Resilience pt.1
Lviv, Ukraine / 2022
In February 2022 Vladmir Putin declared a “special military operation” in Ukraine, presumably to protect Russia from the expansion of NATO, and Ukrainian pro-Russian separatist states from “Ukrainian neo-Nazism.” The attack was a continuation of an invasion begun and soon halted in 2014, but this time Putin would not stop at Crimea. Russian armored units streamed over the border toward Kyiv, Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk on February 24, 2022. Despite widespread speculation that the Ukrainian government would fall in weeks or days, Russia’s advance stalled in March, and by April, armies had treated from major objectives, though with forces occupying southern and eastern Ukraine.
As a psychologist and photojournalist, I was driven to Ukraine not only due to my interest in the psychological impact of the invasion, but because of the obligation I felt to report such a historical event that was, and still is, disturbing victims and bystanders across the globe. Unlike other conflicts that were taking place, this one directly implicated Spain, where I am from, due to Ukraine’s tight connections with Europe.
By that time, most of the news was just addressing the basic geopolitical facts of the Russian full-scale invasion: how many people were murdered and wounded, how many bombs landed, which places were occupied or liberated, etc. I wanted to go beyond the numbers and locations and engage personally in conversations with war victims, workers, volunteers and citizens, to better understand the struggle the Ukrainians were going through. Regardless of the risk I was taking, getting as close as an outsider could to was my purpose.
The Russian occupation caused the largest refugee and humanitarian crisis within Europe in the twenty-first century, mobilizing more than eight million refugees out of the country by the beginning of 2023. While going from Poland to Ukraine by bus in April 2022, I thought about the stories that the Ukrainians sitting next to me might have. They left everything behind once the invasion started and were coming back after the liberation of their cities and towns. More than 870,000 people who fled abroad since 24 February had returned to Ukraine by April 2022, with an average of 30000 per day.
After a six hour journey from Warsaw, the bus got to the Ukrainian-Polish border. While all the passengers were waiting in line at the border checkpoint with their Ukrainians’ passports prepared at hand, I realized that everyone else but me were Ukrainian. I was really nervous and wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to convince the soldier to let me go inside the country. However, I had been preparing myself for weeks to prove the legitimacy of my project. I wrote a document pretending to be a college thesis advisor explaining the different stages of my supposed undergraduate final project: Psychological Impact of the Russian siege on the Ukrainian Population. The document talked about the role of the interviews with Ukrainians as the qualitative method that my research would rely on. My intentions were genuine, and I hoped that all that work and interviews would materialize someday in a multidisciplinary project that could make the Russian atrocities more visible through independent sources. But the truth is that I was in my junior year and had no final thesis’ supervisor yet. I went by myself as a freelancer, with my own money and a little Canon 700d with just a 50 mm lens, without any kind of external support.
I just let a few people know about my project and, until now, my family still doesn’t know anything about it. I had my goals clear and I didn’t want anything to stop me. I felt enough strength, self confidence and passion to do whatever I believed I had to do in order to accomplish my career goals, being a psychologist and photojournalist.
When it was my turn to show my passport, the soldier asked me why I was going to Ukraine. To my surprise and relief, after I explained to him the basics of my project, he automatically allowed me to enter the country. Throughout my whole journey in Ukraine, being a small Spanish woman affected the way people treated me, both in positive and negative ways. In that case, I felt that it benefited me because I looked totally harmless. The only person that had trouble crossing the border was a Ukrainian teenager, around 14 years old, who was traveling by himself. The soldiers probably asked him about his situation and tried to localize his parents. I wondered why he was going back to Ukraine without his family, if he still had one.
Finally, after a 8 hour journey I arrived in Lviv on April 14, a western Ukrainian city 50 miles from the Polish-Ukrainian border. There were a couple of military checkpoints on the outskirts of the city (pic.1). At first glance, it was hard to realize that a war was going on in downtown Lviv. Most of the stores, public transport and other services were still operating. People were working and hanging out with their friends and relatives in cafes, bars and restaurants. However, besides that “normality,” everybody - refugees, locals, volunteers and journalists - could still feel the sorrow of the whole situation. By that time, Lviv had been hit by rockets just a few times and the vast majority of citizens were so far unaffected. Still, the air raid sirens used to sound at least once a day while I was there, alerting the population to get shelter from possible rockets. On one occasion, the sirens sounded in the middle of the night and I was so incredibly tired that I didn’t wake up. Thankfully, nothing happened. As happened most of the time, the rocket was intercepted by the Air Defence Force.
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Sandbags were piled up in front of windows of government buildings, monuments and some corporate stores, presumably to protect from shrapnel in case of artillery strikes or bombings. Military vehicles and tank obstacles (Czech hedgehog) were surrounding the most important squares in the city (pic.2), while soldiers were walking around carrying firearms. Pro-Ukrainian propaganda posters were all around the streets of Lviv (pic. 3, 4).
The whole atmosphere was upsetting. The weather made things worse with frigid temperatures, cloudy skies and periodical rainfalls (pic.5). I couldn't tell if all the homeless people that were roaming the streets were due to the war situation or if they were already there (pic.6). Probably both. Close to the train station, in the Kropyvnytskoho Square, I saw a middle-aged man passed out on the floor under a bus stop (pic.7). I didn’t know for how long he had been there and was worried about him having a severe hypothermia. Some teenagers were making fun of him spitting on him, while he wasn’t even awake. I bought him water and a coca cola and together with two of his friends, we woke him up. I was trying to gain their confidence so I could take some photographs, but I didn’t find the right moment. Before I even tried to take any picture, one of them saw my camera and offered a picture of his wounded leg in exchange for money. I refused, and he politely insisted again, this time taking off his bandage and showing me a huge wound that crossed his infected leg. I knew that once I accepted to give him a little money, he and his friends would ask for more and I would have ended up in a troublesome situation. I refused again and went away. Was that decadence and poverty due to the war? Or perhaps that was usual around the area? Until this day I still don’t know.
In general it was really hard to take pictures, as many locals and refugees were traumatized and paranoid with the war situation (pic.9). During my first day in Lviv, I took a photo of a bus and was (understandably) accosted by an old man who asked for my press credentials in broken English. I tried to explain to him that I was carrying out a freelance photojournalistic project by myself without any kind of organization that could provide me accreditation. He didn’t understand and grew progressively angrier to the point of screaming at me until I hurried away. He might have thought I was a spy. I soon learned… Photographs are generally prohibited during war to limit the potential for espionage. To prevent future misunderstandings with other bystanders, that night I filled up an online form to get the press accreditation. Unfortunately, I received it after three weeks, after I had already left Ukraine.
According to the curfew imposed in Lviv by that time, people were just allowed to be in the street from 6am to 9pm. The curfew was, and still is, imposed regionally according to the risk that the city in question is exposed to, depending on its proximity to the front lines. To my knowledge, Zakarpatska Oblast is the only region in Ukraine that currently has no curfew, after a year from the beginning of the full scale invasion. Regardless of the curfew, restrictions and precautions that locals and refugees have been limited by, they still try to enjoy their lives the best they can.
Due to its safety, this city in particular was more crowded than usual due to the influx of refugees. Next to the Lviv Railway Station there was a group of tents that offered food and other kinds of supplies to the refugees that were either arriving or heading to other cities. They were carrying one or two backpacks in which they probably placed their most valuable belongings once they escaped the invasion (pic.10).
Around one third of the refugees in Lviv were Ukrainian men between eighteen and sixty years old who were not allowed to leave the country, due to the martial law declared by Zelenskyy on February 24. Other people refused to leave the country because they had elderly dependents to care for, as was the case of Maria with her mother, an Ukrainian woman I met in the hostel (pic.11). When the full-scale invasion started in February, Maria and her partner Alexander decided to stay at their home in Kharkiv, one the primary Russian targets.
In the beginning of March, a rocket landed right next to their apartment complex. Maria was in a hallway while Alexander was catching some air on their balcony, leaving him exposed to the blast, resulting in pain and hypovolemic shock, leg and finger break and cranioencephalic trauma. Their cat became deaf and the dog suffered burns on its legs. Thankfully, Maria wasn’t physically injured but felt deeply guilty for letting Alexander go to the balcony, even though it was something she was not responsible for. Maria and Alexander’s father carried Alexander downstairs where an ambulance picked him up. Unfortunately, he passed away that very day in the hospital. Even though Maria lost her boyfriend, she had to stay in Ukraine because her mother was still in the eastern part of the country, thirty miles from Kharkiv. Like many other elders, Maria’s mother preferred to stay in her home, no matter what. After the accident, Maria’s mother took care of Maria’s dog and cat, while her daughter moved to Lviv and lived temporarily in the hostel I was staying in. For Maria, there is no difference between the Russian people that support Putin and the ones that remain in silence and don’t boycott the war.
During my journey in Lviv I met many other refugees, Yevhen among them (pic.12). At the end of February he left his apartment in Kyiv and got shelter in Lviv for a couple of months. Yevhen criticized the little help Europe was providing to Ukraine and how Europeans tended to justify the Russian invasion for economic reasons. “How could this genocide be due to money? What is happening is nothing else but pure hatred” he said. I argued to him that wars are usually economically driven and that I didn’t think this was an exception. He seemed to have misunderstood me and took the conversation too personally, so I tried to move to another topic. With so much hatred and emotions in between I knew that we were not going to get to any conclusion. After that, I learnt to choose my words better when talking about war. Yevhen did not consider any kind of agreement with Russia and stated that war was the only way for Ukrainians to achieve potential freedom: “After all they have done in Bucha and Mariupol I cannot support any agreement with them without trying to win in this war.” At that point, there was no possibility to go backwards, because letting Russia occupy Ukraine "would result in many more losses.” He was scared of joining the army, but even more scared of being “isolated in a shelter or in a basement under the Russian occupation.”
There were so many different people in the hostel. The vast majority of them were refugees, volunteers and journalists, which most of the time made a good combo. At night, different groups of people used to hang out and drink alcohol in the common part, where there were sofas, chairs and tables. As always happens, some people tried to take advantage of the situation. Once, I was in the common area with my camera, and my laptop and Yevhen’s Mac, when two young Ukrainian guys who knew each other sat on the opposite sides of the sofa, leaving me in between them. Since the very moment they came, I felt a really sneaky energy from them. All my suspicions were confirmed when they started to talk to each other by text message. I knew for a fact they were planning something, perhaps to steal any of the expensive devices I had with me. I put everything together right close to me, but they were still there acting so weird. I was so fed up with the situation that I faced them: “You guys are tryna’ do something to me, huh? Aren’t you ashamed of taking advantage of one woman?” I was really nervous, but I tried not to let them feel it. They acted like they knew nothing and went away after a while.
Besides that, I had to deal with some other stuff in the hostel too. In the eight bunk bed room I was staying there was a woman in her early thirties living temporarily with her cat. The corner of the room, next to where her bunk bed and mine were, was full of the cat’s sand and other trash all over the place. At night, the cat used to go to my bed once or twice, scaring the hell out of me. I wasn’t mad at her but at the overall situation, because I was aware of the emotional support that pets usually provide. In addition to the cat’s situation, there was an annoying Chilean guy called Orlando staying in that same room too.
He left his job, sold his car, and came to Ukraine to start a new life and help Ukrainian people fight the Russian occupation. Orlando asked her girlfriend to come to Ukraine with him and stay in a shelter while he would help on the front lines, even though he had no experience as a soldier. She refused to and stayed in Chile. Two days after Orlando arrived in Ukraine, his girlfriend broke up with him because, according to her, he went to Ukraine to flirt with other girls. After that happened, he was always flirting with me even though I rejected him politely several times.
In order to get rid of the whole situation, I asked for another room, claiming that “the cat [was] giving me an allergy.” What I wasn’t expecting was that they would kick the woman out. Even though she had already had several complaints, I felt really bad about catalyzing that situation. I didn’t want her to be kicked out, I just wanted a proper room without trash all over the place and not be harassed by a creepy guy.
Besides Orlando, I met other volunteers in the hostel, Guillaume among them. Like many other people from western countries, Guillaume came from France to Lviv to help refugees by providing food, medicines and other supplies. He was working for team4ua, a humanitarian organization that implements technology into the humanitarian emergency response, such as 3D technology for rebuilding damaged infrastructures and AI analysis highlighting war damage and potential mines. “Due to the high flow of people and products, cases of kidnapping and robbery of supplies are unfortunately common, especially on the Ukrainian-Polish border” Guillaume explained to me. When I told him that I was going to Kyiv, the capital, he put me in contact with a friend of his called Tetyana, an Ukrainian sociologist who could be interested in the project I was carrying out. After three days in Lviv, I traveled to Kyiv by train. (p.13)
So many things happened in Lviv within three days. I was expecting that all the mishaps I had in Lviv as a foreigner would be even stronger in Kyiv. The Russian forces had retreated just two weeks before from the outskirts of the city.
During my three days stay in Lviv, I touched the surface of the Russian’s siege consequences on the Ukrainian population. I met people that had to face several infortunes, but also others that tried to take advantage of the particular situation of the city of Lviv. The mishaps I had as a foreigner photographer in Lviv were going to be even more severe in the capital due to its political importance. I was expecting way more security forces around the city and a more tense climate, because the outskirts of the city had just been liberated two weeks before I arrived in Kyiv. But what I knew for a fact is that, regardless of inconveniences in carrying out the project I was planning to, I would get something from the experience. As I told myself right before heading to Kyiv: “If it goes fine, I will enjoy it. If not, perhaps I will get the most valuable lessons in my whole life.”
