Ukraine: My Life-Changing Journey Into A Warzone
A backpacker becomes a journalist and humanitarian
In August, I was sitting in a hostel in Timisoara, Romania, at this point my nineteenth country since I started my journey around the world. Another traveller from Wales was next to me, and started telling me about how he had just come back from Kyiv, Ukraine, and of his experiences there, having done things like attending concerts in the underground metro station. That piqued my interest, since it was living through history while it was being made. After I asked him how difficult it was to get into the country, he told me he didn’t have any issues crossing the border, joking that his friend told the border guards they were just adrenaline junkies when they were asked why they wanted to enter. He said the guards just shrugged and stamped their passports. After hearing this, and realizing I wasn’t so far away from the Ukrainian border by train, I decided to go there myself and see what the reality was like in person.
At the border, crossing on foot with other Ukrainians that were in the same shuttle, they helped translate between me and the border guards, who asked me why I wanted to enter Ukraine, and how long I would stay. Thinking I’d just spend a few days in my mother’s hometown Chernivtsi, then a few days in Kyiv, I told them I’d just be in the country for a week. I had no idea I would end up spending nearly two months in the country, receiving a Press pass to become a journalist, and joining humanitarian missions only a few miles from the Russian frontlines with artillery striking near us.
The hostel I’d stay at in Kyiv had the most interesting group of people I’ve ever seen gathered in one place: Ukrainian soldiers, International Legion volunteers, humanitarians, human rights lawyers, journalists, epidemiologists, YouTubers, and even a former film producer turned frontline civilian evacuator. On the other hand, there were also a lot of grifters, frauds, and generally weird foreigners who just came to Ukraine to treat it as some sort of playground to collect “war trophies” and experience the thrill of being in a military hot zone. One of the friends I made, Nick Allard, a photojournalist from America who sold his business to come to Ukraine and tell the stories of humans affected by war, would take me to Bucha, the town in which civilians were horrifically massacred in the streets at the start of the invasion in 2022.
We visited several locations in Bucha where tragedies took place, and while watching videos that were released back then in April, I realized I was standing in the exact same place from one of them: a video showing the Ukrainian military driving by dead bodies in the streets, which had laid there for weeks until the town was liberated. Russian soldiers had orders to run a cleansing operation, and the results were devastating. I had seen these images back in America, but not once did it cross my mind that I would be standing on that same street a few months later. It was sobering to have this perspective in person; I picked up a bullet casing I found in the grass next to a wall covered in bullet holes, to have a physical reminder of what happened there.
At this point I felt a calling to do more in Ukraine, and a unique opportunity presented itself: a friend told me he could get me a Press pass if I was willing to document what was happening in the country. I didn’t have any camera equipment, and had no experience as a journalist or photographer, but I didn’t want to pass on this. Shortly after, I met Mackenzie Hughes and his dad, who’d already done more than 100 humanitarian missions under their nonprofit NGO “H.U.G.S. Ukraine”, and they welcomed me to join them in Kharkiv and do photography (I wrote about my experiences with them and other teams I ended up working with in a previous article).
In Kharkiv I saw a different side of Ukraine. Whereas cities in the west of Ukraine felt relaxed and as if people carry on with life as normal, the realities of war are very noticeable in Kharkiv: always blacked out at night, an earlier curfew than other parts of the country, and military checkpoints at concrete blocks throughout the city. A devastated place with noticeable traces of where urban combat with the Russians happened in some neighborhoods of the city. There are dugout trenches next to charred and bombed apartment buildings with exploded cars in parking lots still upside down, and shockingly, people still living in those buildings. My friends from the Brotherhood of Ukraine recently made a video of what the city is like as of November.
I would also end up living in an apartment complex hit by missiles during my time working with humanitarians in Kharkiv. That city is a major humanitarian hub in the northeastern region of Ukraine, and aid is distributed to villages around it, as well as other towns further east towards the frontlines that’ve been recently liberated, such as Kupyansk. I wasn’t prepared to see the amount of destruction and despair as I saw in these places previously under Russian occupation, but having a first-hand experience of living in this region during wartime gave me a tremendous amount of perspective for what so many people around the world have to live with in conflict zones. I heard a series of loud explosions from Russian missiles attacking Kharkiv my very fist night there, and quickly had to become comfortable with it since they bomb the city nearly everyday; daily air raid sirens and hearing missile explosions is just everyday life there.
In visiting so many decimated villages left in ruins that people were still living in, I couldn’t help but notice that they were all walking around with no protection, even with the sound of artillery strikes in the distance, while we had body armor and helmets on. Sometimes we didn’t have a choice but to wear them, as they were required to pass certain military checkpoints near the frontlines, but I wondered why I should walk around in armor among these locals who live in this reality everyday, while they were in plain clothes. I didn’t deserve to live more than they did.
There was one image that was burned into my mind from my time near the frontlines; that of a boy looking calmly into my camera while Russian drones were flying above us and the loud explosions of Russian artillery striking every few minutes less than a kilometer away from our village in Pershotravneve on October 22. Some from my team would jump from being startled by these explosions, and I sensed an increasing feeling of anxiety as they rushed to finish moving the humanitarian aid boxes into the shack there, but then I noticed how calm this boy was the entire time; this is his everyday reality. And seeing him calm helped me feel calm as well.
The Ukrainians I met were not only resilient and hardened by war, but also extremely determined to win. It’s something I don’t think was easy to understand until I personally witnessed what they were living through; fighting this war is a matter of survival to not live under occupation of the Russian terrorist state that runs torture chambers in its Ukrainian territories, uses rape as a military strategy, and buries executed civilians, including children, in mass graves. It’s no wonder there are endless examples of emotional displays of celebration whenever Ukraine liberates another city. Ukrainians are not scared of fighting Russia, so why is the West? Why are influential Americans repeating Kremlin propaganda word for word and others from around the world trying to dictate to a nation of people that they should stop fighting, commit to a “peace” deal with the aggressor state that invaded it, and seal the fate of millions of Ukrainians to live under Russian oppression?
Putin’s speech in October revealed this war is not so much about Ukraine as it is about making an attempt to change the global order. A translation of his speech provides additional context, in which Putin’s main point is that “America has nothing to offer the world except domination”, and he calls for a unipolar world. Westerners who benefit from living their lives in peace and comfort can only do so as a result of a stable global order in which borders don’t change due to increasing military conflicts, but the world Putin hopes to bring about is what we see in Ukraine today: a nuclear power using the threat of nuclear blackmail as a hunting license to bully smaller countries into submission and destruction to steal their territory. Peace is only possible when countries with imperial desires like Russia are defeated, so the least we can do is aid the Ukrainians to defend themselves and survive.
Right now it’s snowing in Ukraine, and half of their energy infrastructure has been destroyed. Millions of people are left without electricity or heating in the freezing cold and darkness of winter. And despite all this, they are determined to suffer any cost other than life under Russian occupation. Zelenskyy’s address to Russia voices the thoughts of Ukrainians in a powerful way:
Without gas or without you? – The answer is without you. Without electricity or without you? – Without you. Without water or without you? – Without you. Without food or without you? – Without you.
For us, cold, hunger, darkness and thirst are not as dangerous and deadly as friendship and brotherhood with you.