Ukranian writer, photographer, documentary filmmaker Yevgenia Belorusets is writing a remarkable war diary from Kyiv since her life has changed in an instant with the fall of the first bomb on the territory of Ukraine. The diary’s aim is to convey not what happens from above, but how it feels on the ground.
Belorusets’s wartime diary has gained a lot of traction, with multiple translations forthcoming in news outlets worldwide.
The letters she writes every day from Kiev describe what happened there, the atmosphere in the places where the war took place, and the feelings of the people. Belorusets says she is writing each letter hoping that it would be the last. She feels that such a war should not last very long in this century.
These letters are a testimony; a test testimony different from all the images, war news, military strategies and interpretations we watch on television. They represent the daily observations of an artist and a writer who is witnessing the destruction of her city and its established order. As you read the letters, you see that not everything is about war. War cannot devour everything, and there is life outside of it – the life of those who try to survive despite everything, those who stand up to war.
Some words from her letters:
Thursday, February 24 (Day 1): The beginning
“I’m staying with my parents tonight. I’ve visited a bunker next to the house, so I know where we’ll all go when the shelling comes later.
The war has begun. It is after midnight. I will hardly be able to fall asleep, and there is no point in enumerating what has changed forever.”
Thursday, February 24 (Day 7): Time to be brave
“The city is sinking into spring fog, but it is still cold. Since yesterday, here, in the center of Kyiv, you can tell a story about the war on every street corner. Almost every intersection is guarded day and night by armed members of the Territorial Defense. There are more groups of saboteurs in the city, more violence. I look with relief into the eyes of the men and women of the defense. In one of the faces yesterday I recognized with amazement a barista who was popular in our neighborhood because he painted particularly beautiful swans on the milk foam of the coffees.”
Thursday, March 10 (Day 14): A flaw in the landscape
“A man who seemed homeless was walking down the avenue with an old backpack. He had wrapped plastic bags around his shoes to warm his feet. In his hand, he carried a small, half-drunk vodka bottle. As he walked, he spoke very loudly into his cell phone, repeatedly asking how someone was doing. With each answer, he broke into sobs, like a child, over and over again. I understood through fragments that he was talking about an evacuation. I caught up with him and slipped him some money, which he accepted without interrupting the conversation.”
Tuesday, March 15 (Day 20): In war, one thinks almost only of war
“Before curfew, I wanted to see the subway station that was shelled last night. I had to pass through checkpoints and take detours to get a glimpse of the wreckage. Shards of glass lay in a shockingly large radius around the station. A roof had caved in, plastic doors were deformed by the blast wave; hundreds of broken windows stared blackly into the street. A circle of silence formed around this place, where several houses and dozens of smaller stores were damaged in one fell swoop.
The ruins formed an eerie scene. I saw some women standing in front of the damaged buildings for several minutes, looking at the destroyed section of the street, as if they wanted to memorize every crack, every broken windowpane, forever.”
Tuesday, March 22 (Day 27): The houses that disappeared
“It is not about Kyiv at all. Is it possible that right now—as I write this in my apartment while most of my neighbors spend the night in shelters—Grad missiles are flying through the air and white phosphorus is raining down on someone’s home, not so far from here, in my own city?
I miss all the walls, all the houses of this city that I haven’t seen yet, that I haven’t photographed, that have already disappeared and been destroyed, that have become unrecognizable, incinerated.”
Saturday, March 26 (Day 31): A gap in the window
“What is happening in Ukraine right now, what we are all experiencing, will define our existence forever. But not only ours. One must find the courage to stop the aggressor. The world will never forgive itself for these crimes.”
Wednesday, March 30 (Day 35): A gap in the window
The room I grew up in no longer corresponds to the life I lead—the life that is unfolding outside the window. Looking around, it feels like a child’s room that was abandoned a long time ago. And now I have to spend the night here again. The room tells a story of peace that I can’t take seriously anymore as an “adult.” On the shelf there are books in Russian, German, Ukrainian, and English. They seem to belong to another era. Since the war started, I have rarely opened a book, and when I do, I read no more than two or three pages.
The word “war” is even less comprehensible during wartime than in peacetime, when it’s used quite differently. What is happening around me right now—the constant shelling and the warnings I hear—this is what “war” should mean. But this word seems meaningless, because in war reality breaks into parts, islands, pieces.”
You can read the letters in full here.