Dispatches from Eastern Ukraine

Between 2010 and 2011, artist Mark Neville travelled to Helmand Province, Afghanistan to work with British soldiers as an official war artist. After tracking the intense fighting in the province’s “green zone”, which resembled guerilla warfare with high visibility and close-quarters fire-fight confrontations with insurgents, Neville witnessed the soldiers’ psychological trauma that came after. On returning to England, he wrote about his own experiences with PTSD and adjustment disorder. Neville’s book of war photographs and accompanying essay, Battle Against Stigma (co-published with veteran mental health expert Jamie Hacker Hughes), struck a chord with many serving and retired military personnel returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. His inbox was inundated by a thousand emails with similar stories from veterans, and their families and friends. And then, out of the blue, the Military Hospital in Kyiv wrote and asked, as he recalls: “Do you have a Ukrainian language version of this book? We’ve got all these guys and women coming back from the frontline in the Donbas. They are not only missing arms and legs and eyes and ears but also suffering from psychological wounds and trauma.” Neville commissioned a Ukrainian translation but realised that was not enough. He soon visited Ukraine, fell in love with the country and would ultimately move there full-time in 2020. In the meantime, he claims, “everyone with a brain and ears and eyes could see the situation [after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014] would soon escalate.” He was right.

For Neville, great art should try and affect some kind of change; it should, in his words, be “a call to action.” In 2016, he started working on another book, Stop Tanks with Books, which sought to “weaponise the medium [of photography]” to serve two aims: “to garner international support for Ukraine in its continuing fight for independence, help end Russian aggression in Donbas, and call for the withdrawal of Russia from Crimea” and to “counteract the wealth of fake news and racist disinformation the Kremlin was generating.” Sent out to diplomats, journalists, historians, celebrities, peace negotiators, NATO and EU members, the book was published just two weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Neville has since set up Postcode Ukraine, which has funded over $500,000 in direct humanitarian aid projects and volunteer groups embedded in local communities, and every fortnight he personally delivers essentials, “a car full of bananas and chocolate and cigarettes and medical support and diapers”, to the Ukrainian frontline. His new book, Diary of a Volunteer, has recently been published (but, like Stop Tanks with Books, is not available for public purchase and is sent out to predominantly Western figures of influence) and features more than 100 photographs Neville took between 2022 and 2024.

The cover slip of the book features a photograph of a 14-year-old schoolgirl and volunteer baker, Oleksandra, from Turbiv, a rural settlement in the Vinnytsia region. The picture was taken in April 2022, just weeks after the Russian invasion. Neville captures her holding a fold-out cardboard crate with beautifully baked bread, incandescent and smouldering brown into fire-orange. “It was the colour of the bread that most impressed me”, Neville reflected. Oleksandra wears a cyan bandana tied behind her neck which, while clearly a functional item to cover her hair while baking, is also a symbol of national independence. For Neville, the bandana “endowed her with a Ukrainian aura of worker solidarity.” Neville’s picture of Oleksandra is entitled Breadbasket of Europe, a reference to Ukraine’s incredibly fertile black soil (chernozem) and its favourable climate which has, for centuries, produced an extraordinarily large output of grain crops like wheat and corn.

The symbolism of bread has been taken up by several artists since the full-scale invasion in March 2022. Zhanna Kadyrova’s humanitarian project PALIANYTSIA (2022) which, like Postcode Ukraine, has a fundraising dimension, began when the artist and her collaborator Denys Ruban fled Kyiv into the Carpathian Mountains. As Kadyrova searched for functional housing and studio space, she collected rounded stones polished by the river’s current and then, as a symbol of resistance, produced a series of sculptures which appear to be sliced like a palianytsia, a Ukrainian hearth-baked bread made mostly of wheat flour in a home oven. The series was displayed at König Galerie’s St. Agnes Chapel in spring 2022. The word palianytsia also functions as a shibboleth, a linguistic test used at checkpoints as a kind of password to identify potential enemy infiltrators (according to this strategy, Russian agents and soldiers are unable to pronounce the word correctly). It is also the name given to a drone missile system for use by the Ukrainian military for real-time data transmission and precision-guided munitions for precision strikes. “For the first two weeks of the war, it seemed to me that art was a dream, that all 20 years of my professional life were just something I had seen while asleep, that art was absolutely powerless and ephemeral in comparison to the merciless military machine destroying peaceful cities and human lives”, Kadyrova reflected in her artist’s statement on the PALIANYTSIA series: “Now I no longer think so: I see that every artistic gesture makes us visible and makes our voices heard!”

While Neville recognises that his photographs may not help as much as the delivery of humanitarian aid to the frontline, he stresses that “it is incumbent on the artist to find ways to reach audiences in ways which are really going to make a difference, not just in terms of virtue signalling or of progressing their career” because, he tells me simply: “I want the war to end. I’m sick of my friends dying. That’s why I do what I do.” One of the most striking aspects of Neville’s photographs is how often the presence of animals serve as reminders for the shared burden of responsibilities in a warzone. One monochrome photograph depicts a beaming young Kyvian girl sitting on a sofa holding her British shorthair cat; another sees an elderly man in a beret cycling his fluffy white dog, who peers over the bicycle’s front basket, as they traverse a thick blanket of snow. Elsewhere, dogs appear starved as they cower against a wall. These are all stark pictures of shared suffering between animals and humans, reminders that war threatens pets and livestock just as it does the bonds that tie them to owner and farmer. Postcode Ukraine gives grants to animal rescue organisations which have, to offer one example, saved a pregnant horse from the frontline, brought her back to Kharkiv, taken care and rehabilitated her, and then looked to find a new owner or return her to the original owner who may have fled the frontline. “Animal rescue is fascinating because it is essential and non-essential at the same time”, Neville tells me. “It’s not a human life, but for many people, their cats, their dogs, their horses, are what makes life important and precious… and for many people, art has that function as well.”

For George Butler, a prolific reportage illustrator who has been travelling to places like Syria, Ukraine and Tajikistan for nearly two decades, art is a means of introduction, an informal interview technique or, in a phrase he borrows from the late artist Paul Hogarth, “a handshake.” Before leaving “ten or 15 years ago”, Butler worked as a guest with the Free Syrian Army and, like Neville, was so moved by this experience that he set up a charity called Action Syria which helps to pay the salaries of doctors and teachers in the region. “It’s an easy excuse for an artist to make: to be on the frontline and say, ‘I have to be impartial.’ Great artists aren’t impartial. How can they be in a warzone?” In this way, Butler sees his practice “as a moment to sit in front of someone and to listen accurately, listen to what they’re saying and record it and share it with as many people as possible.” In this respect, he acknowledges the influence of the Belorussian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich, whose “documentary literature” is often set in devastated post-Soviet landscapes (her book Chernobyl Prayer, 1997, is widely credited with her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015), and blends witness testimonies and oral histories with stylised prose. Like Alexovich, Butler patiently observes the world around him and, crucially, takes the time to listen to the ambitions, fears, and anguish of the people he meets. He recalls “one moment that stuck out for me” during his time in Ukraine in March 2022, where he worked on a commission for Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazine and Virginian Quarterly Review, supported by the Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting. (Research and works made during this visit formed a book, Ukraine: Remember Also Me, published in 2024). That moment was centred around “a man named Petro.”

“In Kramatorsk, in the Donbas region, a bomb had hit a residential building, and all the stuff had been blown out onto the street. I started drawing. A woman had soot on her face from the aftermath. People were collecting what they could, a lot of it was burnt. You could see the inside of the building from the side and all the news crews were filming that. I spoke to an old man called Petro, he was 70, who had found a library of books in a rose garden which had been blown out of the window. He’d taken upon himself to stack these books up in little piles and, as I drew him, he challenged me and said, ‘What would you have done if you found a loaf of bread on the floor? This is food for the soul.’ So on the one hand, you had these multimedia news images preparing footage for rolling news. And on the other hand, there was this Ukrainian-led version of the story. There are two truths to every side of these stories, and probably many more than two truths, and that’s what art can help reveal in these situations.”

It’s striking how Petro uses the metaphor of bread as a treasure analogous to art, and as an object of sustenance that must be rescued from becoming collateral damage from the shelling of the apartment. Neville has a similar story. Pretty much every night he hears Shahed drones flying overhead (“they are nicknamed mopeds because they sound like a Harley-Davidson motorbike flying over you while you sleep”) and early one morning in 2023, while he was in his kitchen making coffee, a huge cruise missile passed just 200 metres from his apartment and hit a children’s playground. Within 20 minutes, “the whole media parade had surrounded it, and you couldn’t get close.” For Neville, photographers and journalists from the mainstream press were already “trying to interpret this event to sell newspapers, not according to reality, or truth, or local experience” because, ultimately, “fear is what sells… there is this huge gap between the way the media presents war and the reality of war, and that’s where the artist is important.”

 

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For both Neville and Butler, there is often a disconnect between the shock and awe captured by the mainstream news media and the lived experience of Ukrainians, civilian and military. Part of this is down to the perceived aesthetic and journalistic conventions of war photography. “If you’re a war photographer what you do is you find a crying person outside a destroyed house”, Neville says, “and then you use a digital camera, and you tweak the contrast so it has a gritty look, and that’s it, that sells, and for 99% of photographers and people in the world, they think that is a great war photograph.” Neville believes this elides the complex experiences of the photographer’s subject because, in his words, “everyone is thinking about war as mere pornography, as a way of selling more units in this endless cycle where you reengage, but you never find any answers.”

Today, we might feel closer to the reality of overseas wars than ever before. We are inundated with images on social media and updates from newspaper apps. But the human stories – the human cost of war – so often elude us. “In our new media age”, Butler reflects, “it can’t just be this small window [the phone screen], three inches wide, that we see the world through” and, for this reason, “we need artists because what I saw on the front page wasn’t what I witnessed on the ground; the drawing became an antidote to that.” Both artists acknowledge the exceptional work, in Neville’s words, of “many fantastic and dedicated journalists – very honourable people” while also criticising the broader structures of the news media who seek fast stories counted in clicks. “The tendency to judge our achievement on apps, on likes and tweets and follows and snaps, and even the old-fashioned clicker through the exhibition door”, Butler says, “doesn’t tally with great art which has always been based on connection and fundamentally over whether it moves someone.”

When I spoke to Claire Brenard, Curator at the Imperial War Museums (IWM), I asked her about what the function of the war artist has been from a historical perspective. “Art represents the creative side of human nature, and of humanity at its best, and war as representing some of its worst and almost unimaginable excesses”, she said, drawing on the research of her book on the subject, Visions of War (2023), which examined more than 170 artworks, spanning over 150 artists, from the IWM’s collection. “How have artists represented war in the past?” Brenard asked, noting how “many artists have used art to commemorate and venerate war [because] patrons wanted great victories to be celebrated.” Today, she acknowledges, “many artists are of course anti-war and I think artists can reclaim some of the best of our humanity in the face of some of the worst”. For many artists, “making art can often be an act of survival of itself; it faces up to the greatest horrors.” In this light, the work of Neville, Kadyrova, and Butler all seek to reclaim some of that humanity not (or not only) through documentation of heroic and valiant deeds. Their work, across photography, sculpture, and works on paper, examines that which is immediately important – the bread of sustenance and the bread of the soul – and which war threatens to take away.