In Ukraine, many people affected by the conflict are being treated and supported by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). I was able to meet some of them: in a rehabilitation centre for war veterans in Cherkasy and a mental health clinic for internally displaced families in Vinnytsia.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I’ve drawn many political cartoons about the war; drawings that feature Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Vladimir Putin and the occasional bear. It looked very different from the ground, where war is fought and lived by ordinary people, just like us. In the hospitals I visited in May this year, I sketched the precise way in which war is mapped on individual bodies and listened to the stories behind their scars. I drew what people told me, as well as what I saw, because trauma and hope are intangible things of memory and imagination. There’s nothing left to draw of an amputated limb but memories – the same could be said for a lost home or relative. These things are beyond a camera’s reach, which I think gives you licence to reach for a pencil.
I watched an MSF psychiatrist help a soldier regain feeling in his paralysed hand using tiny scraps of textured materials intended to evoke strong memories. As she brushed them against his fingertips, she explained: “This cable-knit might remind him of a grandma’s jumper; this fluff, a child’s teddy; this one, grass.” I saw echoes of this image throughout the hospital in injured people reaching back or forwards to life beyond the war. People described their memories of peace in vivid terms, but when I asked what victory meant I was met with nonplussed stares. One soldier said: “No idea … but when it happens, I’ve promised my wife I’ll shave off my beard.” His beard was long. His wife was perched on his hospital bed and asked if I’d like to see how well her husband can lift his dumbbells with his one remaining arm.
Dima (29)
After Dima regained consciousness in the hospital, he phoned his mother to tell her that “everything was fine – just a few scratches”. “It wasn’t true,” he tells me. “There was a big hole in my leg and in my ear and arm.” He still can’t sleep. “My nightmares are always the same. They’re taking me from the hospital back to the trenches, and then I am above – I am the drone making the projectile drop that hits me.”
Dima flies first-person view (FPV) drones so he knows how this looks. His psychologist tells him he might sleep better if he wasn’t on his phone all night. But he likes watching videos on Instagram and YouTube – mostly bodycam footage of the war that, he explains, help him to understand the “subtleties” of his own memories: what he did, what he could have done. He tells me about his mentor, Matrovski, who made him stay down in the trench while he looked out to see if the Russians were still there. Matrovski was immediately shot in the neck and bled to death.
The shard of shrapnel that buried itself in Dima’s body when the drone projectile detonated is now sitting on his bedside table. He tells me: “It momentarily paralysed me from the bottom of my spine to the end of my extremities. I thought it had injured my spinal cord and I wouldn’t be able to walk. I thought ‘this is the end’. But I started to touch my head to see if I had any blood. I didn’t find any and I said to myself: ‘I am alive, I am not dead.’ I could hear the enemy drones watching. FPVs have a horrible squeaky sound – like Formula One [cars]. If it’s high, then it’s quiet. When it gets louder, then you worry. I could hear them watching so I lay very still and pretended to be dead. I heard them leave. Then I was screaming from the pain. I thought I would bleed to death.”
He survived, he says, because “I am my mother’s only child. When I joined the army she cried and so I’d promised her that everything would be fine.” She is a kindergarten teacher, “the kindest person in the world. She has brown hair and green eyes like mine. Always smiling – even when she’s sad.”
Olena (30)
I ask Olena where home is. She tells me about the clouds in Luhansk. “They’re really beautiful, like mountains because there aren’t any tall buildings there. Home is where the sky has no missiles, just clouds and the sun and birds and planes – but not military, safe, with passengers. The most important thing is the feeling that you can look at the sky without being scared. After 2022, I had to again learn how to look at the sky without fear.”
The first time Olena was displaced by conflict was in 2014, when she was 19. She “got on a train to nowhere” and wound up in Kyiv, searching through old Facebook friends for somewhere to stay. She rebuilt her life in Luhansk. She says: “I loved my flat. The children’s bedroom had pastel wallpaper with balloons. My husband and I built a big balcony and I pasted these stickers of pink peonies all over it. We had a great life, we didn’t expect to have war … even more war. Then we started hearing explosions from the frontlines … we saw the first missiles in the sky, interceptions – the children were terrified.”
When the invasion happened, Olena and her family fled to Vinnytsia. She says that now “I feel like I have two lives. Part of my soul is left there back in that life. So I’m here, but at the same time I’m there.” When I ask her what she hopes for the future, she says: “I don’t see the future, for now. I live in the present day … I just think ‘I woke up in the morning, thank God, I went to work, thank God. My children went to school, God thank you.’” She has portraits of her children tattooed on her arms. She shows me her other tattoos: a mandala, a daisy with a plaster, birds. “They’re all connected to the war,” she says. “They’re like scars.”
I show her my tattoos, and some of my drawings. Olena likes drawing too. She shows me a photo of one of her paintings – a road leading to a little house on a hill covered with bright yellow wheat. The sky is dark blue, because, Olena says, “it’s stormy, like it’s about to rain”. She points to the single lit window of the house. “I added this to be like hope.” I ask if this drawing is of a real place where she lived. She says no. “It’s an abstract place – a home in the heart.”
Roman (40)
In 2022, Roman quit his job collecting parcels and joined a medical brigade collecting wounded and dead soldiers. He says that “sometimes the body parts were blown up into the trees”.
When the drone detonated, his legs didn’t get that far. They ended up in the box next to him in the medical stabilisation centre, still with their shoes on. He says: “I remember looking at my legs in the box and I was so scared when I realised that I couldn’t get this part of my past back – that now my future would be very different. I was so sad to say goodbye to what was in the box … Then I realised it was too early to die. I hadn’t said goodbye to my family, or finished the house that I’d been building for them.”
When Roman started building the house many years ago, he’d gone to the bank to take out a loan from a “very beautiful woman with white blond hair. I told her all about the house and she said: ‘Maybe one day you’ll show me.’ So I took her number and invited her to coffee.” Tanya and Roman married soon after and now have two children, Alexi, 12, and Yvan, 21. Their house is finally almost finished – “white pillars and blue walls – only a few tiles on the roof still to complete … maybe also a swimming pool”. He tells me how his family loved to go swimming in the sea in Odesa. “We used go all together. But if I imagine going back, I cannot understand one thing – how will I be able to go in the sea? Can you swim in a prosthesis?” I don’t know the answer but – after a long pause – Roman does: “Yvan goes to the gym. His muscles are even bigger than mine. He can bring me on his back into the sea. And I will swim with him. Then he’ll take me back out of the water and put me on the chair, and I’ll put the prostheses back on. That’s how it will be.”
Roman called his wife from the hospital to tell her that he’d lost his legs but “not to worry: everything is fine”. He said to her: “Nothing has changed. I don’t want anything to change.”
Inna (42) & Tetiana (48)
Inna and Tetiana come to talk to me together, exchanging glances before every answer, sharing tissues and whispered encouragements. Tetiana’s son, Valeria, and Inna’s husband, Mykola, are prisoners of war in Russia. They were captured on the same day in May 2022. Valeria is 27 now. Inna struggles to remember her husband’s age. She says it’s because “we don’t celebrate birthdays any more. When they were captured, everything stopped.” But when I ask what Valeria and Mykola look like, Inna answers: “Now or before?”
Inna and Tetiana wait at every prisoner exchange in the hope that their relatives will be among those released. When they’re not, sometimes the soldiers who have been bring back news of them. That’s how Inna and Tetiana know how different their loved ones now look – “exhausted, so thin”. For the first year of her husband’s captivity, Inna struggled to eat. She says she’s a bit better now; she’s found Tetiana. “We have the same pain, we understand it.” The women believe that they have a “spiritual connection with their loved ones”, that they “must stay strong and cry less so they may also feel our hope and prayers”. Inna describes how her husband comes to check on her in her dreams.
Inna says she likes to picture sitting with her husband in their garden back in Mariupol. Mykola liked to grow flowers there, “wild forest flowers – I don’t even know where he got those seeds. At the time I didn’t even like them! But now nothing would make me happier.” Tetiana says she also likes to picture Valeria “somewhere in nature – a field of white chamomile with the sun shining really bright … birdsong, fresh air.”
Neither Inna nor Tetiana have had any direct contact with their relatives for three years. If they could talk, Inna tells me she’d say “that I love him – that we’re waiting”. Tetiana adds: “We’re waiting. We’re definitely going to wait.”
Tetiana (66)
Tetiana cries silently throughout our conversation. She doesn’t want to stop or skip any questions; she always looks me directly in the eye. Her son Maksym was born in 1995, the same year as me. He was killed fighting in Donetsk on 8 May 2022.
“It’s not possible to describe the burden of the pain I’m bearing,” says Tetiana. “I think about him every day; when I wake up, when I go to sleep. Sometimes when I’m walking and I see a young man who resembles mine – tall, gentle, strong – I think ‘oh’, because I had once such a boy.” She says her grief is “like the evening sky, like twilight – there’s still some light there, and the light is all Maksym”.
Tetiana was born in Russia and came to Ukraine in 1974. She says they’re a railway family. “I worked there for 40 years. It’s where I met my husband. We wanted Maksym to join the railway too, but even from his childhood he always dreamed of joining the military.” As a boy, Maksym played zarnitsa in the woods. It’s an old Soviet war game, and the name translates from Russian as “heat lightning”. “This is how he will remain for ever for me,” she says. “Running through the woods. There’s a photo of his dead body which his commander took. I still haven’t looked at it: I can’t. Let him remain alive for me, for the rest of my life.”
He was “always a military man – he loved his country”, but she says he was gentle too. In the trenches, he’d feed the lost cats and send her photos of them. She says he’d call to say: “Mum, don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine.”
Dmytro (43) & Petrov (40)
Petrov says he and his older brother, Dmytro, have been “making little models of soldiers together since childhood, and conducting fake wars. Then we grew up and had a different kind of war.” Dmytro says that “in the war, we were always together”. They were together when the drone detonated under their car, killing the other two soldiers with them. The brothers are now recuperating from their injuries in the same hospital, in different wards. I talk to them separately, but each brother tells me mostly about the other.
Petrov says that when the drone detonated, “I felt a very strong burning sensation and I was screaming. My brother was screaming that he was injured too and I was so happy that he was screaming because it meant he was alive.” Dmytro says: “I heard my brother’s voice and I calmed down. It probably all happened very quickly, but it felt like time stopped. When I realised that Petrov was seriously injured in all four limbs – how much blood he was losing – I knew that I had to provide medical aid for him or he would die. I’ve been on the frontline for a long time. I’ve tied a lot of tourniquets. So in this situation I’m not panicking. I’m calm. I tied the tourniquets. But I was worried about him.” Petrov says Dmytro worries too much, “but it’s natural, I’m his little brother.” Dmytro says: “I’ve been protective of Petrov since picking him up from kindergarten. He’s not weak, he’s very strong. But I have to look after him. He’s my little brother.”
They are now healing well, although Dmytro says he’s worried about Petrov’s hands. His doctors say he’ll never regain full movement. Dmytro says his brother has “golden hands: whatever he likes to do with them, he does so well. He’s very creative: a sculptor, he plays the guitar.” Petrov says it was Dmytro’s guitar – his brother bought it but got bored after learning one song and quit, so Petrov learned to play instead.
Petrov hopes the war has left him with enough movement in his hands to go back to making sculptures, and there’s one sitting on his bedside table in the hospital. It’s a phone stand with the insignia of his village’s brigade, which he insists on giving to me. I’m concerned that without it Petrov won’t be able to hold his phone, as one hand is swathed in bandages and the other sutured to his midriff. When I ask the doctors about this they explain: “To encourage the skin grafts on his hands to take, we connect the hand to the midriff where the blood supply is better.” They say Petrov spends a lot of his time on his phone, mostly video calling Dmytro in the hospital ward downstairs.
Valentyn (51)
It was a rainy dawn and Valentyn had been sweeping for mines; dawn so as not to be seen, rain because it makes it harder for the drones to fly. He tells me that he never touched the mine – it reacted to the electromagnetic field of his body with a flash that, weeks later, he still can’t get out of his eyes. He holds up the bandaged stumps of his arms. “For this hand there is no hope. But for the other – one finger is still alive.” He displays the prosthetic he’s been given to hold a spoon. “The next device must be to hold a fishing rod.” With his one remaining finger, Valentyn mimes reeling in a fishing line. Valentyn’s grandpa taught him to fish and he still goes to the same spot on the Dnipro River. “It’s very beautiful, very calm. Just trees by the river. I like to go there alone. If I go with my friends they get drunk and scare away the fish.”
Natalii (55)
I meet Natalii at a women’s support group in Vinnytsia for refugees from Kherson. Today, they’re making flowers out of colourful pipe cleaners. The windows of the community room are filled with flowers that Natallii grows in little recycled pots. She talks about her garden back in Kherson, where she lived before the invasion: 200 sq metres filled with apricot trees, grapevines and flowers; her favourites were the pink roses. She shows me photos that a friend who stayed behind took recently. Their house has been utterly destroyed, but the roses in the garden are still blooming. Now Natalii lives with her family in a small apartment in Vinnytsia. “There’s no garden but a good window. For my birthday I was given a huge bouquet, and there were still some roots! Now I have seven big bushes in water on the floor in front of the window.” Natalii says her family think she’s mad, apart from her nine-year-old granddaughter, Anya, who also has green fingers. Anya’s father – Natalii’s son – always buys her flowers from the supermarket when he comes back from the front.
For Natalii, “the flowers are like a memory from home … peace is the memory of the life that we were living there. Here, we are just waiting. My soul is in the garden back home in Kherson.”
As Natalii talks, the other women twist their pipe cleaners into flower ornaments. Svitlana, 68, also a refugee from Kherson, has hands that tremble so violently Natalii helps her with the fiddly bits. I tell her about this project, and she says: “No picture could capture what we have lived through, what it is to have everything, to be together with all your family in your home, and then be living by the side of the road.” It’s a fair point.
This project, facilitated by Médecins Sans Frontières, will be exhibited at The Arcade at Bush House, King’s College London, in September
About the author
Ella Baron is a political cartoonist at the Guardian