‘Kyiv is being bombed,” the message began, “and I’m not sure I’ll get another chance to do this. So here is the majority of my 2010-19 music that you may have never heard.” And then it ended with the words: “Death to Putin.” I read this on Bandcamp, on 25 February, the day after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. It was written by Timur Dzhafarov, better known as John Object, a maker of deconstructed club music. On that day, he gathered most of the music he has created since he started recording at the age of 15, put it into one big anthology, and published the lot under the title Life. Not long after, he was drafted into the Ukrainian army.
I learned about this collection from his Instagram account, which also carries Dzhafarov’s “war diaries”. He is one of the many Ukrainian artists from whom I have learned, among other gruesome things, what a battlefield looks like. Their reports are different from statistics and mainstream media feeds: they are very personal, direct, poignant.
“This war, in some shape or form, has been going on in the east of Ukraine for the past eight years,” says Dzhafarov on Instagram. “We were all aware of it, a gentle hum of anxiety constantly there. But my friends who were there moved away, and we all learned to live with it. We all read the news early this year. We all saw the tanks, the soldiers on the border. We all knew it was coming, but hoped it wasn’t. On 23 February, my old friend invited me to have ‘the last peacetime beer’. And he was right. The next morning, still awake at 5am, I heard distant explosions in Kyiv.”
The music community in Ukraine has been using every channel possible to publicise what is happening on the frontline, from airing photos of bombings to suggesting places to donate or transfer money. “For the last 20 days before 24 February,” says Dzhafarov, “I was writing songs in Ukrainian, which I’d never successfully done before, about a wasted life and a desire to live. I was addressing them to Russian soldiers and Putin himself.”
Dzhafarov has just turned 27 and his new album was due out last month, but he found himself at the front, and the base where he was stationed was bombed. “I was, and I will be, a musician in free Ukraine – and right now I am a soldier in wartime Ukraine. That is my job and I must be aware of it at all times.”
Many Ukrainian visual artists are also using their talents to record the fact that their worlds have turned upside down. Zhenya Oliinyk creates intimate, personal images enlivened with simple handwritten words. “The war has been going on since 2014,” she tells me via Instagram. “But on 24 February, it hit with full force.” Oliinyk and her boyfriend taped up their windows, to catch shards in case of shelling, and hid in their basement, where she put together a comic strip for the New Yorker.
In one box, a woman sits against a wall near a window, her anxious texts and replies appearing in speech bubbles: “Where are you? How are you? I’m alive. You good? Hey there. Stay safe. Call me.” The pair decided to leave for Lviv, but found it too crowded, so went back – first to a village near Kyiv and later to the capital. “I continue to draw,” says Oliinyk. “And somehow we got used to the sound of explosions – even our dogs did.”
Oliinyk, a year older than Dzhafarov, was planning to illustrate a children’s detective book for a Ukrainian publisher in March. She was also supposed to open her first personal exhibition in Kyiv. But ever since she found herself at the frontline of war, she has different priorities. “Sharing information is profoundly important now,” she says, “especially with Russian propaganda and western colonial optics on Ukrainian history.”
Serhiy Zhadan, one of the most popular contemporary Ukrainian writers, is using social media to chronicle the war. The 47-year-old, who made his debut in the 1990s, is also the singer with Zhadan and the Dogs. He has been close to the front for a long time, having lived in Kharkiv since 2014, right next to the so-called Donetsk people’s republic and Luhansk people’s republic.
Zhadan and his friends used to go to Donbas on volunteer expeditions. They played concerts and helped civilians, which is how his 2017 book The Orphanage came about. Although the word Donbas is never mentioned, it is clear that we are in the midst of the war unleashed in eastern Ukraine after the fall of president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Its protagonist, a teacher called Pasha in his 30s, has to bring home his nephew, who is in danger. His journey descends into hell, with descriptions of war that are as terrifying as any news report.
“In Ukraine, there have been voices saying that it is not worth writing about the war until it is over,” Zhadan wrote in a Polish newspaper in 2019 as his book was published there. Zhadan urged readers to forego the politics of the war and instead put themselves in the shoes of “a man who is running through a dark city under chaotic fire. A man who is constantly bending down and looking over his shoulder, whose eyes are inflamed from the lack of sleep and from the cold.”
Zhadan is now giving a first-hand report on the war via his Facebook page. He records his travels around Kharkiv, helping women and children escape gunfire and shelling, appealing for support for hospitals, and photographing medicines arriving. He posts pictures of a community centre called The Word, which was destroyed, as well as shots of Old Hem, a popular pub he used to perform in with his band. In the autumn of 2014, Old Hem doubled as the HQ of the Euromaidan uprising. It was reduced to rubble last month.
“Much will be written and sung about this war,” noted Zhadan in one post. “I guess it will be a completely different language. A language that is being formed today, every day, all over the country.” Shortly after, he published the lyrics to Children, a song by Zhadan and Dogs that was recorded in Dnipro, eastern Ukraine, as the war raged around them. “Since night the sky remains dark / There is a war, children are growing up / And you love them, because besides you / no one will love them here.” I listened to it on the day the theatre in Mariupol – a place of refuge for families with children – was bombed.
Another voice is that of Oksana Zabuzhko. For a good few years, her essays have been predicting what is now happening. I saw her speaking live on 15 March at the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre in northern Poland, where I live. The Ukrainian writer had come to my country to promote a collection of her writings called Planet Wormwood. The event was scheduled for 23 February and she was supposed to stay for three days, but the writer has travelled around Europe for three weeks. Although far away from Kyiv, she feels as if she is still very much on the front line, telling her audience in Gdańsk: “The annexation of Crimea should have been taken seriously because it was a violation of international law. It was a signal that we were going back to the caves, where only the law of force and violence works. But nobody listened to me then.”
In May 2014, she made a speech in Berlin. When she compared Putin to Hitler, her microphone was quickly turned off. This year, on 8 March, she spoke at a plenary session of the European parliament in Strasbourg, the first time a person who is neither an EU citizen nor an official has done so. She repeated her comparison – and this time was applauded.
“Many lives could have been saved,” she said, “if the EU and the US had woken up eight years ago when Putin invaded Crimea. The new Hitler was ready to pick up where the previous one left off. As a writer who knows a thing or two about language, I want to tell you that this is already a war, not just a local conflict. Trust Putin when he talks about his ambitions.”
Words, drawings, music – they can all tell us about this war. As a former journalist, Oliinyk finds drawing very similar to her previous profession. “We tell stories in many ways,” she says. “Ukrainian voices have to be listened to now. And the same will be true after Russian troops leave our country. Unfortunately, Russia will still be our neighbour. There will still be people with traumatic experiences. There will be new Ukrainian communities in many countries. There will be years of rebuilding our cities. We’ll have to talk about it all – and we’ll do so through art.”
Her words echo those of Zhadan, who ends almost all his entries on Facebook with the sentence: “Tomorrow we will wake up one day closer to our victory.” Dzhafarov, meanwhile, has this to say about his next album: “Whatever I record will be joyful. A provisional title right now is How We Won the War.”
