How Ukraine’s soldier-photographers doc their battle

As Ukraine marks Defenders Day on Oct. 1, the work of Ukrainian photographers turned troopers reminds us that battle isn’t just fought on the battlefield — it is usually fought by bearing witness, preserving human expertise, and documenting historical past.

In honor of Defenders Day, the Kyiv Independent is highlighting the work of photographers Yevhen Borisovskyi, Roman Zakrevskyi, Dmytro Kuprian, and Oleg Petrasiuk whereas serving in Ukraine’s Armed Forces.

Photography on the entrance strains of Ukraine’s battle in opposition to Russian aggression safeguards reality in an age of disinformation. Through the photographer’s lens, the battle is given a human face: the weary willpower of Ukrainian troopers, the quiet resilience of households, the delicate moments of normalcy amid chaos. These photos remind the world that this full-scale battle isn’t just being fought over borders or politics, however over Ukrainians’ lives, properties, and futures.

“Reality. Authenticity. Contrast. That’s what’s important to me in every frame. I want to believe that people will see this contrast with the world (of full-scale war) and the lives of those who pretend it doesn’t concern them,” Yevhen Borisovskyi advised the Kyiv Independent.

Each {photograph} carries the ability to stir empathy worldwide for Ukraine’s trigger, and spur worldwide solidarity, humanitarian assist, and resistance to Russian aggression. Yet their significance extends past the current second. They type a residing archive — a sworn statement that ensures the sacrifices, the braveness, and the atrocities of this battle won’t be rewritten or forgotten.

With Ukrainians from each stroll of life now serving on the entrance strains, it’s inevitable that photographers, too, have taken up arms. Some enter the trenches not solely with rifles however with cameras — instruments that enable them to doc the battle from inside. Yet this twin function is fraught with rigidity. Their technical experience is sharpened by proximity, however proximity additionally imposes limits. They typically wrestle with questions of self-censorship, like what should stay unseen for the sake of safety and what ought to be proven to convey to the world the reality about Russia’s battle.

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Their photos reveal the battle’s darkest moments — injured troopers combating for his or her lives, cities decreased to rubble — but they have to present them with a double burden: take care of the dignity of the victims, and a fierce insistence that the world should not look away. Every body is charged with an urgency that resists apathy, a requirement that struggling not be sanitized into statistics.

It is that this very anxiousness — the anguish of documenting one’s personal homeland underneath siege — that shapes their imaginative and prescient. Unlike overseas photojournalists for the media who arrive, report, and finally depart, these troopers turned photographers stay certain to the destiny of the land they seize. Their work isn’t just reportage; it’s survival, testimony, and love of nation, etched into photos that carry the burden of each witness and wounds.

In 2023, when Roman Zakrevskyi joined Ukraine’s National Guard and have become a part of Azov Brigade, his duties included common journeys to artillery, mortar, and infantry positions. While a lot of his work concerned filming their fight operations, he was equally drawn to capturing portraits, day by day routines, and the lived ambiance that outlined their world.

“For me, what has always been and remains most important is the person: their personal story, their individual contribution to this struggle or to life outside of the war, their eyes, their posture, their appearance — through which the state of each individual, and of society as a whole, is conveyed,” Zakrevskyi advised the Kyiv Independent.

The determination to serve in Ukraine’s Armed Forces was not spontaneous. Some had already ventured to the entrance strains as photojournalists after Russia’s preliminary invasion of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in 2014, and in Dmytro Kuprian’s case, he was additionally mobilized in 2015 — but he continued to pursue his pictures.

“For me, the main thing was to film (during that initial trip) — I shot something here and there. And at the same time, I collected shell fragments and recorded the circumstances in which they were found,” Kuprian advised the Kyiv Independent.

“I didn’t even know why I was doing it, I just gathered those kinds of artifacts. It became this kind of parallel experience (once I joined the military). If you ask what was before and what came after, it’s very difficult to say.”

A pure query that arises greater than three years into Russia’s full-scale battle can be whether or not these photographers’ understanding of their craft has shifted within the transition from civilian life to a fight function. The reply is — not a lot.

“Before the war, I mostly photographed people’s portraits, their interaction with everyday objects, with the city I lived in. Now the backdrop has changed a little, because the context that the war has brought is impossible to ignore,” Zakrevskyi mentioned.

Likewise, for Borisovskyi, it’s much less a matter of change in his pictures than of refinement — his work sharpened and deepened by the brand new realities that turned his materials.

“Even before the war, I liked capturing dirt and decay,” he mentioned. “Rust in the middle of a flower field. People at work. People looking tired, but dedicated to their labor. Here, there’s no shortage of that.”

This story was produced with the assist of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers.

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