‘This girl was braver than I was’: Julia Kochetova’s astonishing images of struggle in Ukraine | Photography

Julia Kochetova is in contrast to most people who cowl Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the Guardian. The photographer lives in Kyiv; she is Ukrainian. It is her nation that’s being invaded, her mates who’re being killed.

The struggle that started in 2014 and brutally escalated on 24 February in 2022 has infused each a part of her existence. It is key to her life decisions, her relationships, her friendships, her profession (when she was youthful she had deliberate to go to artwork college in Germany, however photojournalism beckoned). She is at residence on the frontline, and will offer you battlefield first assist for those who wanted it. She can be a vegetarian who makes an exception for meat-based borsch; reads poetry once we’re on the highway collectively; and may wash and brush out her waist-length hair in uncommon areas and at stunning velocity. Her driving fashion lies someplace on the spectrum between chaotic and shrewd, and she will be able to suggest you a superb place for a manicure in Kyiv. She is 32 years previous. She has organised extra funerals than anybody ought to should do in a lifetime.

Born and raised within the central Ukrainian metropolis of Vinnytsia, the daughter of an economist and a lecturer in German, Kochetova is at residence in Kyiv this morning, between assignments, having woken up with out electrical energy, the results of a winter of relentless Russian assaults on energy infrastructure that has left strange individuals freezing of their properties.

We first met on 16 October 2022, once I was in Kyiv writing about artists’ responses to Russia’s fullscale invasion. She had simply come again from the frontline within the Donetsk area. She was photographing ballet dancers – fantastically capturing their fleetness and power. This was her first project with the Guardian. Since then, her work has grow to be integral to our protection of the struggle. That day in 2022, I remarked that the job at Kyiv’s nationwide opera home should really feel fairly tame in comparison with her normal habitat within the trenches and at medical factors. She didn’t disagree.

The following morning, although, issues regarded completely different. Kyiv was attacked for the primary time with Iranian-made Shahed drones. The wasp-like buzzing of those horrific weapons has grow to be a dreadful commonplace; on the time, it was a terrifying, disorienting novelty. That day, she woke to the sound of explosions, pulled on her bulletproof vest, which felt a bizarre factor to do in her personal metropolis streets, and went outdoors. It was her neighbourhood that was being hit. “You could hear small arms – cops trying to shoot down the drones. And then this weird sound of the Shaheds that we hadn’t heard before.”

She bumped into an underground automotive park the place individuals had been sheltering, and photographed what she noticed: a frightened-looking lady clutching the leg of a person in fatigues, who was standing over her protectively. For her, the picture – about to look in an exhibition of her work in Amsterdam – is about love. The pair had been strangers thrown collectively by circumstances. Nevertheless the person, it appears to Kochetova, was impelled to consolation and shield the lady out of affection: out of a sense, maybe, that “someone else, somewhere else, was protecting his family”. Two neighbours simply seen within the background are hugging one another. In the second of taking this {photograph}, Kochetova says, she felt her nation was indomitable. “You stay here, you keep fighting,” she says. “You protect someone out of love, you hug your neighbour who survived.”

Kochetova is commonly requested about her “project” – her ongoing physique of labor courting from 2022, titled War Is Personal. This, which kinds the premise of the Amsterdam present, received her a World Press Photo award in 2024. When the query comes, she tells me, “I always interrupt. I say, ‘This isn’t a project – this is my life.’ I try to keep a bit of distance from the well-known battle of foreign journalists versus local journalists, because I do believe that you can have the same level of empathy, because it’s all about humans meeting humans in terrible times. But in my case, and in the case of Ukrainian journalists, you have the same scars as those you photograph: you match scars with scars.”

There’s a specific {photograph} that to me encapsulates her relationship together with her work. She took it on the funeral of a lady named Nadiia Halych, aged 24, and her two-year-old daughter Anhelina. They had been among the many two dozen individuals killed by a Russian missile assault on a Kyiv house constructing final August. “It is an image I’d really like to forget,” she says. “There are so many that I’d like to forget.” The mourners had been gathered within the yard of the block the place the mom and baby had lived. As is commonly the case at Ukrainian funerals, the casket of the kid was opened. “It was such a strange moment,” she says. “You are trying to breathe, but you can’t. And it stays with you, it stays with you.”

She goes on: “I was trying to be as gentle as possible.” There was no query of speeding as much as take a closeup into the coffin. And but, “I was thinking, ‘How can I tell this story visually?’ And I just noticed this kid looking into the child’s coffin. I still believe this girl was braver than I was, because she made the decision to be that close.”

The {photograph} is taken from a distance, by way of the heads of mourners, excessive of the coffin, which is blessedly out of focus. In the centre is the little woman, going through us head on, and staring intently on the tinier physique. Kochetova considered her personal girlhood, shielded from funerals and the truth of demise by her mother and father; and what a distinction that was with this struggle, the place demise is all over the place: “a shared pain, which just stays with you”. A struggle by which youngsters bury youngsters.

In the exhibition, there’s a formally posed portrait of a younger lady gazing steadily into the digital camera – identifiably a fight medic from her fatigues and the bundle of scissors and bandages strapped to her physique. This is Iryna Tsybukh, a well-known determine in Ukraine. After Kochetova first photographed her in 2022, the 2 turned shut. But then Tsybukh was killed on the frontline within the Kharkiv area, just a few days earlier than her twenty sixth birthday – leaving Kochetova and one other good friend directions for her funeral.

It was then that Kochetova really skilled what it was prefer to be snatching the final moments of farewell to a beloved one whereas, on the opposite aspect of the coffin, ranks of photographers had been massed at a funeral attended by lots of of mourners. Mostly, she says, as a photographer, “I try to stay as far away as possible, to skip the funeral altogether, or to come without a camera. A camera can give you the illusion that you have distance – that you have a shield between you and reality. But if you have lived through something, if you have this memory, if you had this experience, it affects what kind of human you are, and it affects what kind of photographer you are.”

Unlike colleagues of a earlier era, Kochetova doesn’t labour below the phantasm {that a} {photograph} may change historical past, or cease a struggle. Instead, in all the pieces she does, she is attempting to deliver those that see her work in the direction of an intimacy with people, in the direction of a human connection that goes straight to the center and has little to do with maps of the frontline, statistics on losses, or armchair army evaluation. Photography is barely a part of her toolkit, too. The immersive exhibition in Amsterdam may also comprise her personal poems, drawings by an artist good friend, Oleksandr Komiakhov, who’s serving within the armed forces, in addition to sounds and objects – all supposed “to bring you closer to what war is”.

And if she doesn’t assume her work has the ability to alter occasions, she does consider within the energy of documentation – of telling the reality. She additionally believes in doing it with the velocity {that a} stills digital camera can obtain, versus inserting the time and distance that documentary movie requires. Russia, she factors out, is adept at rewriting historical past. It is occurring now, for instance, within the metropolis of Mariupol, which was besieged, bombed and has been occupied by Russia since 2022. False narratives are being created about these occasions – however, as she says, the primary three lethal weeks of the siege had been documented by a single Ukrainian movie crew led by her good friend, director Mstyslav Chernov, whose work turned the premise of an Oscar-winning documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol. The information it ascertained can not now be erased.

Kochetova remembers the horrible sight of mass graves after the Russian withdrawal from the Kyiv area in spring 2022. “I was facing the question, ‘How could you tell their stories?’ There is nothing left after their deaths. Their stories are over.” But then she thought, “OK, I will tell the story of survivors, of those who can still bear witness – and this way you create an antidote to the possible great Russian story of how they are trying to ‘liberate’ Ukraine.”

When Kochetova and I work collectively, she is usually photographing behind the traces – capturing poetry readings, performs, musicians, artists of their studios. But it’s her frontline pictures which may be essentially the most arresting. There is a picture within the exhibition of a soldier kind of in aid towards a backdrop of smoke, fragments of barbed wire within the foreground. It has a timeless really feel, partly as a result of she shot it on movie. It could possibly be from one other struggle, one other place and time.

On nearer inspection, although, it dawns on you that the determine appears very younger, his uniform pristine. This was from a shoot Kochetova undertook with the Guardian’s defence and safety editor Dan Sabbagh in 2025. Their story was a few scheme to incentivise these youthful than the conscription age of 25 to affix the armed forces. The photograph was taken at a coaching course within the Kharkiv area. “You ask yourself,” she says of the boys, the youngest of whom had been simply 18, “why should they be serving in the army – and not me? They all had super-young faces. They had pink Hello Kitty patches on their helmets. The joke was that they could take off the patches if they passed the course, but until then, they were kittens.”

Kochetova is an excellent photographer of males: she captures troopers on the frontline as they toil and pressure, filthy and exhausted, weak and fragile however not missing in dignity. In one image, taken in Chasiv Yar, a a lot fought-over strategic city close to Bakhmut within the east, we see the pinnacle of a person who’s, it appears, mendacity on a mattress or stretcher. A hand sporting a latex glove is about to place an oxygen masks over his mouth. One tiny element infuses the picture with emotional energy: the tear that glistens within the nook of the soldier’s eye.

Another, taken at a distinct medical stabilisation level, the place the injured are given fundamental remedy earlier than being hospitalised, exhibits the pinnacle and shoulders of a person. He is leaning barely in the direction of the digital camera and his face is in sharp focus, whereas his bare chest, a bit blood-stained, is barely blurred. Round his neck is a cross. There is a blue cannula feeding oxygen into his nostrils, and the plain background can be blue. I can’t shake the notion that this image resembles a non secular portray – an Ecce Homo, maybe, the cannula standing in for Christ’s crown of thorns.

Except: the wounded man’s eyes are bruised and swollen shut. “I just remember this moment,” says Kochetova, “being so close to a person who cannot see you. And you face a question, ‘How can I capture this with dignity? How can I capture the incredible work that medics do?’ I am always amazed at these stabilisation points. It’s the place where you fight with death, where you hold someone’s hand and steal them back from death’s embrace.”

The {photograph} jogs my memory of Seventeenth-century Spanish work that relate to the senses: Zurbarán’s St Francis in Meditation, for instance, by which the praying saint’s eyes are invisible, shaded by his monk’s behavior, and we appear to be invited to think about the imaginative and prescient of his internal, slightly than outer world. “For me,” says Kochetova, “the portrait is about what kind of dreams this man is seeing right now. What does he see when his eyes are closed?”

Even when Kochetova’s images are empty of human presence, persons are nonetheless there implicitly. She has one {photograph} within the present of exhumed graves in a forest on the sting of Izium – a city within the Kharkiv area that was occupied by Russia in 2022 after which liberated within the autumn of that 12 months. When the tide of the invaders retreated, they left proof of their dealings behind – torture chambers in basements, civilian killings, and these graves, greater than 400 of them, dug out of the sandy soil among the many pine woods. For those that attended the exhumations, the expertise was unforgettable in its disappointment and horror.

Kochetova has chosen to not present us the volunteers digging up the graves of their protecting fits, however the calm after the work’s completion, the daylight slanting down by way of the bushes. “Izium and this moment has made me hate any forest since then, because you’re hearing this silence, you have this smell of human remains mixed with pine trees, and it stays with you. It was as if I was trying to fight with the idea that there are no people in this frame. I was still trying to show their presence, even with these empty graves. I was trying to show the scale of how many stories are untold.”

There is a paradox between the presence of demise and the fantastic thing about the sunshine, the obvious calm of the panorama. “On the level of framing and technical settings, that is what creates the image,” she says. “But on a human level, you want to ask, ‘Why is it so calm? Why is there so much light in such a dark moment?’ I’d love it to be as dark as possible. But you have to accept the reality that the day after someone is killed, the sun is going to rise again.”

We take a look at one other picture, of a soldier in a trench that has flowered with a profusion of blue and yellow blooms, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. The photograph, taken within the Donetsk area in 2023, represents to Kochetova the potential of discovering, amid the violence and grief of struggle, “these specific moments of beauty, of joy, of silence”. Everyone loves Ukraine’s large sunsets over the steppe, “no matter if they are commanding a platoon, or they are local kids. We are all under the same sunset and under the same stars. One of the main topics I’m trying to explore through photography and poetry is, ‘Could you bloom on the ashes? Could you build something after your city has been ruined? Could you plant a garden after your previous garden was burnt out?’”

Kochetova is just not a struggle photographer: she is a photographer documenting the occasions in her nation. She has not travelled to different conflicts, to different wars. Before the full-scale invasion, she remembers speaking to mates about their future plans, about whether or not they may keep within the nation, or journey abroad. “And one of my friends said, ‘You’re not a tree – you could move.’ And I said, ‘No, you actually are a tree. You have roots. Your roots describe who you are. And that is crucial for me. It’s crucial what identity I have and what kind of choices I make in the most important moment my country is going through.”

In an earlier iteration of War Is Personal, Kochetova confirmed a self-portrait. She is sitting on the ground in a resort room in Kramatorsk, jap Ukraine. It was 25 February 2022, a time of nice worry, and he or she was solely alone – her good friend had determined to return to Kyiv to assist defend town from approaching Russian tanks. Her boots are in entrance of her, her flak jacket, digital camera and a medical equipment beside her. She’s sporting a hoodie and ridiculous brightly colored socks. But that is removed from a second of bravado. It is a picture of vulnerability. She seems terrified.

The {photograph} is not going to be within the Amsterdam present. Instead, it kinds the premise of a drawing by her artist good friend Oleksandr Komiakhov. Her terror and vulnerability are nonetheless there, however he has modified sure particulars. Her flak jacket and digital camera at the moment are positioned in order that they nearly resemble the physique and head of one other particular person. A reminder that her digital camera is a method of connection – and that she is just not alone.

Julia Kochetova: War Is Personal is at Foam, Amsterdam, from 6 March to 25 May