WAR DIARY

A noted Ukrainian-born artist and writer offers an eyewitness account of the Russian invasion of her country.

Though the Russian war against Ukraine began in early 2022, for Belorusets, it actually began in 2014 when Russia seized Crimea. As a journalist who was in the region when the conflict began, “I still remember the intense guilt I felt about being a guest in a catastrophe, a guest who could leave at will, because I lived somewhere else.” All that changed when shells fell on her city on Feb. 24, 2022. In the disjointed hours that followed, Belorusets could do little more than look “out the window and listen to check if the explosions were approaching,” endure the intermittent air raid sirens, and digest news reports of casualties that suddenly turned the abstraction of war “into something very concrete.” The diary that she began on that day and kept until she left Kyiv for Berlin in early April records how simple day-to-day activities—e.g., going to the few open grocery stores, restaurants, and coffee shops or gathering with friends and family anywhere in the city—became fraught with unimaginable possibilities for violence. Yet even in the face of evenings sometimes spent in bomb shelters, days spent walking among destroyed buildings, and musing on the fate of Ukrainians in other, more devastated cities like Mariupol, people continued to carry on, some with the belief that Ukraine would ultimately be “protected by the whole world.” The surreal circumstances Belorusets depicts, both in her writing and in the accompanying color photographs, set against the drama of war, are quietly disturbing. By showing how the war forced people to adapt to create any semblance of normalcy, she creates a compelling portrait of a nation under siege as well as the inspiring resilience of ordinary Ukrainians. The book is co-published by New Directions and ISOLARII.

A soberingly spare and humane record of disastrous events.