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‘I take photos to convey my hatred of war’ Maxim Dondyuk has photographed Zelensky and embedded with Ukrainian troops. Now Kyiv’s military censorship is keeping this photographer from the front.

Source: Meduza

Ukrainian photographer Maxim Dondyuk began taking photos of the war in Donbas in 2014. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he worked with many of the world’s largest media outlets, including Time, Der Spiegel, and The New Yorker. When Time chose Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as its Person of the Year in 2022, the magazine sent Dondyuk to photograph him. Now, however, the photographer is unable to go to the front, having run afoul of the Ukrainian authorities: officials in Kyiv disapprove of the public comments Dondyuk has made about events in the combat zone. Meduza special correspondent Lilia Yapparova spoke to Dondyuk about Ukraine’s military censorship and what he has witnessed while documenting the war.

The following Q&A has been edited and abridge for length and clarity.

You started photographing the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. How did you become a war photographer?

I never call myself a “war photographer” — I’m a documentarian who picked up a camera when war came to my country. There are some photographers who travel around the world in search of armed conflicts; I’ll never understand this. I take photos to convey my hatred of war.

Before the invasion, I, like many people who have read and re-read Hemingway, had a romanticized view of war. But in 2014, this drive rapidly changed into a complete rejection of everything related to war. I spent all of my time with the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU). I took photos during the encirclement in Ilovaisk — and it was there that I first saw the decomposing bodies of Russian soldiers. Bloated and rotting. And I realized that this was all they had accomplished — that their mothers wouldn’t even be able to bury them. I’ll never forget that smell.

Then and there, I became fiercely anti-war. I believe that every day of the conflict is the worst thing that can happen in life. And that goes for both sides. I’m prepared to risk my life and even to die documenting what’s happening — but I could never kill another person. I simply don’t understand how a person can live with the feeling that he killed someone. You can call me a pacifist or whatever you want.

You witnessed the aftermath of Russia’s offensive in Kyiv. One of your photos — showing a woman and her child fleeing Irpin — made it onto the cover of Time.

Our soldiers had blown up an enormous bridge [on the road] from Irpin to Kyiv to prevent Russian troops from passing. Thousands of people tried to cross over its ruins to evacuate [from the outskirts of Kyiv]. They had to do this under constant Russian fire. At the time, I still couldn’t understand why they would prefer to take that risk. Now we know why: because in Bucha and Irpin, things were even worse.

While I headed towards the bridge, I passed dozens of people going the other way; soldiers were helping them carry their children and their bags. When that woman and her child ran past, I instinctively picked up my camera, managed to get literally one or two shots, and kept walking. I didn’t realize the picture would spread so widely afterward. I’m not a huge fan of it — the photo turned out too reportorial, too “news agency,” for my taste.

The woman had lost her husband somewhere at that crossing (fortunately, he was later found), so that made her even more distressed. And the Russian army, watching the bridge with their drones, was firing on it constantly. I also got injured there, while photographing the evacuation. Right behind the bridge, there was a square where a volunteer vehicle had pulled up to pack everybody in and drive them closer to Kyiv, where [Russia’s] artillery couldn’t reach them. And Russian mortars bombed this square. Deliberately.

There were several photographers there, and we could see an Orlan [drone] hovering over us. At some point, a bus driven by volunteers drove up, and several women got inside. They had just driven off, and we’d just started walking away from the area, when a mortar shell landed in that spot. A piece of shrapnel hit me in the shoulder. There were constant strikes and explosions around us.

I understand Ukrainians’ hatred towards Russia when this happens. But when people start taking pleasure in the deaths of another group of people, that’s a psychological problem. If a person can eat breakfast and take pleasure in watching someone get killed, there’s something wrong.

‘I don’t understand the notion that war isn’t the time for criticism’

At the end of the first year of the full-scale invasion, you photographed Volodymyr Zelensky for Time magazine. What were your impressions of him?

I had a conversation with him right before I photographed him. My impression is that he sincerely wants to help the Ukrainian people. He struck me as a patriot — a person who cares about Ukraine not just in words but in practice. And he wants victory in practice, too. But I don’t know if the people around him are the same way. And a single person can’t monitor everything that happens around him, after all. There’s a wild amount of corruption in the country right now, and either he doesn’t see that problem or he’s part of it. I try to believe he just doesn’t see it.

We wanted to spend at least a week with Zelensky so we could see what his everyday life looks like. As a Ukrainian, I wanted to show the president as a living person, to reveal some other side to him that’s usually hidden from the cameras. To show him doing ordinary things — eating a sandwich or what have you.

[Time] promised us that I’d have a week or two to photograph him. And on the first day, we really were given very direct access to the president: I went with him into his bunker and on the train when he traveled to Kherson on the day of the city’s liberation. That evening, though, I learned that the shoot was over: [Zelensky’s] press team had suddenly decided that a single day was plenty. That was a surprise to us; if I’d known about these restraints, I would have worked more aggressively.

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In recent interviews, you’ve spoken a lot about the military censorship and bureaucratic difficulties Ukrainian and foreign photographers face.

Right now, no independent documentarians or journalists, many of whom photographed the war in 2014, have the option to work [on the front line]. We’re not given access. At the same time, there are journalists and bloggers who have gotten into the press pool [approved by the AFU’s press officers] and can go everywhere, despite some of them having no experience and no knowledge of the ethics of wartime photography.

These people are part of Ukraine’s propaganda efforts. Unfortunately, access is only given to those who support policies that are favorable to the government. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing — I’m not a government official. But I am a documentarian, and it’s important to me to show the truth. If a person is sick, does it do him any good to conceal that from him? Propaganda messages like “Our counteroffensive will liberate everything up to Crimea in two weeks” — what effect do they have? We don’t talk about our challenges, and NATO ends up sending us fewer weapons.

How did you manage, then, to get to the front line to spend two weeks in the infantry trenches in Kostiantynivka with New Yorker correspondent Luke Mogelson?

I’ve been taking pictures on the front since 2014; I have connections I can use to get access. There are a lot of Ukrainian officers who don’t approve of the censorship, and moreover, it’s hard to punish many of them [for circumventing the press service and helping journalists], because they’re in a critical situation already. When you’re in hell, they can’t send you to another hell.

We just went there and lived in a trench for two weeks, 150 meters (about 500 feet) from the enemy’s positions. We were with the guys [from the 28th Mechanized Brigade] the entire time: we lived with them in their dugouts, sat with them under fire, didn’t shower, and ate only canned food. We simply wanted to see what it was like to be part of Ukraine’s infantry, which is suffering the heaviest losses in this war and, essentially, holding the entire front line.

Initially, we were stunned by the whole situation, to put it mildly. It was hard for us to spend even two weeks there — I can’t imagine what it’s like for the people who have been there for multiple years. I was struck by the fact that half of the soldiers we were living with were at the front just because they’d been caught on the street — that’s the kind of mobilization going on [in Ukraine]. It also struck me that a lot of people on the front line had had no training and were fighting with almost no equipment.

Luke worked on the text and I took photos, but we can’t tell you even half of what we saw out there. Just think of movies about World War I — that’s how it is for the infantry on the Ukrainian front right now. And a lot of people don’t realize this, because they only see photos of stormtroopers, artillerymen, and mortarmen.

After you left the front, you received threats.

Yes, I got threats demanding that I take the article down. They asked me to find some way to pressure the magazine. They got in touch with The New Yorker through unofficial channels as well.

At first, [AFU] press officers called me, then there were things that I heard secondhand or thirdhand. Evidently, these people didn’t want us to know who was asking. We ultimately realized that [Ukraine’s] top leadership was not just unhappy with our article, they were furious.

Now there are a lot of independent journalists getting threats like that. Most likely, someone in the government has no interest in freedom of speech. Or is afraid. Or too stupid to realize that our work is actually helping Ukraine. The corruption we see right now, during the war, is literally causing people to die. People are being taken illegally while conscription officers are buying vacation homes. I don’t understand the notion that war isn’t the time for criticism.

Can you still work in Ukraine?

To put it bluntly, it became impossible for me to continue working in Ukraine. After I got a few threatening calls, I started giving interviews about censorship — and since then, I seem to have been put on some kind of blacklist. I don’t have accreditation [from the military press service]. I was called in by the National Security Service (SBU), and I still don’t understand what for — they said it was “just to talk.” They stopped letting me leave the country to go to exhibitions or to see my parents. I feel like my country has no use for me. And that everything I’m doing, from their perspective, is hindering Ukraine.

Now I’ve managed to come to the U.S. (it was pretty difficult) to work with [Dean Emeritus of the International Center of Photography] Fred Ritchin to finish a book for the German publisher Buchkunst Berlin. The book will feature my photos and my purely subjective accounts of the war.

In your original documentary projects, you often talk about the war through landscapes. Why are there no people in these photos?

When we see bloodstained stretchers rather than human faces, it’s easier for us to imagine that our own injured relatives, for example, could have laid on the same stretcher. Our consciousness and subconscious fill in the gaps of what happened, and this meaning embeds itself in our minds, in our memory. Through landscapes, I try to connect the viewer with the event.

Landscapes, especially white ones, are associated for me with the internal emptiness that people feel when they return from the front. When you come back to civilian life, but there’s complete emptiness inside of you. Many of the structures I photograph were important during active combat, but now they stand abandoned and useless. The same thing happens with soldiers who come back without legs, without arms, mentally traumatized — even their wives don’t understand them.

When I cover news in war zones, my camera is my weapon against Russian propaganda. But in my documentary work, I prefer a meditative approach, and I always return to landscape photography as a form of meditation. I need emptiness — especially after shooting in conflict zones.

I spent the last two winters in the Donbas: I took a car and roamed through minefields alone. I photographed places where battles had been fought [after the start of the full-scale invasion]. In winter, it’s absolute emptiness there — completely frozen tanks, trenches, abandoned checkpoints, and destroyed houses. I waited until everything was covered in snow and frost, and then I captured these white landscapes. Because after the war, if humanity doesn’t stop, this is all that will remain of us.

Right now, I’m trying to engage audiences through art spaces — to draw renewed attention to what’s happening in Ukraine.

Ukraine — no matter how much we Ukrainians might wish — is not the center of the world. And to keep attention focused on us, our government needs to stage exhibitions in major museums, embrace contemporary art, and let documentary filmmakers do their work. We can no longer hold people’s attention through news agencies: people have gotten tired of seeing the same photos every day. But our government hasn’t yet realized that the news alone can’t hold people’s attention.

At the start of the war, many Ukrainian photographers wanted to collaborate with Meduza; they believed their photos would help Russians understand what’s happening. Has this approach proven ineffective?

I don’t believe photography can change Russians’ attitudes. If those who remain in the country were to change their perspective, their entire world would collapse. That’s why they’ll hold onto it until the very end. It’s a certain form of defense — you can’t penetrate it. Many Germans didn’t believe in the concentration camps and gas chambers until the very end.

And who can be reached in Russia anyways? It wasn’t Putin who killed people in Bucha (he didn’t personally call each soldier with the demand “Kill women and children!”), it was Russians. They simply behaved that way because nobody told them not to. Putin is doing what some portion of the Russian people want him to do. None of my evidence will be taken rationally. For them to change their views, they would need a devastating catharsis.