Ukraine, 2022
by Helena Lea Manhartsberger & Laila Sieber
One month after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, a new normality has emerged into the daily lives of people living in the west of the country. Even when the air-raid sirens sound, silence remains. It is war, but the front line, where civilians and soldiers are killed every day, is a few hundred kilometres away.
The silence can be heard in the train station halls, where thousands of refugees from the embattled areas arrive every day. It’s spreading through hotels that are booked to the last room and crowding into theaters where volunteers are sorting donations. It lays over queues of cars in front of military checkpoints and strides through classrooms that now have to serve as emergency shelters.
At a shelter for the LGBTIQ+ community in Chernivtsi, Sofia has convinced her partner Sasha, who is trans, not to enlist in the army to fight. In a former beauty clinic, soldiers from the Azov Battalion contort their faces in pain. They are treated by doctors who were caught up in the war while on skiing holiday and were unable to return to their hometowns. In the small village of Duliby, Natalia mourns her two fallen brothers. The younger one was blown up by a mine in Mariupol and the older one was killed 10 days later by a rocket in Yaroviv. Young men and women who look like students crawl across the dusty ground during one of the many training sessions for the Territorial Defence Forces, saying phrases like: “I’m not afraid of fighting, I’m afraid of losing my country.”
The silence that can be heard is sometimes softened when conversations are loud laughter. Then it screams again when worries about relatives, who are still on the run, leaves you speechless. But it is a constant companion in this war.
Collected fragments from western Ukraine show a country that hopes every day to wake up from a nightmare.
The project was presented as part of the exhibition “Fragments of War” at the Willy-Brandt Haus in Berlin, as a finalist for the VGH Photo Prize 2022 at the GAF Eisfabrik in Hanover, at the exhibition “Identity – Courage – Love” in Perpignan and at the exhibition “in between states” as part of the Journalism Festival Innsbruck 2024.
Video messages
Helena Lea Manhartsberger and Laila Sieber met Seva, Marija and Vania during their research. The three people were at different stages of their escape shortly after the Russian invasion.
Since then, they have been sending regular video messages to report on how the war has changed their lives.