It’s hard to get the world interested in the realities of the war in eastern Ukraine. Frankly, it’s boring.
Ever since Russia invaded the region to prop up its proxies in Lugansk and Donetsk in August 2014, the war has evolved into an uneventful, yet bloody stalemate. The Ukrainian military and separatist forces face each other along a 500 km long “contact line” with little movement, but almost daily fighting.
By 2017, over 10,000 people are said to have died, while eastern Ukraine is becoming one of the most heavily mined areas in the world. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers are said to be mobilised on both sides. And over two million people had to leave their homes. A permanent state of war has ensued.
As long as the Russian government is willing to invest, according to estimates, a few billion euros per year into subsidising its dysfunctional separate “republics” and lend them its political and military support, there is little hope for peace any time soon.
The time when the war in Ukraine was a central focus of Western media is long gone. Increasingly, it is becoming more difficult to drum up foreign interest in the conflict, and thus to justify the costs of sending reporters out to the field. This leaves the space wide open for parties with an agenda. In a conflict which from the very beginning was characterised by intense, reality-distorting propaganda, it’s not a good development.
This is not to say that it is difficult to get reliable information about the state of the war, even as a foreigner. The work of human rights groups, or, for example, by the journalist Nikolaus von Twickel, who documents the state of the separatist “republics” are good examples. But neither of them are commercially funded nor directed at a mass audience. And none of them are able, as the expression goes, to “give a human face” to the civilians affected by the fighting.
While the war in eastern Ukraine did not see the kind of mass atrocities which characterised many recent wars, from the former Yugoslavia to Syria, millions of non-combatants are nonetheless affected. If they have not emigrated, they tend to live in a kind of limbo: Dislocated by war and growing economic disruption, they nonetheless remain stuck in place, helplessly hoping for any kind of political arrangement that would allow them to return to a normal life.
The renowned conflict photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind and the journalist Alisa Sopova teamed up to produce portraits of these people and their quiet desperation. Like many similar projects, theirs wasn’t commercially funded, but apparently serves to promote EyeWitness, an app that allows people in conflict zones to produce verified, geo-tagged photos of crimes they are witness to simply using their cell phones.
The result of Taylor-Lind and Sopova’s efforts are published on their Instagram accounts – a platform which works surprisingly well for this kind of photojournalism, and is fitting for a time when even civilians caught in wars are able to produce real-time documentation of events via social media. More and more, the construction of visual narratives about war and conflict is becoming a chaotic, complex endeavour.
All photos are accompanied by the writing of Sopova. We meet, for example, Rodion Lebev, a former business owner who holds out in a Donetsk suburb, his “yellow minivan” being “the only connection between Opytnoe and the outer world, driving free of charge people, groceries, cash and humanitarian aid along the mud road through the minefield to nearby Avdeevka.“
Or Olga, “putting her baby to sleep with the sounds of combat in the background”. Or Ruslan, whose story is as simple as it is indicative of the kind of misery the endless war has inflicted on millions of people: He would like to leave his village a few hundred meters away from the frontline, where wayward shells are always in danger of killing his young children. But the coal mine that used to employ him has closed, Ruslan is unemployed, and as much as they’d like to flee, “The family can’t afford it.”
The collaborative project #fivekilometersfromthefrontline is published on the Instagram accounts of @anastasiatl and @sopova.alisa. Photograph courtesy of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine. Published under a Creative Commons license.
