A world where those with weapons have absolute power.

Events that you would think would never happen to you happen, such as plane crashes and wars. When I was a child, I heard the words Bosnia and Herzegovina every time the TV was turned on. These two words stuck with me because they sounded strange and different from anything I knew. But most of the time I was upset because it meant I couldn't use the TV to play video games when the news was on. When I was in middle school, my history teacher started crying about the Iraq War. “No one is doing anything. The United Nations is useless,” she said. We students rolled our eyes and laughed. We thought that was strange. Why do some people cry over things that only happen on TV?

It's not that my childhood was flashy or privileged, quite the opposite. I'm from Donetsk, Ukraine. When I was three years old, the Soviet Union collapsed. It was a difficult time. Food was scarce, the playground was rusting and falling apart, and the trolleybus that took us to Grandma's place came and went. The highlight of my kindergarten days was accompanying my girlfriend's mother as she sold the Tanpack stampons she brought from Poland at the market. If she had good sales, she would buy me bananas. It was a luxury item, like Tampax itself. Our ladies realized that stuffing cloth inside their panties isn't the only option.

However, things were getting better. By the time I graduated from college and started my career as a reporter at a local newspaper, my life was not much different from that of a typical Western middle class. In the spring of 2014, I fell in love with my new yoga studio. I was also thinking about going on a retreat and was trying to choose between that and a vacation in Barcelona. I decided that since my salary had increased a bit, I could afford to get waxing every few weeks.

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Well, that's what I thought was happening. In Russian propaganda, this spring was called “Russian Spring.” This was when the invasion of Ukraine first began, when the Kremlin incited and supported a separatist uprising in Donetsk. It quickly got pretty bad. And what shocked me most deeply about my war experience, even more than seeing my house bombed or seeing people die, was how the world suddenly became so far away from me.

A series of events ensued that revealed this.

The first was a blanket on a plane.

The war between reality and reality had not yet begun. There were some street riots and some rumors of Russian involvement, but there was some strange activity that most people didn't even pay attention to, believing it would end. Then one day, my newspaper decided to send a reporter to the airport to cover the arrival of a cargo plane full of blankets from the United Nations. I remember asking, “What is an airplane…?” The thought that someone, in an office somewhere in Brussels or New York, would already classify my life, my plans, everything about me as an object of charity and would make me as miserable as I needed to be. I couldn't understand it. Humane blanket. I wanted to scream, “I don’t need your blanket!” I'm not that kind of person! ”

But those people knew better than I did. The situation was only getting worse. A few weeks later, my city was nearly taken over by Russian-backed separatists. Do you know how cities are taken over? Every day, one or two buses were parked near centers of power, such as the police station, courthouse, city hall, and the Treasury building. A group of armed people unloads their belongings and enters the building. The only people facing them are a bunch of scared to death office workers, who change the flag at the entrance, find the office manager, put a gun to his head, and demand his cooperation. Some cooperated, others fled, but few resisted openly, and no one ever saw them again, except for one who was later found in the river with his stomach slit.

One day a bus pulled up by the newsroom, next to my little red car. It was a yellow school bus stolen from the Ministry of Education. Armed men came in. You cannot take over a city without shutting down independent media. Our editor-in-chief refused to cooperate and fled the city. Overnight, the newspaper closed down and I lost my job. The next day I was hired as a fixer by a Western media outlet.

I loved being a fixer. It was a lot of adventure and good money. But there was something odd about my position with my employer. On the one hand, I joined the global media scene. On the other hand, I was constantly reminded of the unbridgeable gap between me and them.

If a dead person could listen to a living person talk, this is how I would listen to the conversation. At that time, I was in a state of shock and confusion. My entire world was falling apart before my eyes. And people were talking about massages, restaurants, weddings. Because, as you know, there is always some kind of suffering in the world and you can't help it all. This time, however, I am the one suffering in the world.

I remember one day driving home after a day of work on the front lines with two American photojournalists. They were chatting leisurely in the back seat. One person said he was going to get a massage when he got back to the hotel. “They have really good massages. Try them while we're on a mission, it's guaranteed.” The other one said he was tired of this mission and was reluctant to return. I said I was looking forward to it. “I'm going to stay in Kiev for a few days and meet some friends. There are some really good restaurants, so check them out.” I said I needed to go back.

Even within my own country, I always experienced this foreignness. After months of reporting on my city, which had fallen into the abyss of war, I felt I needed a break, so I visited a friend in Kiev. The day after I arrived, I went to a nearby supermarket. At the entrance, we were stopped by volunteers collecting humanitarian supplies. She said, “You can buy some groceries and put them in this box for the refugees from the East.'' “I’m a refugee from the East,” I answered. The volunteer looked at me with a “system error” look on his face. They obviously couldn't be refugees because they looked normal and lived freely in public spaces. I wasn't covered in mud, wrapped in a UN blanket, or better yet, isolated in a camp far from the public eye, as refugees exist in the public imagination.

That's where I met Anastasia. She stood out because she didn't just go to the front and return to the hotel. She was interested in the logistics of everyday life during the war. She asked me questions about my own life. “I'll take you around the neighborhood,” I offered. The suburban area where I lived before the war was adjacent to Donetsk Airport, which was one of the main battlefields. Whatever life he had left, there was tension.

We strolled towards the old house. I showed Anastasia my newspaper building, now abandoned after shelling. I showed her my favorite nail polish salon. It's empty now and the windows are broken. About a 10-minute walk from my house, I was stopped by a soldier. “We're not allowed to go any further.'' “But there's a house there. I live there,'' I tried to argue. “We are not allowed to go any further,” the soldier repeated, looking down at me as if I were a non-existent entity, a fly in the way.

I wasn't surprised or upset. I was adapting to a world where the person with the weapon had absolute authority. But Anastasia was stunned. She was upset by her idea of ​​being barred from accessing her own home by a strange man who was not from there. I finally found a Western journalist who engaged with me as an equal and treated my experience as if it were his own. That day laid the foundation for our friendship and creative collaboration.

Over the next few years, we worked together on a project entitled “5km from the front.'' The goal was to overcome this foreignness and show what everyday life during wartime was really like. Anastasia will take a photo and I will write a short story about it. These are images of people, places, things, and living conditions in the immediate vicinity of the front lines taken over the past five years.

Before Russia's full-scale invasion, the war in Ukraine received little attention from the world media scene. We self-funded many reporting trips to Donbas to bring more visibility to the suffering of people in eastern Ukraine. Eventually, our work began to be featured in media outlets such as Time Magazine, The New York Times, and NPR.

We continued this activity even after the full-scale invasion. As before, we strive to represent everyday civilian life in Donbass. Despite increased attention to Ukraine, it is an aspect of the war that remains overshadowed by events considered newsworthy.