Stas Kozliuk

On February 24, Stas woke up in Bakhmut.

That morning, he was about to return to Kyiv, but the day before he had had a call from a colleague who asked him to work as a fixer with some foreign journalists whose previous agreement had unexpectedly fallen through. Despite his hesitancy, Stas accepted the offer.

By that time, he had already begun to receive messages about ‘some agitation nearby’ from his military acquaintances. His colleagues were told something very similar by the border guards from Kharkiv. Stas realized that a full-scale invasion could be launched any minute; nevertheless, he was finishing his report about the heavy artillery shelling of the villages in the Donetsk region till 2 am. For one more hour he read the news, and then set his alarm clock for 4:50 am.

“It was quiet when I woke up,” Stas shares. “I thought that I still had a couple of hours to nap. But the shit went down that very second as I closed my eyes. It was really some fucking shit. The double-glazed windows vibrated from the blast, the alarms in everybody’s cars went off, and the people were running down the hotel corridors. I came down to the main door and saw the journalists throwing their suitcases in the trunks and driving away, while I was just standing and thinking what I should do.”

Stas gathered his lenses, took his camera, and called his driver. The latter was taking his wife away from Kostiantynivka, so he gave Stas just thirty minutes to get there from Bakhmut. It was impossible to do in such a short time.

Thus, Stas ended up in Bakhmut all alone and without a car. A foreign journalist he knew said that all wars started in the same way, so now they just had to wait for the breakfast. Stas explained to him that no one would be preparing breakfast in that hotel from then on.

At 6 am, they finally decided to leave for Dnipro. A foreign colleague had suggested going to Sloviansk: he did not want to believe that the Russian aircraft had hit there.But Stas didn’t know where the frontline was at that time, what kind of weaponry the Russians were using, how far they had actually advanced, and whether the line of defense near Horlivka had been broken. He remembered the forecasts and rumors saying that the Ukrainian army would probably hold on for a maximum of 72 hours, and then it would come down to guerrilla warfare.

“Finally, I made it to Dnipro,” Stas recalls. “My family stayed in Kyiv. My colleagues were sharing photographs of the helicopters above my city. Also, there was the news of the troops landing in Hostomel. I had no idea how I could help my relatives. This feeling of your own uselessness was so awful. But then, I realized that ’72 hours’ was bound to be wrong: Kyiv will endure, while the Russians are not going to have an easy ride here. The only thing I could do was to keep working.”

Photo by Max Levin

For three weeks Stas worked with TIME. After three more weeks of the pause, he started working as a fixer again. And he continued shooting for himself into the bargain.

It turned out to be difficult to get to the frontline. Foreign photographers are not very welcome there as they often ignore the requests not to shoot anything that could disclose the positions of the Ukrainian military. Still, Stas and his colleagues managed to reach the unit assigned to him by the time they were expecting a tank breakthrough. Apart from the increased amount of shelling, Stas says, everything was almost the same as in the previous eight years.

“You just sit in a trench with the soldiers who treat you with coffee, tea, or cigarettes. Meanwhile, something is constantly flying around, exploding, and thundering. The military are always very concerned about civilians at the frontline, regardless of the warning on our accreditation cards that the safety of our lives and health is not the responsibility of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”

Stas admits that journalists from abroad have always been astonished to see the washing machines, clothes dryers, women’s cosmetics, and other elements of everyday life which the Ukrainian military have at their positions. For his part, sees nothing surprising about maintaining one’s customary lifestyle at the frontline for as long as one possibly can, as the best way to stay sane.

Stas Kozliuk. Trenches of the Ukrainian military near Donetsk, April 26, 22

Once, living like that was possible along the whole frontline, but by now very few sections have retained that level of relative calm. The Russians have stopped pretending they are following the Minsk agreements, so they openly use heavy artillery. The deserted roads are no longer safe; the military positions can change; and now aerial bombardments have been added to the mix. All of that must be taken into consideration while planning the work.

“One more difference can be spotted in the cities,” says Stas. “They are dreadfully empty of human beings. You can come to Avdiivka and meet no one on the streets. There is just a demolished shopping mall in the center of the town, windowless apartment blocks, a few outlets open at the market, and that is all. Only a few people can be seen outside because all the rest are hiding in their basements. Bakhmut is deserted. The local inhabitants wait in lines for beer, which has been renamed ‘wheat drink’ because of the prohibition on the sale of alcohol.”

When asked why they don’t evacuate, the locals answer in different ways. As for Stas, the most senseless reply is, ‘there’s nobody waiting for us there’. People are not convinced by the argument that a missile could hit them. In the end, they linger till it’s too late.

“One more reply is, ‘it’s my home here’,” Stas ponders. “For example, in Severodonetsk. But all that has been left of the town is a big fat nothing. How can one live there at all? What if it falls? The Ukrainian military cannot keep up the defense forever. I know that the Russians succeeded in seizing Izium just due to their numerical superiority, by filling it up with dead bodies. They can use the same tactics anywhere. It’s not logical to sacrifice hundreds of Ukrainian servicemen just to hold a totally destroyed city.”

Severodonetsk, April 22, 22, a civilian car destroyed during the shelling of the city

After having worked as a fixer, Stas began to document life in the liberated Kyiv region. Together with his colleague, he had initially planned to shoot in Kyiv, but then they got an offer to go to Bucha even before the town had been opened up to journalists. Nevertheless, the military did not let them pass beyond Dmytrivka because the area had not yet been cleaned up after the Russians. So the local people advised them to go along the Zhytomyr highway, where many people had been killed near the filling station.

It was there where the journalists were the first to witness the burnt cars and dead bodies. Most likely, they belonged to local residents who had been killed when attempting to get out of the occupation zone, and then set on fire.

“That was the most terrible thing I had ever had to see,” Stas recalls. “My first thought was, ‘fucking shit!’, then, ‘I must photograph it’. There was no reason for me not to take those pictures. I knew that the Russians’ incomprehensible cruelty must be documented and shown to the outside world.”

Stas Kozliuk

After the pictures were published, Stas got numerous requests for help in identifying people among the deceased. But he could not be of any use because those dead bodies simply had no faces anymore. Still, his photographs could serve as evidence, since the prosecutor’s office had also asked him for more materials to share. This was when he learned that his work had some meaning. The police arrived at the scene of mass murder the very next day.

“It might sound awful but in such historical times for my country I could not have been a soldier, medic or volunteer,” says Stas. “I can only work as a journalist. My job is to document history so that it could be spread worldwide. As a journalist, I must come to people and help their stories to be heard.”

He does not care about the medium of documenting this history: text, photo, or video, for him, are nothing but simple tools which can be mastered at any time. There will be many stories yet to retell, from innumerable towns like Bucha, Borodianka or Hostomel. A story from which one can turn gray – hiding in the basement, being evacuated, tortures and executions – can be heard from any house in any village of the Kyiv region.

Stas gets angry and irritated when his foreign colleagues fail to take such an approach, as they consider many stories non-sensational, or too similar to those which have already been told.
“There was an incident in Bucha when an exhumation could not be started because of the two American journalists who wanted to film the process,” Stas recalls. “The rescuers said that the relatives of the deceased deserved some respect, but the photographers insisted on taking the pictures because they were famous. Of course, they were trying to get an exclusive, but no one is allowed to treat anybody like that.”

According to Stas’s observations, civilians trust Ukrainian journalists more, as do the military. Above all, they can talk without the need for translation. Moreover, the foreigners ask insensitive and horrible questions, such as ‘what do you feel?’ Even before the full-scale invasion, Stas had heard a story that some foreign journalists were disappointed that an old woman from a frontline territory had not cried for the coverage. So they asked her whether she was ready to be executed by Putin’s army.

“No matter what coverage you are trying to make, please don’t act like jerks. Of course, this is not the first war for you, since you have already been to Syria, Afghanistan, and southern Africa, but, guys, you still have to be humane and respect other people.”

Stas admits that this phase of the war, especially after his colleagues’ death, has frightened him. For a while, he could not acknowledge that and tried to avoid traveling, but once he got into the car, no other options remained.

“I am scared, to be honest,” Stas says. “I don’t want to die. But the fact is that there are no safe places left in Ukraine. The risk is higher near the frontline, for sure, but you always try to check the situation beforehand. Besides, you must go. It is your job. I am not that fearless compared to those colleagues of mine who spend all the time being shelled together with the military. I am not prepared for that. This is the reason why I deliberately refuse to go to places where something like this could happen.”

Still, he wants more Ukrainian journalists to cover the war, although the Ukrainian offices lack money for at least some protection. Meanwhile, the foreigners come for a few hours only and report an incomplete story – even though it should all be the other way around. A journalist must spend some time with his protagonists, to contemplate them and try to grasp of their situation so that the people could open up.

“We will have enough work for a whole lifetime,” Stas summarizes. “Our main goal is just to survive.”