On February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin ordered an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. In the several weeks that have followed, there has been heavy shelling and rocket attacks, with several cities under siege or destroyed, and countless lives lost. The Ukrainians have mounted a strong defense, slowing down Russian troops in some cities, but at the time of publishing, the country remains under intense bombardment.
I have been photographing conflicts since I was 27—more than 12 years now. The effects of photographing war comes in waves; there are peaks during the job, followed by low, low valleys. In stressful environments I can’t always fully absorb the effects and feelings that come with what I’m seeing, because I have to focus on the job.
I arrived in Kyiv a few days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24. The night before, people were out and about in the city’s center, eating at restaurants, shopping, strolling, enjoying their evening. It was a typical cold winter night in Kyiv. The next day a blanket of stillness fell over the city and you could hear a pin drop in the streets. Everyone was frightened and stayed inside, people came out only to walk their dogs, stores were closed—it wasn’t unlike the very beginning of COVID.
The bombardment from Russian forces varies from city to city. The situation in cities like Kharkiv and Mariupol is quite desperate—they are in ruins with hundreds dead and thousands of lives still at risk. In Kyiv, the situation is largely fluid and unpredictable. Over the past two weeks the bombings decreased, and people began to venture out of their houses. But then, just a few days ago, Kyiv experienced some of the heaviest bombing since the start of the invasion. I could hear it last night from my bedroom window. The shelling sounded closer, and it was constant. Right when you think one thing is going to happen, something else happens and it throws you for a loop.
But despite the ceaseless unpredictability and danger, what’s most remarkable about the situation is the Ukrainians’ unified defiance. Their resilience is awe-inspiring. Everyone is pitching in—volunteering, signing up to fight or to support the war effort.
The women I’ve met in Ukraine come from all walks of life. The words I’d use to describe them all are admirably brazen. Each one featured in this story was unassuming and yet bold in her actions—living in a subway station with two children, giving birth in a hospital under the threat of shelling, leaving her husband behind so that she could evacuate her family to safety, and signing up as a civilian in a military unit to help defend her country. These are ordinary women performing profound acts of bravery in the face of adversity. And they’re all doing it with dignity. Here are their stories.
Oksana Hnatiuk, Defense Force Volunteer
Oksana: On February 24, I was asleep in my bed when I heard the bombs. I woke up and went to my brother, to tell him that the war had started, that he must go with me, and we must pack our most useful things and go to a shelter. It was very unexpected for me. I knew that this was possible, but I just didn’t want to believe it.
I was feeling…not fear. It’s just surreal. This is like another world, because yesterday you were living your life and now you realize you must do something else, and you don’t know what that is. But from day one, I knew I couldn’t just sit at home waiting, and I decided to join the Territorial Defense, as a medic, because I knew I would be useful here.
I’m feeling that now I’m living. And if I die, I die, and it’s not a thing that I can change. So I am just living and doing my job. And this is right for me, and I’m feeling like I’m in the right place at the right time. It gives me some release because I can just accept this situation, and that is all that I can do. I’m not thinking about how I feel when I do this work. I just do it, and it’s right, and that’s all. I’m not some kind of hero.
When it started…the guns, they were creepy for me because guns are…like some kind of mark of death. But now it’s okay; it’s just guns. The same situation goes for bombs and sirens—now it’s just some sound for me.
Sometimes we have slower days when we are sorting medicine, or packing first aid kits. Maybe I’m going to the hospital, or maybe I’m going to patients. Whereas some days are madness, because we have rotation, we have injured people, and I’m just trying to work quickly, and I don’t sleep, I don’t eat. And this is also okay for me, because it’s war and I can sleep another day.
I think many of us are better than we were before the war, because war just shows different sides of people. Before the war, it was easy to be a coward, and we were all similar in some ways, but now we have changed. We just concentrate, and all of us want to do something, and we just do it. And I don’t want to say that this, the war, is good, but it is useful.
Here I’ve met many girls that joined our Territorial Defense, and we are friends now. They are going to the posts with guns and so on. They protect this place and other places in this region, alongside the men.
All our lives move faster now. So if I meet people that I like, I start to form very close connections with them. And I feel that these are my people. I can trust them. They can trust me. We’ve only known each other for three weeks, but I feel like we are closer than I am with some of my best friends.
To other women, I want to say that women are strong. We are stronger than most people think. We can do all different kinds of things. Actually, if we don’t believe in us, then nobody will believe in us. So we must believe, and we must keep doing what we want and what we think is right. We can do whatever we want.
I just want this to all be over. I don’t know how it will be, or what we will do afterward. It will be very difficult for us, for all of us. But I just want this war to stop. Maybe I can go on a trip with my friends and we can just sit. We’ll sit in the mountains. Drinking tea, speaking about everything, looking for stars. Maybe I’ll draw some pictures. This is what I think about.
Taria Blazhevych, Sheltering in a Kyiv Subway With Her Children
Taria: I’m not from Kyiv, but I’ve lived here for seven years. I’m from Donetsk. I’m not lucky in that sense. I left Donetsk because of the war and came here, and it became a very hard life, maybe for the first two years, because it’s hard when you lose all your connections. You lose your home, you lose your work, you lose your education for this time. I was only 19 when I left.
I met my partner when I came here to Kyiv. His friend introduced me to him. And we have two boys—Artem is five and a half, and Denys turned four on March 14. When you ask my children whether they understand what’s happening, they answer, “In our country there is war. Our father is a soldier and has gone to the military. He will save us, and we live in the metro.” Sometimes they see the news showing on the TV in the metro, and they see the bombings in Kharkiv, and they start crying. I think the kids understand.
My biggest challenge was waking up on the 24th of February. I had the biggest flashback of being in Donetsk. My mum woke me up by saying, “Get up! Get up! It’s war!” I opened my eyes, and I thought she was having a dream. I didn’t want to get up because it was 5 a.m. I told her, “We’re not in Donetsk, we’re not in Luhansk. We’re in Kyiv; it’s all normal here.” But then 10 minutes later she got me up again, and I said, “No, no, I want to sleep.” And then I hear…BOOM…maybe one hour after it hit, I took a bag with all the things we needed, I took the children. They were sleeping and were very surprised. It feels like a dream. I keep thinking, Wake me up when all of this is over.
When we stay here in the metro, we don’t hear any bombs. In fact, my eldest child, he had a stomachache the day the bomb hit the TV tower. We were walking up top above the metro, but he had to use the bathroom, so we ran down here to find the bathroom, and then the rocket hit the TV tower nearby. So my child’s stomachache saved us.
Before the rocket attack, those first days of the invasion, I was trying to take them up top to walk around outside because down here we have no fresh air. It was difficult because there were illnesses down there in the metro the first week. Maybe COVID, we don’t know. We were coughing, we had high temperatures, everyone was sick.
I feel a little depressed. I’ve had the biggest jump with my emotions. This is not the first time for me, and I know all the rules of war. I can understand every sound, what the guns are, what I need to do, stay, or sit down. I have experience with war, and I understand how it happens and how it ends. Right now I’m trying to keep my mind safe. I’m not speaking with my friends, I’m not keeping in touch with anyone, I’m not asking them, “How are you? Are you safe?” Because I’m assuming that all my friends are already dead. That way when it’s all finished, and if it’s not the case and we are able to meet again, I will be very happy. It’s a defense mechanism to protect myself. Of course, I hope that my colleagues and friends are surviving and are alive. But I know from my experience in Donetsk that if you call and check on people, and then all of a sudden they stop answering the phone, it’s because they are dead.
Maksim joined the Territorial Defense Forces the second day of the war. He has no military experience. When the first rockets came, we saw that it was planes attacking. They were moving over the neighbor’s house. I saw it first, and then he saw it. A plane flew over us, and he saw the white smoke trail. After that he took his bag and left the flat, and he didn’t say anything to me. He just took his bag and left. I thought, Okay, great, I will be alone now. I think he was scared to tell me that he was leaving, so he just left. He went to a military base, filled out the paperwork, and signed up for the Territorial Defense. He told our children: “Sons, we have a war, we have an advance on our country, and I have to go to save you. I will fight because I need you to live in a free country.”
At the start of the invasion, I thought about leaving the country, and I do have a place to go, but I have two problems. First it’s my mom. She has ongoing chemotherapy. She has cancer. Her hospital has been closed for two weeks, and she needs me. Secondly, I know how it feels when you move from your place to another place that’s not your country. When I first got to the metro, I thought, Okay, this will be a few days, and then it will finish. But a few days passed and the war hasn’t stopped. Now I’m a little afraid that this will last a few months. And I don’t want to leave. I’m tired of moving from place to place. My kids live here, they have a home, it’s the first time we have a home. I’m very happy to live in Kyiv.
I work for a company as a quality assurance engineer, testing websites and their functionality for my company. I like my job. I’m trying to learn programming in my free time. We had a normal, happy life. After the kids were finished with kindergarten, we’d go to the playrooms. They would be giggling, jumping, running for hours. Then we would go home to eat, talk about their day, about my day, and then we would go to sleep. It was a normal life. Now it’s different. Now it’s difficult.
These days I wake up at maybe 8 or 9 a.m. I go to the back of the station where there’s a toilet. It’s cold down here, so we take a thermos of hot water from the station workers. We have some tea. I give my phone to the children for them to play video games. During the day when the metro is working, it’s very dangerous, and I’m scared that my children will run off the platform and get killed by a train. I’m still trying to work, maybe one hour a day, to understand what my company is doing. It’s not really working; it’s just me trying to stay busy. I have my laptop, but it will only stay charged for one hour without electricity. Sometimes, once or twice a week, I go home to help my mum—it’s an hour walk away—or to bring her to her treatment. She doesn’t want to come to the shelter.
How am I feeling about this? It feels more difficult when you stay in a place like this and do nothing. It feels like the 36th of February now. I’m counting the days of war. I don’t count days on the calendar.
My finances are also ending. I bought some water, bought games for the children; I bought medicine for my mother. At this time I have less than 1,000 hryvnia [$30 USD] left in my bank account. I don’t know how I’m surviving. I am angry. I have no toilet, no clothes, no sink, no television, no nothing. I’m struggling. I’m trying to be tough like iron. I am trying to not feel anything, but sometimes I have anxiety, and I feel like I’m going to start screaming here. But it’s not helping anyone, so I find a place that is soundproof, like the bathroom, and I scream in there to let it out. I am losing myself. Wake me up when it’s September. Wake me up when this all ends.
Irena Zadorozhnyuk, New Mother
Irena: We were waiting for this baby for a very long time. I’m 42. That’s why the day of his birth was the happiest, probably the happiest day of my life.
We had wished for him for a long time. It was our dream to have a baby. At the very beginning we were so busy with our careers, and we thought that we wouldn’t have time to look after a child. But we always wanted one. Then during the last five years we decided to try, but we weren’t successful, and it was very painful for us. And after a while we accepted that probably not everyone can have a baby, and we just let the situation go. And then I became pregnant.
But I ask myself, Why did my child have to be born during a war?
I remember the first day of the war. We were all sleeping in the city, and we were woken by the sounds of explosions—we live four kilometers from the military airport, and the Russians were bombing it. We immediately understood what was going on, packed up our bags, and moved to the garage under our house.
We stayed there until I went to the maternity ward not long before my planned C-section on March 23.
For the birth itself, I was conscious and I felt everything, and as soon as I heard the voice of my baby, I immediately started crying. It was so emotional. Even now, when I talk about it, I cry.
My husband wasn’t with me the night before, because of the curfew in the city. The curfew lifted at 7 a.m., and he came straight over. He arrived thankfully in time to see our son born, but he was not allowed in the room with me—because of the war, the surgery was performed in a small room on the first floor that was safer.
Very soon after my son arrived, we had to move to the basement because of the air raid sirens. I felt safer there than in the upstairs room in the hospital.
But I am asking myself why this happens to me and my child, why he had to be born in war. Not just my child, but all the others born during this time too.
It is very scary because I don’t know what will happen, how long this war will go on, and how I can parent a child through this. Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow. It’s scary.
I want to live in an independent country. I want it for my child as well. I want the children, our children, and all children around the world to never hear the sound of explosions, and never feel or see what death is.
Anna Mezurnishvili, Fleeing With Her Children
Anna: At first, when the war started, on February 24, we couldn’t make up our minds whether to stay or leave. We were told we needed to get out of Krolevets, but we somehow hoped that everything would pass, that it would be over soon.
I worked at a pharmacy, and we needed to provide people with their medications. But my nerves couldn’t take it. We were staying in the basement of this multistory apartment building. It was cold, uncomfortable, terrifying. You constantly live in fear that at any moment there will be a missile, or they will start bombing. We were terrified for the children. Of course I was afraid of losing my children. God forbid. I’m afraid to even say that out loud.
Then we started having problems with food supplies. They started turning off the electricity. There was no electricity, no water, no living conditions. My husband has relatives in Georgia, so we decided to risk it and try to get out of this nightmare somehow. I decided that, Well, if I have the opportunity, if there is a way to protect them from this, then I had better, so as not to blame myself later for not doing it.
We left on March 17. The last day with my husband was very difficult. We departed Krolevets very early in the morning. We went in cars, with a convoy of vehicles. It was organized by members of the city council, and we didn’t know how safe the road to Kyiv was. We made our way to the railway station, where we waited and looked for options—how to get to the border, across the border, where we could get to, and where we couldn’t. I mean, everything. How would I manage, since I had never gone abroad myself? Especially with two children. As for our emotions, we tried…I mean, I wasn’t thinking, I love you, or, What will I do without you? No. All I was thinking about was getting the children to safety. There was nothing like that. How to get out, where to go, what to do.
And then, when you realize that these are the last moments before parting, and you don’t know how long it’s going to last, only then did my emotions come into it. At that point, yes, the tears came. But we had to hold back, because of the children.
I am proud of my husband for staying. This is how it should be. The men are the first to defend our country. If not them, then who? The women and children should be as safe as possible, and the men should defend. If not with a gun in their hands, there are plenty of other things to do.
But I’m crying now. Because…it’s hard, it’s painful. I’m not sure if I’ll see my husband alive again.
These interviews have been condensed, edited, and translated for clarity.
Erin Trieb is an award-winning photojournalist whose work on social issues and conflicts has been published in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, National Geographic, Newsweek, Glamour, and more.
To help families in Ukraine, donate to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
