every war zone was a hometown
I LIVED IN UKRAINE from 2009 to 2012 as a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in a town of about 5,000 located 40 minutes or so from the Russian border. Lots of people there still called their money “rubles” instead of “ghrivna,” which is what it’s been called since Ukrainian independence in 1991. It was common to hear older people reminisce about “when we had Lenin” and things were simple and life was good. The store where I bought toothpaste was owned and operated by Vladomir, the editor of the local Communist newspaper, who loved to talk about history.
My life revolved around the school, and so my camera was often trained on the young Ukrainians of Bilovodsk as they studied, played heavy metal in the park, diverted themselves, and planned to leave for college in the bigger cities.
Less than a year after I left, the country erupted into civil unrest and violence as democratic protests opened the door to Russia's forced annexation of Crimea and a period of prolonged conflict in the eastern Donbass region preceding Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
When the physical education teacher would take the male seniors on military training exercises each spring, I thought it was odd and paranoid for these young men to don gas masks and wooden AK-47s and charge imaginary enemies.
Now the scenes look like premonitions, like echoes of a future nobody wanted.
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Dasha, a student of the Bilovodsk Secondary School, prepares for a recital at the town's music school. She, like many other young people in Bilovodsk, attended the school from a young age learning to dance and sing, often for performance in holiday shows.
Bilovodsk, in Ukraine’s Donbas region, is nestled against distinctive chalk-white hills.
New graduates of the Bilovodsk Secondary School toast their graduation at the town park, one of the main social hot spots.
On graduation night, which combines elements of both graduation and the American prom, it's tradition to take the party to the hill overlooking the town as the sun rises, where students declare their wishes for the future.
In internet cafes all over town, kids spend hours playing games like STALKER (an adaption of “Roadside Picnic” and the Tarkovsky film) and Halo.
Easter shows the depth of religious devotion in Bilovodsk as crowds spend all night at Mass and then surround the church at daybreak to have their baskets blessed by a visiting priest.
A performer in a traveling dance troupe prepares on the bus before a show in the town square for the annual celebration of the town's founding.
Seniors dance at their graduation ceremony, a sort of combination of an American prom, graduation, and theater performance.
The small Derkul River that meanders through the town makes Bilovodsk a regional gem. Much of the surrounding area is dominated by the slag heaps and factories of the USSR's former industrial powerhouse. In summer, a picnic by the river or game of beach volleyball is the go-to recreation.
In a smaller village outside Bilovodsk, the more traditional ways of life still dominate. An older couple digs potatoes from a two-acre plot for dinner and plucks a watermelon from the vine for a snack. Here, the young people who stay tend to wallow in vodka. "Kyiv doesn't see us, they don't care," a local says.
The machismo of Ukraine dwarfed anything I ever saw in South America. Here, young men arm wrestle between shots of vodka during a Maslenitsa celebration.
A statue of Lenin is almost forgotten in a park that has become a forest in a small village outside of Bilovodsk. Many of these statues were toppled during the pro-democracy protests of 2013.
There are buses between Bilovodsk and Markivka, where many students from Bilovodsk attend university, but it's often easier, faster and cheaper to hitch a ride.
"We buy hair, 6,000 gr." These signs would pop up around town from time to time. Never a good indicator for the local economy.
A math teacher in the Bilovodsk Secondary School.
Anomoly, a local hard metal band composed mostly of recent high-school graduates, plays a free show in the park. Tucked between screaming and roaring, they played a beautifully mellow rendition of Pink Floyd's “Comfortably Numb.”
Yaroslav, a top-of-his-class student, rehearses his lines one last time backstage during his graduation ceremony.
Spring brings chicks and ducks to the local bazaar, a place of commerce and socializing every Sunday morning.
The specter of World War II, still part of living memory for many, looms large over Ukraine. The region suffered devastating losses and remembers the conflict solemnly on several holidays throughout the year.
In a town on the border between Ukraine and Russia, students from the Belovodsk Secondary School watch a recreation of a battle between Ukrainian Cossacks and Tartars. The Tartars continue to suffer as a minority in the country, and the Cossacks have recently made somewhat of a resurgence as turmoil has opened cracks for militarism and vigilante mindsets.
Yaroslav, an intelligent and gentle senior at the Bilovodsk Secondary school, dons a gas mask and a wooden AK-47 with his classmates to charge an imaginary enemy. Each spring, the physical education teacher took the male seniors through a series of these war games, a holdover from World War II and the Cold War, both of which stressed constant military vigilance.
I remember the Gulf War on TV when I was a kid. The night-vision explosions and the fighter jets and the graphics and chyrons, not understanding any of it, just having these images of this other part of the world seared into my brain. To me, for a long time, that’s the only kind of image I had of the Middle East: war, destruction, and ruin.
I wonder if young people in the US who had never thought about Ukraine before 2022 have a similar experience. Rockets, explosions, trenches, labyrinths of rubble, people displaced and distressed. “War zone.” We tend to package that up and it crystallizes as a category, a permanent state of things. And the people who live there— well, they live in a war zone. That’s just how it is.
But every war zone used to be a hometown.
The labyrinth of rubble is made of schools, hospitals, office buildings, parks, grocery stores, cafes and restaurants. Places where people hung out, went to school, got into fights, fell in love, dreamed of the future, raised families, went to work, worried about bills and health and weekend plans. Until the war.
I’ve been hesitant to say much about Ukraine, since my experience is so limited, and there are much better sources and voices for that. But a friend reminded me a little while ago that it’s important for people to see Ukraine as more than war. So these are some reminders from the town I lived in, now in occupied territory, from 2009-2012. Little scenes of normal life, when it was still normal.
Every war zone used to be normal.
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