I woke up in my Kyiv apartment in the early morning of February 24, 2022, to the sound of explosions, and I immediately understood that the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine had begun. The next day, we all moved as a family to our relatives’ house in the village of Vyhraiv in Cherkasy Oblast, 130 km from Kyiv. After three months of evacuation, we returned to the capital at the end of May 2022, and decided to stay there.

I started my visual diary on that first morning, as soon as I was able to recover from the initial shock. I record my own life and that of my family, as well as our wider surroundings. These are the materials I have used to create War Diary.

The series has no strict chronology: in the diptychs, images from the evacuation period can appear next to photos I took after returning home. The main idea is the internal connection between them, which becomes metaphorical.

War Diary is mostly not about external events, but about the inner state and human feelings in the midst of war. The images are documentary, but at the same time they acquire symbolic meaning.
War Diary is also about the value of life and striving to find crumbs of normality in absolutely abnormal circumstances. It is not only about trying to survive and protect loved ones, but also about keeping the essence of human beings.