Guest post: A moment captured in Ukraine — the ‘before and after’

By Dmytro Chaika

Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.

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(Photo by Dmytro Chaika)

It was 6:55 a.m., Feb. 24. This was the moment when the fact that the war had just begun was sinking in.

A little more than two hours earlier, I had awakened to the distant sound of an explosion. At first, I didn’t realize what it was. Yehor, my boyfriend, was still asleep. I lay in my bed for a moment, then heard another sound outside. I remember glancing over at my watch — it was 4:48 a.m. I stood up and as I opened the window, a jet flew just over our house.

For weeks, the tension had been coming to a climax. All the media outlets had been saying the war was about to start. We’d all been talking about it, whether it would or not. Even as all the facts pointed to it, even as we prepared, we wanted to believe it wouldn’t. We just held onto this glimmer of hope. But as I felt that jet flying over (you feel it with your whole body), I knew this couldn’t be anything other than this. Right away, you recognize that this is the “before and after” point in your life.

I caught myself thinking that I was going through this moment, “rehearsing” these words, as I turned to my boyfriend to wake him up.

“Yehor,” I said. “The war has begun.”

Right after that, my body started shaking so hard — as if I were standing at the North Pole, naked — the fear was very physical and immense. We woke all our flat mates, called our parents, started packing up to go to a shelter and tried to figure out what was going on. At first, there was nothing in the media. Later, channel after channel started posting very short messages: “Explosions in Kyiv,” “Explosions in Odessa,” explosions in Dnipro, Kharkiv, Ivano-Frankivsk — basically, explosions all over Ukraine. But reading about this, for some reason, didn't feel like an answer to “what is going on?” so we kept flicking between dozens of channels and websites, in the hope that somewhere an “answer” would slip through.

This is the moment in the photo.

These first hours of the war have been carved into my memory like stone. Now I can see that at that moment, we already knew the answer to our question. It was just taking time to sink in.

Since this photo was made, I’ve lost my ego (or at least most of it). I see now that I’m not more important than anybody else. I’ve lost my anxiety, learning to live without acting like I can 100 percent control whatever is happening — I can’t and never could. I always thought that living with no expectations leads to apathy — but I feel more free and more energized than before. The photos I’ve made since then seem like the best I’ve ever done.

Overall, I came to realize that the world around us is defined by whatever is happening inside our own heads. Life challenges, even war — whatever — are just triggers for what’s already there. And what can scare you about the war is discovering that deep down inside, you know you’re full of shit: You, like everyone, are not entirely selfless, even if that’s what you tell yourself. You have some darkness, and you know that there is no way you’ll be able to keep it all inside under these circumstances. You’re afraid you’ll act against your core beliefs, and that everyone you care about will know about it, including you. You can easily imagine yourself being the Good Samaritan in peacetime — but will you actually share food and medicine from your stash with your less prepared neighbor if you’re uncertain whether you’ll have enough for yourself?

So you let all your inner crap go — you don’t have the resources to sustain it anymore.

Almost nine months later, I feel I still have a lot to get rid of. But it’s okay, this is a journey. And it has not been just about losing things — I’ve found something too. Mainly, I’ve realized that I already have everything I’ve been searching for. And what I should be absolutely ecstatic about in each and every moment of my life is that I get to understand all of this while having everyone I love alive and relatively safe. Nothing terrible has happened to me or them, while so many others have paid with their lives. I have a chance to enjoy the results of knowing all of this — for what seems like a pretty damn low price.

Dmytro Chaika is a fixer, documentary photographer and filmmaker, based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, he has worked with foreign journalists covering the aftermath of the Russian occupation of Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka and neighboring settlements in the Kyiv region and beyond.

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