Julia Kochetova is unlike most of the people who cover Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the Guardian. The photographer lives in Kyiv; she is Ukrainian. It is her country that is being invaded, her friends who are being killed.
The war that began in 2014 and brutally escalated on 24 February in 2022 has infused every part of her existence. It is fundamental to her life choices, her relationships, her friendships, her career (when she was younger she had planned to go to art school in Germany, but photojournalism beckoned). She is at home on the frontline, and could give you battlefield first aid if you needed it. She is also a vegetarian who makes an exception for meat-based borsch; reads poetry when we’re on the road together; and can wash and brush out her waist-length hair in unusual locations and at surprising speed. Her driving style lies somewhere on the spectrum between chaotic and shrewd, and she can recommend you a good place for a manicure in Kyiv. She is 32 years old. She has organised more funerals than anyone should have to do in a lifetime.
Born and raised in the central Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, the daughter of an economist and a lecturer in German, Kochetova is at home in Kyiv this morning, between assignments, having woken up without electricity, the result of a winter of relentless Russian attacks on power infrastructure that has left ordinary people freezing in their homes.
We first met on 16 October 2022, when I was in Kyiv writing about artists’ responses to Russia’s fullscale invasion. She had just come back from the frontline in the Donetsk region. She was photographing ballet dancers – beautifully capturing their fleetness and strength. This was her first assignment with the Guardian. Since then, her work has become integral to our coverage of the war. That day in 2022, I remarked that the job at Kyiv’s national opera house must feel pretty tame compared to her usual habitat in the trenches and at medical points. She did not disagree.
The following morning, though, things looked different. Kyiv was attacked for the first time with Iranian-made Shahed drones. The wasp-like buzzing of these horrific weapons has become a dreadful commonplace; at the time, it was a terrifying, disorienting novelty. That day, she woke to the sound of explosions, pulled on her bulletproof vest, which felt a weird thing to do in her own city streets, and went outside. It was her neighbourhood that was being hit. “You could hear small arms – cops trying to shoot down the drones. And then this weird sound of the Shaheds that we hadn’t heard before.”
She ran into an underground car park where people were sheltering, and photographed what she saw: a frightened-looking woman clutching the leg of a man in fatigues, who was standing over her protectively. For her, the image – about to appear in an exhibition of her work in Amsterdam – is about love. The pair were strangers thrown together by circumstances. Nevertheless the man, it seems to Kochetova, was impelled to comfort and protect the woman out of love: out of a feeling, perhaps, that “someone else, somewhere else, was protecting his family”. Two neighbours just visible in the background are hugging each other. In the moment of taking this photograph, Kochetova says, she felt her country was indomitable. “You stay here, you keep fighting,” she says. “You protect someone out of love, you hug your neighbour who survived.”
Kochetova is often asked about her “project” – her ongoing body of work dating from 2022, titled War Is Personal. This, which forms the basis of the Amsterdam show, won her a World Press Photo award in 2024. When the question comes, she tells me, “I always interrupt. I say, ‘This isn’t a project – this is my life.’ I try to keep a bit of distance from the well-known battle of foreign journalists versus local journalists, because I do believe that you can have the same level of empathy, because it’s all about humans meeting humans in terrible times. But in my case, and in the case of Ukrainian journalists, you have the same scars as those you photograph: you match scars with scars.”
There’s a particular photograph that to me encapsulates her relationship with her work. She took it at the funeral of a woman named Nadiia Halych, aged 24, and her two-year-old daughter Anhelina. They were among the two dozen people killed by a Russian missile attack on a Kyiv apartment building last August. “It is an image I’d really like to forget,” she says. “There are so many that I’d like to forget.” The mourners were gathered in the yard of the block where the mother and child had lived. As is often the case at Ukrainian funerals, the casket of the child was opened. “It was such a strange moment,” she says. “You are trying to breathe, but you can’t. And it stays with you, it stays with you.”
She goes on: “I was trying to be as gentle as possible.” There was no question of rushing up to take a closeup into the coffin. And yet, “I was thinking, ‘How can I tell this story visually?’ And I just noticed this kid looking into the child’s coffin. I still believe this girl was braver than I was, because she made the decision to be that close.”
The photograph is taken from a distance, through the heads of mourners, over the top of the coffin, which is blessedly out of focus. In the centre is the little girl, facing us head on, and staring intently at the tinier body. Kochetova thought of her own girlhood, protected from funerals and the reality of death by her parents; and what a contrast that was with this war, where death is everywhere: “a shared pain, which just stays with you”. A war in which children bury children.
In the exhibition, there is a formally posed portrait of a young woman gazing steadily into the camera – identifiably a combat medic from her fatigues and the bundle of scissors and bandages strapped to her body. This is Iryna Tsybukh, a famous figure in Ukraine. After Kochetova first photographed her in 2022, the two became close. But then Tsybukh was killed at the frontline in the Kharkiv region, a few days before her 26th birthday – leaving Kochetova and another friend instructions for her funeral.
It was then that Kochetova truly experienced what it was like to be snatching the last moments of farewell to a loved one while, on the other side of the coffin, ranks of photographers were massed at a funeral attended by hundreds of mourners. Mostly, she says, as a photographer, “I try to stay as far away as possible, to skip the funeral altogether, or to come without a camera. A camera can give you the illusion that you have distance – that you have a shield between you and reality. But if you have lived through something, if you have this memory, if you had this experience, it affects what kind of human you are, and it affects what kind of photographer you are.”
Unlike colleagues of a previous generation, Kochetova does not labour under the illusion that a photograph might change history, or stop a war. Instead, in everything she does, she is trying to bring those who see her work towards an intimacy with individuals, towards a human connection that goes straight to the heart and has little to do with maps of the frontline, statistics on losses, or armchair military analysis. Photography is only part of her toolkit, too. The immersive exhibition in Amsterdam will also contain her own poems, drawings by an artist friend, Oleksandr Komiakhov, who is serving in the armed forces, as well as sounds and objects – all intended “to bring you closer to what war is”.
And if she doesn’t think her work has the power to change events, she does believe in the power of documentation – of telling the truth. She also believes in doing it with the speed that a stills camera can achieve, as opposed to inserting the time and distance that documentary film requires. Russia, she points out, is adept at rewriting history. It is happening now, for example, in the city of Mariupol, which was besieged, bombed and has been occupied by Russia since 2022. False narratives are being created about those events – but, as she says, the first three deadly weeks of the siege were documented by a single Ukrainian film crew led by her friend, director Mstyslav Chernov, whose work became the basis of an Oscar-winning documentary, 20 Days in Mariupol. The facts it ascertained cannot now be erased.
Kochetova remembers the terrible sight of mass graves after the Russian withdrawal from the Kyiv region in spring 2022. “I was facing the question, ‘How could you tell their stories?’ There is nothing left after their deaths. Their stories are over.” But then she thought, “OK, I will tell the story of survivors, of those who can still bear witness – and this way you create an antidote to the possible great Russian story of how they are trying to ‘liberate’ Ukraine.”
When Kochetova and I work together, she is mostly photographing behind the lines – capturing poetry readings, plays, musicians, artists in their studios. But it is her frontline photography that may be the most arresting. There is an image in the exhibition of a soldier more or less in relief against a backdrop of smoke, fragments of barbed wire in the foreground. It has a timeless feel, partly because she shot it on film. It could be from another war, another place and time.
On closer inspection, though, it dawns on you that the figure seems very young, his uniform pristine. This was from a shoot Kochetova undertook with the Guardian’s defence and security editor Dan Sabbagh in 2025. Their story was about a scheme to incentivise those younger than the conscription age of 25 to join the armed forces. The photo was taken at a training course in the Kharkiv region. “You ask yourself,” she says of the men, the youngest of whom were just 18, “why should they be serving in the army – and not me? They all had super-young faces. They had pink Hello Kitty patches on their helmets. The joke was that they could take off the patches if they passed the course, but until then, they were kittens.”
Kochetova is a wonderful photographer of men: she captures soldiers on the frontline as they toil and strain, filthy and exhausted, vulnerable and fragile but not lacking in dignity. In one picture, taken in Chasiv Yar, a much fought-over strategic town near Bakhmut in the east, we see the head of a man who is, it seems, lying on a bed or stretcher. A hand wearing a latex glove is about to position an oxygen mask over his mouth. One tiny detail infuses the image with emotional power: the tear that glistens in the corner of the soldier’s eye.
Another, taken at a different medical stabilisation point, where the injured are given basic treatment before being hospitalised, shows the head and shoulders of a man. He is leaning slightly towards the camera and his face is in sharp focus, while his naked chest, a little blood-stained, is slightly blurred. Round his neck is a cross. There is a blue cannula feeding oxygen into his nostrils, and the plain background is also blue. I can’t shake the notion that this picture resembles a religious painting – an Ecce Homo, perhaps, the cannula standing in for Christ’s crown of thorns.
Except: the wounded man’s eyes are bruised and swollen shut. “I just remember this moment,” says Kochetova, “being so close to a person who cannot see you. And you face a question, ‘How can I capture this with dignity? How can I capture the incredible work that medics do?’ I am always amazed at these stabilisation points. It’s the place where you fight with death, where you hold someone’s hand and steal them back from death’s embrace.”
The photograph reminds me of 17th-century Spanish paintings that relate to the senses: Zurbarán’s St Francis in Meditation, for example, in which the praying saint’s eyes are invisible, shaded by his monk’s habit, and we seem to be invited to consider the vision of his inner, rather than outer world. “For me,” says Kochetova, “the portrait is about what kind of dreams this man is seeing right now. What does he see when his eyes are closed?”
Even when Kochetova’s photographs are empty of human presence, people are still there implicitly. She has one photograph in the show of exhumed graves in a forest on the edge of Izium – a town in the Kharkiv region that was occupied by Russia in 2022 and then liberated in the autumn of that year. When the tide of the invaders retreated, they left evidence of their dealings behind – torture chambers in basements, civilian killings, and these graves, more than 400 of them, dug out of the sandy soil among the pine woods. For those who attended the exhumations, the experience was unforgettable in its sadness and horror.
Kochetova has chosen not to show us the volunteers digging up the graves in their protective suits, but the calm after the work’s completion, the sunlight slanting down through the trees. “Izium and this moment has made me hate any forest since then, because you’re hearing this silence, you have this smell of human remains mixed with pine trees, and it stays with you. It was as if I was trying to fight with the idea that there are no people in this frame. I was still trying to show their presence, even with these empty graves. I was trying to show the scale of how many stories are untold.”
There is a paradox between the presence of death and the beauty of the light, the apparent calm of the landscape. “On the level of framing and technical settings, that is what creates the image,” she says. “But on a human level, you want to ask, ‘Why is it so calm? Why is there so much light in such a dark moment?’ I’d love it to be as dark as possible. But you have to accept the reality that the day after someone is killed, the sun is going to rise again.”
We look at another image, of a soldier in a trench that has flowered with a profusion of blue and yellow blooms, the colours of the Ukrainian flag. The photo, taken in the Donetsk region in 2023, represents to Kochetova the possibility of finding, amid the violence and grief of war, “these specific moments of beauty, of joy, of silence”. Everyone loves Ukraine’s big sunsets over the steppe, “no matter if they are commanding a platoon, or they are local kids. We are all under the same sunset and under the same stars. One of the main topics I’m trying to explore through photography and poetry is, ‘Could you bloom on the ashes? Could you build something after your city has been ruined? Could you plant a garden after your previous garden was burnt out?’”
Kochetova is not a war photographer: she is a photographer documenting the events in her country. She has not travelled to other conflicts, to other wars. Before the full-scale invasion, she remembers talking to friends about their future plans, about whether they might stay in the country, or travel overseas. “And one of my friends said, ‘You’re not a tree – you could move.’ And I said, ‘No, you actually are a tree. You have roots. Your roots describe who you are. And that is crucial for me. It’s crucial what identity I have and what kind of choices I make in the most important moment my country is going through.”
In an earlier iteration of War Is Personal, Kochetova showed a self-portrait. She is sitting on the floor in a hotel room in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine. It was 25 February 2022, a time of great fear, and she was entirely alone – her friend had decided to go back to Kyiv to help defend the city from approaching Russian tanks. Her boots are in front of her, her flak jacket, camera and a medical kit beside her. She’s wearing a hoodie and ridiculous brightly coloured socks. But this is far from a moment of bravado. It is an image of vulnerability. She looks terrified.
The photograph will not be in the Amsterdam show. Instead, it forms the basis of a drawing by her artist friend Oleksandr Komiakhov. Her terror and vulnerability are still there, but he has changed certain details. Her flak jacket and camera are now positioned so that they almost resemble the body and head of another person. A reminder that her camera is a means of connection – and that she is not alone.
Julia Kochetova: War Is Personal is at Foam, Amsterdam, from 6 March to 25 May
#girl #braver #Julia #Kochetovas #astonishing #photographs #war #Ukraine #Photography
