Kiwi photojournalist Tom Mutch among rubble in Bucha. Photo / Arnaud De Decker
Kiwi photojournalist Tom Mutch among rubble in Bucha. Photo / Arnaud De Decker
Friday marks a year since Russia invaded Ukraine. Kiwi photojournalist Tom Mutch has been on the ground since the beginning and tells of the devastation and heartbreak he’s seen.
February
The bars in Kyiv were still full when we left at 4am, and by 5am we were all at war.
For a split second, I wondered if the bangs that had woken me at the crack of dawn were just nightmares before a quick check of my phone confirmed that Russian tanks and troops were rolling across the borders of Ukraine. I’d heard missiles striking targets throughout the city, and we saw videos on Twitter of Russian helicopters carrying special forces flying towards strategic airfields near the capital. No one in Ukraine had believed this would happen until the very last minute, but before long, we were in the metro stations packed together with civilians sheltering from bombardment.
Journalists, aid workers and diplomats were told to evacuate the capital as soon as possible, as almost all analysts believed that it would be, at most, a week before the Ukrainian Army collapsed. From deep in a bunker 70 metres underground, I told New Zealand media that “it was a matter of time” before the Russians took the capital.
Overnight, Ukrainian Territorial Defence soldiers closed huge metal blast doors as we waited for the Russian push to descend on the city. We were expecting to climb out the following day to find Russian troops patrolling the streets. But when we emerged, they were empty.
The country, led by its formidably brave President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had rallied behind the flag and its Army and citizens had valiantly resisted, keeping the Russians outside the city.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy and guards in the central square of Kherson city.
Photo / Tom Mutch
It was early signs that Ukraine was much more resilient than anyone had imagined.
Early in the month, it was clear that something had gone very wrong with the Russian invasion. Rather than surround the capital in three days and force Ukraine to capitulate, the Russians had stalled on every one of their lines of advance. By this time, the front had stabilised and the trains continued to run, allowing me and my colleagues to travel closer to the frontlines and see first-hand the carnage of the war.
In the west, the heartland of Ukrainian nationalism, they had always hated the Russians. But in the east, such as in Kharkiv, the second-biggest city, most of the residents spoke Russian, had Russian families, and had voted for politicians who wanted closer ties with their former Soviet Republic. The war was destroying all of this. Down one street, we saw an elderly couple picking their belongings up from the wreckage of their house.
“Russian terrorists did this,” said Galina, a 63-year-old woman, “and my father is Russian.” It wasn’t just buildings and bodies being torn apart by Russian rockets. All cultural, historical and familial ties between Russia and Ukraine were being torn asunder under the cruelty of the Russian bombardment. In its place, a new proud and united Ukrainian identity was emerging, but at a terrible cost.
April
In early April, Ukraine shocked the world by pushing the Russians back from the gates of Kyiv. They had managed an ingenious defence that involved targeting Russian logistics and armoured vehicles with artillery and handheld anti-tank weapons supplied by the West. But the taste of victory soon turned sour as the world learned the Russians had left behind a trail of horrors in their wake.
Behind a church in the town of Bucha, I watched as bodies of civilians, some of them shot dead in cold blood, were winched out of a mass grave. One woman broke down in tears as she was brought to identify the body of a close relative. When the Ukrainians had liberated the small towns outside Kyiv, they had found the streets littered with corpses that showed signs of torture and execution. It was the same all around the region. In one town I walked through, Borodyanka, I couldn’t see a single undamaged building, so thoroughly had it been destroyed by fighting. Within days, the names of these towns became synonymous with the cruelty of the Russian invasion. It also hardened the Ukrainian resolve to achieve a full victory, rather than give up some land in exchange for peace.
Girls and tanks in central Kyiv, taken in September 2022.
Photo / Tom Mutch.
May
After Russians pulled back their forces from Kyiv, they changed their focus to trying to conquer the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. This area had been at war for the last eight years when Russian-backed separatists had attempted to break away from Ukraine following the Maidan Revolution and Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. Negotiations had produced a flimsy peace agreement, and neither side had implemented their promised de-escalation or peacebuilding measures.
The separatists had controlled small parts of the oblasts, including the major regional capital cities of Donetsk and Luhansk before the full-scale invasion. Yet it became clear that here at least, the Russians were starting to learn from their previous errors. By using their overwhelming advantage in artillery firepower, they were levelling cities to the ground, leaving entrenched Ukrainian troops nowhere to hide, before they would march in with their infantry.
Of one city, a local soldier told me, “They didn’t capture Popasna. They destroyed it and moved into the ruins.” I saw their destructive firepower first-hand. As we drove down the road towards Lysychansk and Severodonetsk, the last cities in the Luhansk region still in Ukrainian control, we saw a group of cars parked next to a military truck under the cover of a few trees. When we drove back down that road around two hours later, they were in flames, having taken a direct hit from Russian artillery that had been firing on the road.
“We missed this by about five minutes”, our driver, a Ukrainian Army soldier, told us.
Others weren’t so lucky - two of my friends, journalists from Hong Kong, were injured by an artillery shell on this same road. Another colleague, a young French reporter my age, was killed covering an evacuation here. The twin cities fell to the Russians shortly after.
Tatiana with her cat in Balakliya, Kharkiv oblast in September 2022.
Photo / Tom Mutch
June
I had been warned that leaving would be the hardest part, and in June I finally left Ukraine for a long break. I had vacations planned, parties and gatherings to attend, and conferences booked. In the end, I turned up for almost none of them. For most of the war, I had been running on adrenaline. I had become very used to the constant sounds of explosions and gunfire, or the whir of drones above my head.
But leaving, and sitting in a cobble-stoned old street in Romania, while young people were dancing and drinking all around me, astonished me. It was difficult to comprehend the normality of most of European life in 2022 while knowing that in the country next door, there were scenes that looked like they were out of World War II. I felt empty and emotionless, in a melancholy state that lasted for weeks.
The war had descended into a stalemate. The Russians had taken heavy casualties in their assaults on the Luhansk region and lacked the firepower to proceed. After a lot of heel-dragging, the same Western governments who expected Ukraine to fall apart quickly, finally realised the Russians could be beaten and started providing Ukraine with heavy weaponry.
The guns provided, especially heavy artillery pieces like the M777 Howitzer, and HIMARS, allowed the Ukrainians to start matching Russian firepower, if not in quantity, then definitely in quality.
In the meantime, no side was making progress on the battlefield. Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by taking revenge on the civilian population, attempting to bomb them into submission. Most of Western Ukraine, including the city of Vinnytsia, had mostly avoided the horrors of war. That is, until one noon in mid-July when a series of Russian missiles slammed into the town centre, killing 23 people.
A mother and son holding a missile in Kun'je, Kharkiv oblast in September 2022. Photo / Tom Mutch
They had hit at midday, in a crowded square full of civilians, and could scarcely have been better timed to produce as many casualties as possible.
Yet the Ukrainians were predictably stoic. By the time I arrived in the evening, there was no sign of panic or despair. I spent the evening and the next day taking photos of first responders and local civilians who were already putting windowpanes back into place or nailing the boards of their houses back together.
They did the job - Zelenskyy’s team shared them on his official Instagram account the following day.
August
“We need to get out of here right now,” Damien, a combat medic and former British Army soldier told me in the middle of an evacuation run to get civilians out of the frontline areas. We were in the town of Soledar, in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, which the Russians had been trying to capture for months.
Several men had ridden up to us on mopeds and snapped photos of us. As an experienced soldier, Damien knew what they were up to - spotting for the Russians. We hightailed it out of the area, and soon enough, artillery fire, in the form of thermite incendiary rockets that can burn through concrete, started smashing into the square we had just been in.
In some places in eastern Ukraine, despite the catastrophic attacks, civilians stayed behind. Some were elderly, who knew no life outside the cities, and were determined to stay in their homes at all costs. Others were part of the small minority who clung to the idea that the Russians were bringing a brighter future. In their twisted worldview, the rockets and bombs raining down on Ukraine were actually “liberation”.
I’ll never forget the terrible smell of the mass graves outside Izyum, a small city outside Kharkiv that was liberated by the Ukrainians in a lightning offensive in September 2022. They had exploited Western weaponry and their own superior tactics and intelligence to great effect, recapturing almost all of the Kharkiv oblast. Like in Bucha, a stunning Ukrainian offensive had uncovered a trail of repression and destruction that the Russians had left wherever they had taken control. Some of the bodies in the grave had been lying there untreated for months.
The smell stuck to our clothes and hair and seemed to get inside our nostrils. It took days before we felt normal again. In addition to the graves, there was a network of torture chambers that had been set up in the surrounding towns. But finally, the city of Kharkiv was achieving some level of peace. When I had previously visited, it had been with a fellow New Zealand film-maker who I had been a classmate of, and we had made documentaries about the people who were living for months at a time in metro stations under the city. Now that the Russians had been pulled out of artillery range, the streets were finally safe to walk. People could return to their homes, start rebuilding, and finally start living something of a normal life again.
A destroyed Russian tank in Mykolaiv oblast, August 2022. Photo / Tom Mutch
October
I finally got a peek into the “other side”. Frustrated by his continual battlefield losses, President Putin announced a partial mobilisation to provide Russia with more manpower. For many young Russians, this is the first time the war had put them in personal danger, and they started fleeing en masse. Hundreds of thousands crossed the border to Georgia, one of the few countries still accepting Russians, and I travelled out of Ukraine to the border to interview them. “He’s f***ing crazy, that guy,” one of them said, referring to Putin. “Of course not, I don’t want to die,” another said when I questioned whether he would ever want to fight in Ukraine. They looked terrified, pale and gaunt, as if they’d had the life sucked out of them.
I felt genuine pity for many of these people, most of whom were completely blameless. Yet it was hard to fault the Ukrainians who had no sympathy and blamed all Russians for the war. I remember a friend telling me an anecdote of her cousin, who had waited three days in the cold to cross the Georgian border. “It was like hell,” he had told her. I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant - but I had seen hell and hell was Mariupol, Lysychansk, and Soledar, cities turned into ashes, and the mass graves in Bucha and Izyum. I couldn’t shake the feeling that many of the Russians who had fled didn’t understand the depths of misery in Ukraine, and secretly considered themselves the real victims.
Children playing in Izyum, September 2022.
Photo / Tom Mutch
I’ll never forget walking into the central square of Kherson city a few days after the liberation. The Russians had taken only one provincial capital in all of Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion, which they had annexed to become part of “Russia forever”. Now, due to a daring Ukrainian counter-offensive, they were forced to give it right back.
Seeing cheering crowds singing the Ukrainian national anthem through loudspeakers, wrapped in flags, crying as they handed soldiers flowers, watching them tear down Russian propaganda posters. It was a rare moment of joy in a year full of sorrow, and it felt like being there while history was being made — I imagine this is what it was like when the Allies liberated Paris in World War II. But as we left the town, a Russian artillery shell hit just a few hundred metres from the bus we were in — a reminder that the war was still very deadly and that the violence was not going away any time soon. Outside the city, we saw constant devastation as small towns and villages had been annihilated in the fighting.
January
January 13 was my birthday, but I wasn’t celebrating. Instead, I spent the day in a hostel in Bali, and rather than relaxing, I was writing about the death of my colleague. Andrew Bagshaw, a New Zealander volunteer who I had met and profiled for the Herald recently, was killed in Soledar, the same city I’d narrowly avoided an artillery strike in. His colleague, a Brit called Chris Perry, was almost my age, and I thought instantly of how easily that could have been me. I felt deeply troubled and conflicted - on the one hand, he’d undoubtedly saved many lives and driven dozens of people to safety.
Kiwi aid worker Andrew Bagshaw died in Ukraine. Photo / Sebastian Polarchski
On the other, he and his colleagues had no military background, local language skills or medical qualifications. Why were such people there - and more importantly, why had the larger aid organisations shirked their responsibilities and passed the most dangerous jobs off to people who were effectively freelancers? But so many of the evacuation runs were not done by professional aid organisations, which mostly stayed in the comfort of big cities far from the frontlines. Instead, they were done by ragtag groups with unclear backgrounds.
Try as I might escape the war, as I arrive back in Kyiv for the first anniversary of it, I know it will be a part of me for the rest of my life.
