Visual Stories: The Silent Migration

The Medium Of War

2026

A Post-Documentary Manifesto by Cory Zimmerman

There is no bridge between the drywall of a gallery and the wooden bar of an Irish pub on the Ukrainian front line. There is no "fine-tuning" that can translate the sound of a mortar round into the language of a budget meeting or a latte order. Sanitizing the struggle is wrong. Sweetener is wrong. Take it straight. Black. Reality is the constant "hum" of non-existence. But it is the only reality from which art can be born. In war, the mask is no longer a luxury. To express “unexplained” is the only fucking fortune of war.

May.
Ukraine.

Morning.
I am only one of countless many who have sat in this Ukrainian hotel bar waiting on a fixer with a sore back and a persistent sense of uncertainty, grasping at ghosts of motivations floating about the back of a scattered, underslept mind. The young waitress is live wire. Name: Mira. Back in Mexico, it means “to see.” Here: Peace. To come of age in a war zone while trembling with life in direct periphery to death--where peace is seen between death like clockwork. And the siren blares again. And no one flinches.

Midday.
The "boom" of mortars is a sensory shock that stays in your bones, especially when contrasted with the sterile, futuristic drone of a fleet of Iranian Shaheds. In a moment's time, one can witness the entire lifecycle of this conflict: the high-tech sensors of a robotic arm and the "dumb" iron of a mortar shell smacking the earth. The "mind-machine" disconnect of seeing amputees control robotic limbs with their thoughts while struggling to control your own racing mind is a jarring irony. The cognitive dissonance is the struggle to make a machine move, with that to make the mind quiet and still. It’s no wonder I feel "weird" and "sub-par"—I am watching humans be rebuilt while I feel like I'm being worn down by the scent of coal and diesel. The bar of usability for the work I am creating, I can see the "connective tissue" of war. However, I worry I have missed the heart of the story, as my own heart never drops below 110 beats per minute between and beneath the sky-scorching roar of missiles flying overhead, a sound more akin to God tearing open the heavens than to the inevitable hell that reigns down upon this land and its people.

Evening.
I can hear children playing outside even though it's late and half past dark. Everything sounds so normal that one might almost forget the war. I hope the air-raid sirens stay silent for now, as I'm certain the kids have been instructed to flee inside the second they sound. But for this brief moment of normalcy, of sanity, these kids will never know how much the echo of their laughter and the sound of shoes chasing one another across the pavement four stories below ease the city streets. As for the tension in my chest, the only thump I hear is a basketball, and the roar of a distant motorcyclist taking in the cool spring breeze. Everything sounds so damn normal on this beautiful evening in Dnipro City. So normal that I fear my own words, and I shall cut them short. To forget is to lose sight of the truth — a truth so distant from an entire waking world, far beyond the western horizon. As for the eastern front, chaos twiddles its thumbs, waiting for the moment, the very moment it believes the war has gone forgotten just long enough.

Night.
There are explosions all around my hotel, but I want to share a poem by Volodymyr Vakulenko before I go to the shelter, as in the shelter, I will be unable to see or hear.

Storks bring burned letters,
Stork post over the ash and ruins...
Wait for me, sun, wait in my dreams—
Whom will you meet at the dawn:
Primroses disheveled somewhere on treasures,
Or maybe a shattered, split stone?
Chechnya, Dagestan, Crimea, Karabakh,
And Kyiv in the bosom of its wounds.
A soul red hot with pain in the sky
Folds a burnt letter…
The storks fly. The day lay unbound
In the expanse of tears. Shots were fired.

The poem found beneath a Cherry Tree after his abduction and assassination.

Midnight.
It is now five days past the end of the ceasefire.
The war rages on, intensified.
I lay awake on the bathroom floor.
Goodnight.

Tamara, Kherson Oblast

My name is Tamara. I was born in 1956 in the village of Tokaryvka, Kherson Oblast.

When our soldiers came, our village had already been under occupation for a year. That was two and a half years ago, and now there is no village left, just like all the buildings in the story. There is no place; it does not exist anymore. There were sisters, there were daughters, there were granddaughters, and so on. But as they say, it is good to be around, but I want to go home. Well, my soul hurts, but the heart is here now.

At the time, I was cooking for our soldiers — when they first came. I was cooking good food for them. But, as you can see, I was injured by a drone. Well, you know, it came, and my husband in the yard was killed. We had only one month left to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary when he died. Now, it will be two and a half years since he was killed. The drone hit the garden. And then artillery came, and fragments completely blew up our home. We had been together there for 50 years.

I have one daughter; she is still in Kherson. She is 25 years old and works as a nurse in a hospital. My son-in-law is in Odessa. My granddaughter left for Lviv because her child, my great-granddaughter, is only 5 years old. There, too, she is a nurse. The child is in kindergarten and will soon be entering first grade. Her apartment in Lviv is very expensive, of course, 14 thousand. My great-granddaughter is smart. She goes to dance classes and gymnastics.

I am 56 years old. Retired now. I worked in a greenhouse and once in a store. That's it. But I remember everything about life. I graduated with a trade. But, you know, I used to come from the Vinnytsia region. My husband and I got married. We used to rent a house when we first arrived in 1977 in Tokaryvka. Then, you know, we did everything. And now I have become, as they say, a homeless person. No house. I used to have a big garden. Five acres. We had a farm. We had everything. As they say, we put everything into the house. We bought a car. Then we bought furniture for the house. My husband brought home all new furniture from the furniture factory. Because I wanted all the furniture to be white. That's it. Only white. And I did it. We furnished the whole house. We insulated it. We rebuilt the whole thing. And now there is nothing.

But I have started a little garden here out front. I dug it up there and planted it myself. I sowed everything there. I planted it. I bought tomatoes. There are flowers. That makes it somehow easier for me. But there often comes a time when you can't calm down. So, I relax with the earth. In the ground, somewhere, I can sit down. Where the earth might tell something to the soul. When I feel sorry for the house. When I feel sorry that I, myself, am left alive. That he was killed. That I have all these wounds, here, here, here... and here. I have a wound here, and here, and here. I don't have health. I don't have a job. There is so much pressure. The pressure will last until the end.

My daughter in Kherson calls every day. She will visit soon for the second time. It's scary. She lives, if you know, near the Kherson-Dnipro market. And she walks to the hospital for work because there are no trolleys. You see, there are so few buses that people are fighting for them. So, she walks. She says she must work around the clock. That's how it is. Her name is Tatiana. And we are all waiting for victory. And that's it. We hope that one day we will be in our yard, in our house. No matter how hard it will be, I want my own house. I want my own house. But there is nothing left. I feel so sorry for everything. You know, I feel so very sorry. Because I made it all myself. Just the two of us and our children.

(Tamara stood proudly over her budding garden out front the module housing she has been sheltering in for two and a half years, inside the red militarized zone of Kherson Oblast, the look of pride on her face as she reared life from the bare earth creating a deep sense of dissonance with the shaky words she had just spoken, born of the deep pain in her heart.)

Ignatius, Kyiv

I was always like, “I'm fine,” but you're not fucking fine, you know, you’re not fucking fine after shit like that. What really did it for me was in January, when my friend was killed in front of me, and my other friend was badly wounded. And I’d had to choose which one of them to help, to treat. I had to triage them... it was shit. But it didn't hit me straight away; it hit me about two months later. And it really started affecting my life. I started spiraling pretty fast… my mental. 

It was January 1st. It was fucked up. Really fucked up, and it was really dumb the way she died. The whole mission was so stupid. It was completely avoidable. Their team made a series of really bad decisions on the ground. I was with them, but not in an official capacity, so to speak. And they just kept making mistake after mistake after mistake. It was just absurd what they were doing. And then she got killed. And my mate lost his arm. But thankfully he survived. It was in the Zaporizhzhia region, about 30 kilometers behind the front line, where we got hit, actually. We got hit by a drone. I'm lucky to be alive, to be honest. The fucking blast, the shrapnel was 45 meters, and I didn't get hit by anything… not a single little thing. What are the chances of that…? 

I went to Sweden to this mental rehabilitation program because I suddenly started feeling really tired all the time. I'd wake up at 10 or 11, but I wouldn’t get out of bed until around 12. I’d go for a walk, and by one o'clock I was done... physically, you know. My body was just done, and I was just falling asleep. I’d be walking down the street and start to fall asleep. And that went on for about two or three weeks, and it started to really affect me. So, I went to see a fucking psychiatrist. I got pills, ketamine therapy, etc. And it fucking sorted me out, to be honest. The effect was really fast. Within a month, I was back to a good functioning level.

You know, I want to do things in life. I wake up early in the morning. I wake up at 8 or 9 a.m. I get out of bed because I want to. I don't want to stay in bed all day, you know. I want to do things. I have plans for the future in terms of work and stuff. Because before that, I was just going to go back to the military. That was it. That was the only option. And then with the ketamine therapy, I realized I don't want to do this anymore. The thing I realized was that I don't want to be in that situation again -- where I must choose between two of my friends -- which to treat, which to help survive. I don't want that again. It was too stressful, you know. It was such shit. I just realized I don't want to put myself through that again.

I also realized I have the capacity to bring about positive change and to empower others. I will go to Sweden, where I'm going to talk to all the nations. Where I can try to help all people. I'm going to go to Germany for this big defense summit. I'm going to give a keynote speech for young people. And maybe it can be inspirational for them to know they can do something positive as well, you know. Because I didn't fucking start out running around on the frontline… And I realized that as long as I’m doing something, anything to help… because I think it's important to give back to people.

(Ignatius leans back against the bumper of his Toyota Land Cruiser, spray-painted with camouflage from his time in the military. He has since been discharged due to the disability he explains to me as we overlook the Dnieper River from a desolate overlook an hour south of Kyiv. It is quiet, except for the chirping birds that surround us in a horseshoe of trees. The environment is calm and feels like a world away from the drone attack on the capital city. During our drive south along the river, we’d stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. As we exited the station doors with cups of coffee, Ignatius immediately heard the approaching swarm. He checked his phone, and the radar app noted 60 of them. The Iranian-made Shaheeds targeted Kyiv directly. As the matte black triangles soon hummed just overhead, I could not help but feel vulnerable, surrounded by enormous tanks of gasoline and diesel. Despite being in the absolute middle of nowhere -- the station itself just a blip on a vast plain of farmland -- it was nonetheless impossible not to feel the digital, high-tech crosshairs skimming the clouds just overhead. Then we heard a roar. Ignatius said it sounded like a tin roof wobbling in tornado winds; to me, it sounded like God himself tearing open the sky as the missile crossed from horizon to horizon in a matter of moments. And as I looked around at the barren land, I could not help but see how utterly similar it was to where I’d grown up in Central Illinois, and I could vividly imagine what it would be like to be standing at a rural gas station anywhere between Peoria and Champaign, as a Russian missile flew overhead on its way to the heart of Chicago. It felt like a dream. It felt like a bad 80s movie. I was afraid. But simultaneously, it was all too surreal to be seen as real enough to be feared any more or less than the baseline terror I’d felt since arriving on the Kyiv Express into Ukraine. And I’d not yet known or fully grasped the secret horror behind Ignatius’s eyes, what wicked memories that terrible roar was stirring up in the back of his mind, those retentions that felt like yesterday, that despite all his healing, most likely always will remain, just like yesterday. Leaning back against his Toyota on the overlook, he tells me he does not ever want to ever have to choose between the lives of two friends again. “Because I didn't fucking start out running around on the frontline,” he says. “I started off with just...” but his words seem to trail, his attention fleeing for one brief moment of reprieve, as he says, “birds, birds, birds,” a swarm of Eurasian Blackbirds swooping down over our heads, sweeping down the slope to skim the placid river, before circling back around again to settle their nervous energy into the fortitude of evergreen trees which guard us.) 

Lyudmyla, Odesa Oblast

You know, it used to be calmer. It can be quiet for a week, and then the windows are shaking, the doors are shaking, and we are shaking when the bombing is close.  

My name is Lyudmyla. I am 68 years old. I am from Kiselevka; my mother brought me there 22 years ago. She is 90 years old now, born in 1935. Since the war began, my mother has gone completely blind. She walks badly; well, she practically does not walk at all. I still want her to walk and move, so I slowly take her to the places we need to go. But basically, she mostly lies and sits, and that's it. We left Kiselevka together. It was impossible to live there in the village; we were already being heavily bombed.

We did not leave at first. Not until we had to be rescued when Kiselevka was first under occupation. And thank God, the Russians did not kill us before our soldiers came and freed us just in time. We left on March 28, right as the Russians arrived. Our rescuers took everyone away in cars, and all the diesel fuel that had been there before the Russians completely destroyed our village. All the houses burned. My house, too, and probably no houses have survived completely.

Even before we left, our roof was broken. It was raining and snowing, and everything was leaking. The ceilings were falling, and everything was rotten. Everything was broken. Everything. Everything was ruined. And now, there is nothing left. As my mother says, “There is not even a leg left.” The conditions here at the shelter are wonderful for us. We each have our own rooms. We have everything, thank God. A shower and a toilet in our room. Everything is convenient for us. It's warm for my mother. She is my family; it’s just me and my mother.

During our time here, all of us strangers have become related. We all worry about each other, help each other, support each other, and check in on someone if they haven’t left their room in a while. There are now 100 of us here. But at first there were 300 or more. Every space was filled.  Before, two families lived in a single room, even four in some; there were so many of us, and there was not enough space. God grant her health and the whole family of the woman who has sheltered us here. She completely freed us.

When I arrived on August 3rd with my mother, I began feeding the animals. We feed the cats and dogs, and we sterilized all the cats when volunteers came to help us. Sometimes they come to bring food for the dogs. We don't let anyone starve.The animals calm me down very much. I have two cats in my room. I took one for the winter, and then another cat was born. It's good to have two; Musya and Buysa. I worry a lot. I worry about my health. I'm constantly on blood pressure pills. I worry about sugar, age, and nerves. I don't know. My hip hurts, and my knee hurts. My joints hurt. My hip, my back. And my mother, she is constantly on medicine. The day begins and ends with pills.

Thank God it's quiet for a moment, but the bombing can be very loud. It used to be quieter. But Odessa is being bombed hard now, and we hear it all from the South. But God willing, I’m doing fine, not worse. We take our pills, talk to each other, and distract one another back and forth. We have our lunch, then our dinner, and we stand around and talk. But I have decided that when it's all over, I want to go home. I want peace. Most importantly, I want peace and that they don't bomb us anymore.

(Moments later, the concussive blasts from nearby mortar shelling can be heard once again. There are no shelters to flee to. Only a fifteen-story complex, rising vulnerably high above the sandy earth. Once a vacation resort, the building now houses 100 internally displaced people and sits a kilometer from the Black Sea coastline, with beach access closed off with barbed wire and iron hedgehogs, strategically placed to slow the advance of Russian tanks.)

Elvira, Kharkiv Oblast

My name is Elvira. I am 60. I am from Donbas.

It's a disease. It's a disease of the brain. I am a disabled person.

I was in Donetsk. I have this inscription… Let me tell you.

In 2000. No, in 2019. In 1919. What am I saying... I am sorry. I got confused. I am sorry.

In 2014, our Ukrainian military sent me here for treatment. I lived in Kherson. No, in the village of Veletensky. There was a laboratory in the village of Veletensky. A neurology hospital. They put me in neurology. And I worked in the dormitory. And I felt very good.  

In the village, there was a boy. There was a boy. I lived there. And now I am here. We came by foot. We came to a town, then took a train, and then came here.

At first, I had a blockage of one eye, then I had an atrophy of the face; in short, it was bad. And now this atrophy has grown to the point that I cannot walk. But I can… I can walk.

This is the only way I know how to explain it.  

Here, the distance has grown.

This should be guidance to you all.

(Elvira appears to be 20+ years older than she claims. She suffers from dementia and is housed in an old school building repurposed into a hospital and evacuation hub for displaced persons from the frontline. The room she is in is designated for the elderly who can no longer care for themselves. The smell in the room is atrocious and beyond what words can describe. But it is one I have become familiar with, as it lingers throughout the country, mostly in repurposed centers like these, mobile humanitarian clinics operating out of schools, subways, and restaurants and bars of urban train stations, which have been forced to cease operations over the course of the war. Elvira struggles to grasp onto the here and now as the there and then invade her mind, sat propped up on the edge of her hospital bed as her blood pressure is checked by the quiet and patient nurse kneeling down at her side. The weight of witnessing such suffering is overbearing, and soon I forget all about the scent of human rot, even as it permeates my sinus cavities, where it shall remain for the remainder of time.)

Yevheniya & Olishenko, Kherson Oblast

I am Yevheniya. And I am Seventy-four.

You’re seventy-five!

No, I’m seventy-four... seventy-three.

Well, I’m fifty-one, and she’s fifty-two.

Okay then, let’s go with that.

I am Olishenko.

The two of us, we’ve worked together our whole lives. 

But we didn’t become close friends until we got here. We’re from the same village and would see each other here and there. She lived on one side, and I lived on the other. I’d see her when she would just be doing her rounds with the cows and calves—just fellow villagers, you know, more like acquaintances back then. But now we’ve become real friends because hard times forced us together.

Trouble came, and we fled those drones together.

Yeah, when the volunteers showed up and started taking people away...

And there were drones all around…

Two groups of volunteers. One group was loading us up, while the others were shooting down drones. We was split into two groups, and hers ran off, hiding in the weeds. And that’s where a drone fell on her, and her leg got hurt. They took her legs out. And her head isn’t okay either.

Was it Friday? I don’t even remember.

We haven’t been home since.

We haven’t seen any doctors or anything, either.

There’s no one left in our village now, and no, we haven’t been to the hospital in a long time.

I really needed to go to the hospital, definitely.

For sure.

I gave everything for nothing. I locked the house, did what I had to. That’s all. And that’s it. And now, I just want to go home. But when I started asking, well... they say there's nothing. No light, no water, nothing.

I say, God, maybe there's power by now.

But there's nothing.

There’s nothing good at all. Just drones, all the time.

Drones…

The first thing that happened, well, it was New Year’s Day at six in the morning. I’d just gotten up and was walking around the house. I was sitting right next to the window when these glass shards — they shattered all over half the house. And on Sunday, I hired some people who glued some kind of plastic sheets to cover the windows. But then some Russians, they came on motorcycles… they started beating me. They wanted me to leave and to take me with them, but I tried to hide behind the TV, while they just smashed up the whole house, tore everything apart.

Were they drinking?

Who knows. But they caught people’s houses on fire that day, and they burned for three days. Half the village’s houses burned down, and all the people fled — there was no one around to put out the fire. That’s what’s happening. That’s just how it is.

Yeah, all we took was just the clothes we grabbed.

I did get medicine to keep hope.

My place is still blocked up. But I can't get back there.

We want to go back and grab some stuff, but we can't get through because of the drones swarming all over the place.

Plus, those motorcycles zipping all around.

They’re rushing all around on motorcycles.

Yeah, and those guys... they stay close to death too.

It's such a scary thing.

But you can see it; they show it in their eyes.

(New friends, bickering and already finishing each other's sentences. Two friends bound by shared trauma as they wait outside a mobile clinic on the outskirts of Kherson, out of immediate danger yet still in the red zone, together trapped in the void between displacement, return, and an uncertain future.)

Unnamed Soldier, Chornobyl

During the first days of the war, the Russians occupied the plant for about a month. They would have gone further eventually, but… for some other reason, they stopped. They also didn't use the river to travel downstream in boats, which they could have done. 

When they pulled out, they left a lot of stuff behind. We found many record books and all their military first-aid kits. But it was clear why, and we were surprised. We discovered they had already taken all the narcotic drugs. There was no vodka, which is why they took the drugs. And, of course, they stole many things from here. Things that were contaminated. In Belarus, they set off radiation sensors. The Belarusians became interested and began checking these radioactive items. But the Russian military repressed those efforts, and the soldiers were able to take these things home. As a soldier, I have personally never taken anything as a trophy or whatever. I don’t understand. I don't like it. But there are different kinds of people. There are many trophy takers in the army. And there are marauders. When you take a cartridge, even a watch, it's a trophy… a knife, a gun, even a uniform. But when you take a chain or a ring, you are a marauder. 

I was in Vyzhgorod, a city just south of here, in the territorial defense, and we were very scared they were going to use the river. Because they had the Pripyat River from Chornobyl and the Dnipro from Belarus to go for Kyiv. But they never did. They easily could have. 40 years ago, after the disaster, they used the river to evacuate people from here on boats. But many of the people came back because they still had jobs here at the station. And they still had their apartments, which were given to them by the state. Many took their kids and families away, then came back here themselves. They technically didn't own anything, but no one kicked them out. And many stayed even though the living conditions here are not very good. But for an introvert, this place is great. And many stayed because the territory here is controlled. There's no one pressuring you to do anything. You're left alone. There are no young guys singing music till 2 in the morning. There's really no theft. Anyone here is just someone who came here for work, and that's it. They come here for work.

Of the original villagers, 35 people were still here, but now only 6 or 7 remain. The rest left; they found another place to live, or they died. Just today, a woman left. She said that her grandchildren invited her to stay with them in Kyiv. But those few still here either have nowhere to go or refuse to leave. One of the old ladies always tells me, “It's very hard for me to live here. Very hard,” but she says she is used to doing everything herself. She says it's better for her to have the toilet outside, to do everything by hand, and haul the water to the house by hand, and blah, blah, blah. She says, “I've lived all my life like this. So, I'd rather the hardship of this than the city.” But in the winter, the snow comes up to her waist, and the well is a long walk off... and that’s a long way to haul water in the snow. And this winter was very difficult. So, 35 people were here at the beginning of the winter, and now in the spring, there are only 6 or 7 left. And when they die, they die. That's it. That's the end of the story.

(The 60-something-year-old soldier lives in Chornobyl City with his wife, 40 years after they were evacuated from their apartment in Prypiat. We now stand outside the Prypiat Café, a mid-century building on the port dock with a scenic view of the river. Its interior, illuminated by a surviving floor-to-ceiling stained-glass window, is decayed, eroded, and gutted by time, like most of the abandoned buildings throughout the Chornobyl region. But the bar still stands, the same bar he says he had his first beer. At that time, Pripyat was one of the most modern cities in the world, a real pride of the Soviet Union. A crown jewel of achievement and a showcase city for what technological greatness would come. But for the past four decades, besides the Ukrainian soldiers temporarily housed here since the withdrawal of Russian troops at the beginning of the war, the densely radiated city, which once had a population of 49,400, is 0. He says that after he and his wife were evacuated back in 1986 -- though before they decided to return to his job at the lab and the apartment that had been given to them by the socialist state -- he shaved his radiation-soaked hair and advised his wife to do the same, to which she replied, “I would rather die.”)