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5K from the Frontline

Anastasia Taylor-Lind & Alisa Sopova

Ever since Ukraine was first invaded in 2014, millions of people in this country have been learning to inhabit war—to make it their living environment. In the process, they discovered that war looks very different on the inside than on the outside.

Most people think they know what war is. We’ve seen it thousands of times in movies and news coverage: tanks, soldiers, explosions, crying women, and pitiable refugees. These images are so familiar, they’ve become trite.

But guess what? Most of the time, war does not look like this. Most of the time, it seems too normal, too much like peace, to catch the eye of journalists and filmmakers. Often, only a tiny detail, like a tape in the shape of an X across a window or an unusual emptiness in the street, reveals that something is off.

Yet this seeming normality of the abnormal—this integration of horror and the mundane—is what tells the most poignant story of the human condition during war.
It also reminds us that war does not happen to some distant, constructed other—a group of people imagined as perpetually miserable or undignified. It happens to people just like us, who do all the everyday things people do—cook, clean, text their relatives, drink coffee, go for walks—even under extreme circumstances. Indeed, it can happen to anyone. Our goal is to show this side of war to make the experience of those who live through it more relatable.