Among the Ashes, a Teddy Bear: Journalism as Voyeurism and Responsibility
As Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were supposed to speak on the phone, I doubted they would think of the boy in Vasylkiv, whose toys I walked among after a Russian drone killed his mother.
We’d left late in the day for Vasylkiv, a suburb of the capital about 30km southwest of it, but still well within the sprawling Kyiv Oblast. Waking up to news of drone strikes is normal, even for those of us who don’t live here. But this one was different: The largest on Ukraine since the start of the war. By the time we did leave, about 1pm, I was anxious we’d waited so long. It was already clear the casualty rate was slightly off - four injured - and a day after at least nine were killed on a bus in Sumy, the context of things isn’t always easy to read within the newscycle and desensitisation.
The drive there was short; the transition from a busy highway to the traffic-jammed single lane abrupt. We noticed the fire engines first as we arrived. Then the smell. I wouldn’t have told you before I went there that I knew what a burning house smelled like, but as I breathed the scent in, it was unmistakeable. It occurred to me that’s not something many would recognise, and that I’d now been to enough of those scenes to recognise it.
As we got out of the car, I put on my flak jacket. I didn’t initially notice the full scale of what had happened. We hopped down the verge and followed some of those that had come to remove the valuables of one of the houses that had been hit. Their car was rendered unusable, though not fully destroyed, and my gaze, which had been fixed on the ground, moved upward to the people calmly, slowly and deliberately moving past us in both directions. They were neither hurried, nor dawdling; impelled by something, but moving on autopilot. Some sat smoking, staring into the middle distance.
As we moved up the driveway of the house, we started to see the contents of it placed out, carefully, on the side of the drive, most covered in dust. In a wheelbarrow was a red plastic fire engine, not unlike the ones we had driven past. On the right, behind a small chicken wire fence, was a beautiful well-cared for garden, full of green and pink, blossoming in the spring and clearly trimmed recently. It was a violent contrast to what it now stood outside - a house barely in one piece and erupting with volunteers carrying bits of door and window, occasionally bricks and glass.
A neighbour stood talking to a local news crew and we lingered, awkwardly, waiting to see who we in turn could interview, and where we could film. There is always this sense of arriving in a scene like that that leaves you feeling like a voyeur - intruding on someone’s despair - hoping to turn it into a currency that can be consumed by audiences detached from this reality, and the suffering of those it commoditises. I loitered at the doorway to the kitchen. Even with half the house missing, and its owner not clear to me, it still felt rude to enter without permission. A few feet away through the door stood a woman, whose eye I tried to catch. When she finally saw me, I gestured, asking if it was ok to come in. She shrugged - in a way that invited me in, but did nothing to set me at ease.
I walked in, and took in the floor, the tables and the fragments of life still perched on windowsills and in broken cupboards. I wondered when the owner had bought those items, and whether it would have occurred to them at the time that they’d become stencils in the picture of horror her home now was. My cameraman came in with me, and we entered the backroom - what must have been a bedroom, though it was impossible to tell, save the pink pyjamas on the floor. Deflated foil balloons that may have hours earlier been helium-filled hearts sat underneath dust and brick, and above them a gaping jaw in the building, twisted into the mess we then stood among. This was not even the house the drone had hit.
We went back outside to interview the homeowner, Valentyna. She told us she and her husband had been warned of the drones attacking in the early hours that morning - and that although they wouldn’t normally go to their shelter in the basement, on this occasion they did. The drone attacks had been getting worse. The neighbours, whose house we had just seen through the hole, did not go into theirs.
Four had been living there, Valentyna said. The two grandparents were in hospital, along with their four-year-old grandson, still probably in intensive care. Their 27-year-old daughter - the boy’s mother - had apparently protected her son with her body as the drone hit. It cost her her life.
I asked Valentyna who she blamed. “Russia, of course. Putin. He wants to go down in history, and he doesn’t care if he’s the villain.” I asked her whether she thought she would sleep tonight, after this - insensitively, I knew, but as a necessary way to draw out the emotion of confronting her situation. She said she didn’t know where she could sleep, let alone if she would. She left us.
We wandered around the back, to the house where the mother died. I looked at it again, now fully aware of what had happened. Time doesn’t stop for me in those situations, but sometimes I do feel transported. I thought about the little boy, and how scared he must have been. I thought about him no longer having a mother. I thought about my own kids, and what that would be like for them. I looked at the bits of their life scattered among us, now meaningless to almost everyone but the TV crews. The voyeurs. I thought about my aslive.
I moved to the side, waiting for another crew to do theirs first. A dog barked a few feet away. I saw on the ground, beneath a tree, a teddy bear, lying face down, riddled with pieces of its home. It looked like it had deliberately buried its face in the grass, unable to face what had happened. I wondered if the little boy had looked like that when they found him. I thought about how important the bear might have been to him. I thought about filming it, but something kept me from doing so. It felt dignified, and sacred. I thought about my aslive, and tried to put the bear out of my head. As we finished, we heard an explosion - controlled, likely a deliberate drone detonation. Nobody flinched, but we moved to leave.
As we drove away, I couldn’t stop thinking about the bear.
There is a sense of privilege in those places so recently visited by death and destruction - and it’s true everywhere, not just in Ukraine. We are let into that suffering - to show what it is, and what it does to people’s lives. We wait for those standing in the smouldering ashes of that violence to allow us to descend with cameras. We do it because we have to. We have to show people the truth of what this is - what is really happening in Vasylkiv, Bilopillia and everywhere else visited by this conflict. We have a responsibility to do so. But we are responsible too for those we film and talk to - as well as those that we don’t.
Before we left the area, we stopped at a medical storage facility next to a runway nearby. Two drones had hit there, but only one had detonated. There must have been 30 firemen there still working on it. I could still feel the heat, even as the rain started falling and the broken glass and tattered insulation lay soggy beneath our feet from the hoses. Most of the medical equipment there had been moved, so the impact was limited - but the building was nonetheless destroyed. The drone that hadn’t exploded had still caused a huge fire at the back of the building. The firemen dragged out pieces of the unexploded Shahed for us, and we examined the tiny 50cc engine, and what remained of its wooden propeller. The tail was still partly intact - enough to make out the Russian markings on it. Geran-2 - a Russian manufactured Shahed. The emergency crews saw a long, serial-style number they told us they thought was coordinates. It was actually a manufacturing catalogue number. Just two of those drones, one of which didn’t explode, had wrought destruction that needed all these people to contain it. One had destroyed the lives of two families. Nearly a hundred had come to Vasylkiv in the early hours of that morning. I thought about the sort of destruction they could have done to their actual targets. I thought about the 273 that had been launched at the country overnight. I thought about the tens of thousands of Shaheds, missiles and bombs that have been used on Ukrainian civilians in this war.
I thought about how many were still to come.
In my aslive, I reminded viewers this was all just two days on from supposed peace talks in Istanbul. Others had framed those as progress. I felt indignation rising in me again, as we headed back towards Kyiv, imagining anyone would think this war might be close to over. It’s not for the people in Vasylkiv. It’s not for Ukraine. It’s not for me, either.
