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An exhibition by Dasha Chechushkova at Odesa’s fine arts museum. Photograph:
Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
View image in fullscreen
An exhibition by Dasha Chechushkova at Odesa’s fine arts museum. Photograph:
Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
OpinionUkraine



HOW DO UKRAINIANS SURVIVE THE TRAUMATIC GUILT OF WAR? FOR MANY, THE ANSWER IS
ART

Charlotte Higgins



Whether the issue is shattered relationships or the ugly deaths of those who are
fighting, these works give voice to often unspoken horrors

Mon 12 Aug 2024 07.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 12 Aug 2024 09.31 EDT
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38
38

War is made of blood and terror, but it is also made of emotion, not all of it
logical, easy, pretty or comfortable to express. In Ukraine, there is a
“maelstrom of guilt”, the film-maker Iryna Tsilyk told a book festival audience
in Lviv recently. “Each of us finds something to be guilty about … Those who
left the country feel guilty for those who have stayed. Those who have stayed
but live in the rear feel guilty for the military. The military have their own
guilt – they feel guilty for their brothers and sisters who have had different
levels of experience.”

There is survivor’s guilt when your fellow soldier was killed and you escaped
unscathed. There is guilt for not “doing enough” to help the war effort. There
is the guilt felt when your friend’s boyfriend is serving, but your own partner
is exempt from mobilisation. Russia’s war has snatched territories from the
Ukrainians, but has also insinuated itself into people’s relationships, where it
squats, monstrously, between friends and lovers and family members.



These facts of war are difficult to express and reify. Art offers a route. The
young Odesa-born artist Dasha Chechushkova has made etchings loosely based on
Goya’s series Los Caprichos: lonely, delicately rendered figures are accompanied
by texts that express guilt, alienation, anxiety, fear. “It is like a collection
of symptoms and depressions,” she tells me, “thoughts that most of the time we
can’t tell anyone: loneliness, strangeness and the distance between people,
because we all had so many different experiences now.”

In Kyiv, the artist Bohdan Bunchak, a tall, slim, moustachioed man in his 20s,
tells me about his own sense of guilt, and how he has expressed it through a
remarkable 10-minute film work. In February 2022, he was a novice, preparing for
life as a monk, in the far west of the country. War “grabbed me out of that
monastery”, he said. Over the next year, he returned to his former life as an
artist. And yet, “I had a big black hole in my conscience,” he says. He went to
the draft office just after Easter 2023. By June he was in battle, near Lyman in
Ukraine’s east. On his fourth assault, a month later, he barely escaped with his
life.




What happened was this. One evening, he and his small squad, of which he was the
leader, had just completed a mission in the Serebryansky forest. He got back to
their base – cradling a badly wounded soldier who was thrashing and convulsing
in pain all the way – at 11pm. He talked to family and friends on the phone
until about 3.30am, bringing down the adrenaline, anticipating a few days’ rest.
By the time he put his head down, still unwashed after the three-day task, the
night sky was beginning to brighten into dawn.

The walkie-talkie call at 6.30am came as a shock. The position they had been
defending had been lost. The order was to go straight back in and retake it.
Somehow, Bunchak gathered his men, glugged some energy drinks, ate some Snickers
bars. They were meant to make a joint assault with another team, but the others
came under fire and never arrived. He was sharing a trench with two fellow
soldiers and the corpse of another when he got word that help was on the way. He
crawled out of the trench to inform the rest of his men – when the explosion
came. A flash, smoke, a sound that knocked him off his feet – and no feeling in
his lower body.


Bohdan Bunchak’s You Ain’t Even Try

Bunchak was taken to hospital. Surgeons removed shrapnel from his spinal cord.
Regaining movement in his legs was a long and painful process. Now, a year on,
he can walk but still has little feeling in his lower limbs. Bunchak is now
attending theological college, wondering whether life will take him towards the
priesthood. He is also working in a programme to help reintegrate veterans into
civilian life – and making art about the horrifying experiences of fighting in
Russia’s bloody war.



Bunchak’s film You Ain’t Even Try – the title a reference to a Kendrick Lamar
lyric – is a terrifying, 10-minute insight into the haunting feelings of guilt
and responsibility that Bunchak feels after his No 2, on a earlier mission in
the same forest, was killed by explosives let loose from a Russian drone.

The work is not graphic; there is no hint of the horror and indignity of the
man’s death. Nothing could convey that, and no one should see it. Bunchak, when
we speak, seems caught between the sense that his work is “not harsh enough”,
does not go far enough in conveying the reality of the battlefield, and the
knowledge that “a snuff video is not art”. An artwork, he says after a moment,
can at least “trigger you to think about the harsh stuff, the horrible stuff,
the terrifying stuff – in a safe way”.

You Ain’t Even Try is put together from found materials – film footage, computer
graphics, animation. “You are a goddamn murderer,” repeats an AI-generated
child’s voice over shots of forest and fields and a track of church bells.
Watching it, you feel that you are disappearing into Bunchak’s psyche.

Bunchak blames himself for not having his first aid kit on him at the time of
the attack, when he and his fellow soldier were carrying an ammunition box
across an exposed area. But no first aid kit could have saved the man, whose
bones and lungs were exposed by the blast.

“I feel guilty because I was in charge and I had the responsibility,” he says.
It seems an awful, unfair burden to add to the sense of loss. (Of the 60-strong
company of which Bunchak was part, 11 died. Of the rest, only five or six
escaped without serious wounds.)

Towards the end of our conversation, my Ukrainian colleague Artem Mazhulin
pitches in with a question, perhaps the obvious question. “Do you think the
Russians feel guilt?” he asks Bunchak.

“I don’t think about the people in Russia,” replies Bunchak. “I think about all
these people all around us, and what they feel. Because what they feel is the
future of my country.”

 * Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer

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