War in Ukraine: ‘The Hardest Part is Leaving’

Tom Mutch documents the ups and downs of the last 10 months of triumph and horror, and how Ukrainian resourcefulness brought hope out of despair

“If you want to visit the torture chambers, please follow Svetlana” our press escort, a blonde Ukrainian woman who looked in her mid-30’s had told us, “But don’t be late, you need to be back at the busses by 1 pm so we can go to the mass graves.”

Her voice had the tone of a stern headmistress herding a group of junior high school students, as if she was guiding us on the world’s grisliest school field trip. WH Auden was wrong when he wrote in his poem September 1, 1939, of the ‘unmentionable odour of death’- when the stench of corpses envelopes you, it becomes all you can speak about.

Just outside Izium, hundreds of rotting bodies were being exhumed from their graves, filling the air with a dust that carried fine particles of earth mixed with human flesh. It was here in Izium, outside Kharkiv, that I witnessed the grisliest scenes I saw in Ukraine, as yet another unexpected Ukrainian triumph unearthed fields of horrors.

I’ve been asked many times about how you mentally and physically cope with the experience of war. Apart from a week and a half hiatus in Poland, I had been in Ukraine from January to June reporting non-stop. Like so many others I’ve spoken to, leaving is the worst part. When I had left for Romania at the beginning of June, I had a packed schedule of holiday’s, events and conferences. I turned up for almost none of them.

Along with many of my colleagues, I had sunk into a post-war funk that wasn’t quite a depression, but more a severe sense of disassociation with your surroundings. It was bizarre sitting in a bright street of Bucharest, with bars and cafes packed with young people dining and drinking, talking and laughing while there were scenes in the neighbouring country that looked like World War Two.

While support for Ukraine continued, the war was gradually slipping from the headlines. One friend told me, “I was glued to the news for the first few weeks, but then I had to stop watching — it just got too overwhelming.”

Indeed, one of the reasons for the declining interest was the situation on the battlefield. After the dramatic battle for Kyiv and the Russian push in the Donbas, the war had descended into an artillery slugfest over villages few people had heard of, and with neither side threatening to make major gains. Frustrated on the battlefield, the Kremlin turned instead to a terror campaign of missile strikes on civilian areas.

In the centre of Vinnytsia, a city a few hours drive west of Kyiv was one of the sites of Ukrainian stoicism and resistance in the face of the murderous crimes inflicted on them. It had managed to almost completely avoid the destruction visited on the rest of the country.

Then, at noon on a midsummer’s day in July, five missiles had smashed the centre of the city, killing 23 people, including five children, and wounding dozens of others. When I arrived at the city soon after the strike, the situation was already calm. The area was cord