The book includes personal testimonies of people who have lived through various experiences of occupation since 2014, interviews with experts, and photo documentation.
The third volume of the Living the War documentary project, which reveals the experience of living under Russian occupation, has been released in Ukraine. This was reported by the project’s communication team.
The book includes eight personal stories of people who have witnessed the occupation since 2014, including the story of journalist and first deputy chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people Nariman Dzhelal, who returned from Russian captivity in June 2024.
The book also contains witnesses’ accounts of the robbery of a private house by occupation forces, the siege of the city and escape from filtration camps, being held hostage together with almost 400 fellow villagers in a cramped school basement, and others.
The volume also includes a photo story by documentary filmmaker Emine Ziyatdinova about life in occupied Crimea, as well as Mykhailo Palinchak’s photo documentation from the liberated territories about the consequences of the invasion from January 2022 to the end of 2024. In addition, the Wall Evidence project presented in the book captured graffiti left by Russians on buildings and inside private homes, illustrating the views of the invaders.
In the book, Oleksandra Matviychuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Tymofiy Mylovanov, economist and president of the Kyiv School of Economics, and Anton Drobovych, memory expert, reflect on the Russian occupation and share their views.
“The communicative memory of the experience lives on for three generations, and then only what we have managed to manifest, comprehend, and record remains. Therefore, we must preserve personal stories, collect photo documentation, and keep a chronology of events. It is important to do this now. We need to spread it around the world in all possible ways to defend the truth and fight for justice,” said Oleksandra Matviychuk.
The publication was created and printed with the support of the Open Society Foundation and the International Renaissance Foundation.
The third volume of Living the War costs $44. You can learn more about it and pre-order it on the official website or buy it offline at the Zbirka bookstore.
As a reminder, the independent documentary project Living the War was founded in Kyiv after the start of the full-scale Russian invasion.
In January 2023, Ukraine released the first issue of the English-language magazine Living the War, which contained the stories of 12 Kyiv residents during the full-scale war from February to November 2022.
The stories include a 20-year-old animal rights activist who rescued animals, as well as the story of 80-year-old Doctor of Historical Sciences Natalia Yakovenko, who continued to translate Titus Livy into Ukrainian during the shelling. Also among the heroes of the publication is a businessman who lost a warehouse with goods worth 15 million euros as a result of Russian shelling.
In April 2024, the book Living the War: Children during the Russian war against Ukraine, which highlighted 8 stories of children’s lives broken by Russia’s war against Ukraine. As the authors explained, this publication is a study of the impact of war on children’s lives through personal stories, photos and drawings: about the tragedy of loss, deportation, and life under the conditions of survival of the occupation.
Source: Detector Media
