Reporters, the long-form reportage journal revealed by The Ukrainians Media, devotes its fifteenth challenge to ‘magnificence’, beneath a masthead that guarantees to seek for which means between info. Editor-in-chief Marichka Paplauskaite opens with {a photograph} from a front-line ‘stabilisation level’ or subject hospital: six pairs of palms holding a barely aware physique, faces lit purple so the darkness hides them from the enemy, bent so shut they type a circle, in a composition that recollects a Rembrandt portray.
Great thing about type can serve evil as readily pretty much as good, Paplauskaite writes; what survives is ‘the nice magnificence within the alternative to stay human’.
The flag of hope
Natalia Nahorna, a journalist who has adopted prisoner-of-war exchanges for years, opens with a dream: buses between tall pines, pale close-cropped males in pale jail garments, mendacity face up on emerald grass, weeping. She wakes on a pillow soaked by means of.
For the previous eighteen months the exchanges have been held in Chernihiv area. Journalists be taught of the date the day earlier than. There’s a petrol station on the way in which the place everybody stops for espresso and the identical sentences flow into – ‘ours’ have definitely been introduced, maybe the blindfolds are off by now. Households watch for a notification within the state Diia app. Nahorna images a girl and needs her probably the most beneficial factor potential on such a day: that she receives the message.
Ten minutes later she hears her scream. ‘Happiness may be deafening’ – usually relations faint from the surplus of it. Lots of the launched really feel responsible and have waited months to apologise to the individuals who waited for them. One lady embraces one other household’s daughters, following a neighborhood superstition: maintain the relations of the launched ‘in order that the change passes on’.
Nahorna has her personal relic: a wand in a field and a ticket from platform 9 and three-quarters, carried to fifteen exchanges, the corners worn delicate. They belong to her buddy Sasha Ivanov, a marine of the thirty sixth Brigade, who final known as from the Illich plant in Mariupol at 4 within the morning, the wounded groaning behind him, when it was already clear that captivity lay forward. 4 years have handed.
Ivanov is aware of the Harry Potter books by coronary heart, so his buddies write to inform him which of the movie actors have died: Hagrid, Professor McGonagall, Dumbledore. When somebody dies in that world, the remaining elevate their wands: ‘We all know that if he reads our letters, he raises his wand in his thoughts.’ Beside the wand lies a pair of socks studying ‘Dobby is free’, saved for the second he steps off a bus and will get the joke. Kinfolk on the roadside carry blessed crosses, bracelets woven by kids, and a white and black flag – white for the hope of return, black for many who vanished or had been tortured to demise. ‘Final June I promised that when he returns I’ll tie the flag of hope round his shoulders.’
On 15 Might 2026, after this challenge went to press, Oleksandr Ivanov got here house in a prisoner change, after 1,494 days in Russian captivity. In a colony in Mordovia, the place prisoners stood in silence from reveille to lights out, whereas propaganda radio performed with out pause, he retold all seven Harry Potter books to his cellmates from reminiscence, whispering so the guards wouldn’t hear, and breaking off on the most attention-grabbing second in order that they’d ask him to go on. ‘We felt like prisoners of Azkaban, with dementors behind the door. And the way is it greatest to battle dementors? With a patronus. When an individual in captivity begins to imagine that he’s anticipated at house, that creates a patronus so robust that no dementor can get by means of it.’
The yard reverse the church
Artur Dron talks his method into the home of Father Oleksii Filiuk, who lives close to a buddy he’s visiting. He was among the many first Ukrainian monks to see what on-line preaching might do; a couple of and a half million folks observe him on Fb alone. He greets them with ‘Thanks be to God and to the defender of Ukraine that we awakened completely happy.’ He settles questions of superstition – sure, you might sleep in a mattress the place a grandmother as soon as died – and movies the abnormal enterprise of village life: constructing work, a son’s birthday, his rabbits. He speaks brazenly about his circle of relatives historical past: his spouse left him for one more man, and he was in a position to transfer on, although he admits with a smile, ‘I like her anyway!’
Dwelling alone, along with his yard filling up with silence, he determined to undertake a boy from a kids’s house. Then one other, and one other; he grew to become a father to 5, the eldest married with a toddler of his personal. A nineteen-year-old known as Mykhailo, who grew up in an orphanage and now research at school, wrote to him in December 2025 after following him on-line: ‘Might I come to you for Christmas Eve?’ Mykhailo communicates solely in signal language or in writing. He grew to become Filiuk’s sixth youngster.
The ladies of this household
‘There may be religion in God, and there may be religion in your kin’, runs the road above Olena Livitska’s reportage. The latter generally makes an individual start what they by no means deliberate. Valentyna Zusko noticed the marriage costume of her grandmother, Nastia Hnatkova, and determined to make a precise duplicate. In Volyn Polissia, ladies bequeath their marriage ceremony garments, usually known as vinchalni, to be buried in – dressed for the grave as they had been dressed on the day they married. Loss of life isn’t an finish: ‘I have to be stunning, as a result of they’ll meet me there.’ When Nastechka died, the kids dressed her within the girlhood shirt embroidered with broad flowers and set a candle in a jar of grain. The ladies of that household quietly did what needed to be finished.
Nastechka got here from Lobna, a village absorbed by Novovolynsk, a Soviet mining city constructed at velocity for the individuals who dug its pits. Zusko carried the shirt, apron, headband and skirt to Kyiv to be digitised with the Vidkryta Skrynia undertaking, which paperwork historic gown, at a time when she was afraid of not discovering a shelter through the shelling. Researching Liubeshiv embroidery, she discovered how a lot has gone: one Etsy store that opened round 2022 has offered eight hundred objects from the district. These are sellers, not collectors, she insists. Magnificence leaves for the opposite world much less usually in coffins than by means of indifference – rushnyky used to wipe footwear, shirt sleeves on garbage ideas, the garments and items from a dowry chest burned in the midst of the yard when their proprietor dies.
In September 2025, on Nastia’s anniversary, Zusko entered a contest for probably the most actual reconstruction of an genuine costume, stitching to the millimetre in double-sided satin sew and reproducing even her grandmother’s errors. The costume gained. ‘I imagine in my kin. I imagine that in a tough time for our nation the souls of our lifeless awaken and act in order that Ukraine could stay.’
A spot in between
For 9 months the photographer Liza Bukreieva documented the medics of the Third Military Corps in stabilisation factors, the place there are minutes to stabilise the wounded earlier than evacuating them or returning them to obligation. It’s a place ‘in between’: the battlefield and the rear hospitals, gentle and darkness, life and demise, writes Daria Svystukha. Nothing prepares an individual for a subject hospital; generally tears come as a bodily response to the disinfectant. Bukreieva photographed as if each wounded man had been somebody she knew.
After assaults the wounded arrive in dozens, most frequently in the midst of the night time, and the medics work shifts of 4 days at the least. They take a very long time to get well from those that arrive in a terminal state; as soon as they stood outdoors for ten minutes and no one dared to maneuver first. The rooms maintain different element: lilac on a desk in spring, garlands in winter, kids’s drawings on the partitions all 12 months.
‘To really feel pleasure through the warfare we’ve to make an excellent effort – and troopers twice as a lot. What is required is the power to make pleasure out of nothing.’ Sweets for an evacuation driver, an vitality drink for a medic: pleasure made by hand, which can’t be had totally free. Nearer to the road the world narrows – from political information, petrol costs and blackouts all the way down to brotherhood and assist.
Assessment by Kseniya Kharchenko
