Guardian opinion cartoonist Ella Baron has documented the human cost of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine through sketches and interviews with war-affected individuals. Visiting rehabilitation centres and mental health clinics run by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Cherkasy and Vinnytsia, she met soldiers and displaced families whose lives have been forever changed by the conflict.
Baron described how her political cartoons of leaders like Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin gave way to intimate portraits of ordinary people. In hospitals, she sketched the precise ways war is mapped on bodies and listened to stories behind scars. “Trauma and hope are intangible things of memory and imagination,” she said, adding that an amputated limb or lost home leaves only memories beyond a camera’s reach.
One soldier, Dima, recounted being hit by a drone projectile. The shrapnel now sits on his bedside table. He said the blast temporarily paralysed him from the spine down, and he lay still pretending to be dead while enemy drones circled overhead. “I could hear them watching so I lay very still and pretended to be dead. I heard them leave. Then I was screaming from the pain. I thought I would bleed to death,” he told Baron.
Dima continues to suffer nightmares of being taken back to the trenches. He watches bodycam footage of the war to understand the “subtleties” of his own memories. He spoke of his mentor, Matrovski, who was shot in the neck and bled to death after telling Dima to stay in the trench. Dima’s wife visits him in hospital, and he has promised to shave his long beard when victory comes.
Another interviewee, Olena, described her longing for home in Luhansk. “Home is where the sky has no missiles, just clouds and the sun and birds and planes – but not military, safe, with passengers,” she said. “After 2022, I had to again learn how to look at the sky without fear.”
