MEN/UKRAINE

This project follows the fragmented journeys of three friends in Ukraine: Sasha, Ilya, and Danylo. Danylo and Ilya join drone units, while Sasha stays civilian, making drones for an exemption. MEN/UKRAINE explores masculinity in a country at war.

Since 2022, in Ukraine, men aged 18 to 60 have been subject to restrictions on leaving the country. In this war-torn country, faced with the Russian invasion, the presence of recruitment centers has become part of the daily life of all men. Identity checks on the street, summonses, and the possibility of an imminent departure to the front line are reshaping individual trajectories. 

The shift from civilian life to military life can occur without transition, leaving little room for the psychological processing of this change. Whether a student, worker, or artist, all men, including those who identify as such, may be confronted with a sudden redefinition of their role.

Through these portraits, MEN/UKRAINE questions the notions of masculinity, courage, and vulnerability. The men depicted navigate between social expectations: endurance or heroism, and their own fragility. The war reshapes relationships, transforms familial and friendly bonds, and introduces new forms of relating to each other, within all realms of life. 

The project wrestles with the knowledge that, at the heart of contemporary Europe, war remains a reality. Mandatory male conscription, which seems like a thing of the past to many outside of Ukraine, continues to exist here in the present. 

The series aims to consider the distance between the past life, still fresh, and the present reality where the male body is called upon, constrained, and deeply transformed. With discreet insistence, MEN/UKRAINE unfolds as a photographic investigation.

The project began in May 2022, in Kyiv, in the early months following the full-scale invasion, when conversations between young men, often my friends, silently but insistently began to shift towards conscription, obligation, and death.

Ukrainian forces are estimated to have suffered between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties between February 2022 and December 2025, with the total death toll on both sides (russia and Ukraine) potentially reaching 2 million by the spring of 2026.

How do these men understand themselves within the demands imposed by war? Drawing partly on the concept of taboo and the American writer Bell Hooks’ observation that “to remain loyal to patriarchy, we all learn to keep men’s secrets,” the work seeks to circumvent these silences.

My initial attempts at approaching the subject through interviews failed. It became clear that, in a war-defined climate, few men, particularly the younger ones, would admit fear, and even fewer would acknowledge avoidance. I then chose to focus solely on a visual approach, attempting to convey inner states through images alone, without recourse to text, thus deliberately leaving the project open and partially opaque.

The images, through their close framing, seek to reduce distance and establish intimate, sometimes uncomfortable proximity. The inner life resists any form of expression. This distance, this impossibility of fully accessing what is happening beneath the surface, becomes central to the project, as it is in the condition of men in Ukraine.

MEN/UKRAINE does not directly turn towards the spectacle of destruction, though such images exist. It stays with the men, in the landscapes they inhabit, allowing the war to surface indirectly, through recurring figures over the years: my friends Danylo, Ilya, and Sasha.