How do Ukrainians survive the traumatic guilt of war? For many, art is the answer | Charlotte Higgins

Bar is made of blood and terror, but also of emotions, not all of which are logical, simple, beautiful or pleasant to express. There is a “whirlpool of guilt” in Ukraine, filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk recently told an audience at a book festival in Lviv. “Each of us finds something to feel guilty about… Those who left the country feel guilty for those who stayed. Those who stayed but live in the hinterland feel guilty for the military. The military has its own guilt – it feels guilty for its brothers and sisters who had different experiences.”

There is survivor’s guilt when a comrade is killed and you escape unharmed. There is guilt when you have not done “enough” to support the war effort. There is guilt when your girlfriend’s boyfriend is in the military but your partner is exempt from mobilization. Russia’s war has taken territory from Ukrainians, but it has also crept into people’s relationships, creeping monstrously between friends, lovers and family members.

These facts of war are difficult to express and objectify. Art offers a way. The young artist Dasha Chechushkova, from Odessa, has made etchings loosely based on Goya’s Los Caprichos series: lonely, finely drawn figures are accompanied by text expressing guilt, alienation, anxiety and fear. “It’s like a collection of symptoms and depressions,” she tells me, “thoughts that most of the time we can’t tell anyone: loneliness, strangeness and the distance between people because we’ve all had so many different experiences now.”

In Kyiv, the artist Bohdan Bunchak, a tall, slim man in his twenties with a mustache, tells me about his own feelings of guilt and how he expresses them in a remarkable ten-minute film. In February 2022, he was a novice monk preparing for life as a monk in the far west of the country. The war “tore me from that monastery,” he said. Over the next year, he returned to his former life as an artist. And yet “I had a big black hole in my conscience,” he says. Shortly after Easter 2023, he went to the draft board. In June, he was in combat near Lyman in eastern Ukraine. In his fourth attack, a month later, he narrowly escaped with his life.

Here’s what happened: One evening, he and his small squad, of which he was the leader, had just finished a mission in the Serebryansky forest. He returned to their base at 11 p.m., carrying a badly wounded soldier who thrashed and twitched in pain the whole time. He talked to family and friends on the phone until about 3:30 a.m., letting his adrenaline subside and looking forward to a few days of rest. When he lowered his head again, still unwashed after the three-day mission, the night sky began to lighten and usher in the dawn.

The radio call at 6:30 a.m. was a shock. The position they had been defending was lost. The order was to go back immediately and retake it. Somehow Bunchak managed to round up his men, drink some energy drinks and eat some Snickers. They were supposed to launch a joint attack with another team, but the others came under fire and never arrived. He was sharing a trench with two comrades and the body of another when he got the message that help was on the way. He crawled out of the trench to inform the rest of his men – when the explosion came. A flash, smoke, a sound that knocked him over – and no feeling in his lower body.

Bunchak was taken to hospital. Surgeons removed shrapnel from his spinal cord. It was a long and painful process to restore mobility to his legs. Now, a year later, he can walk again, but still has little feeling in his lower limbs. Bunchak is now attending a theological college and wondering if life will lead him to the priesthood. He also works in a program to reintegrate veterans into civilian life – and creates artwork about the horrific experiences of fighting in Russia’s bloody war.

Bunchak’s film “You Ain’t Even Try” – the title is a reference to a Kendrick Lamar song lyric – offers a chilling ten-minute look into the tormenting guilt and responsibility Bunchak feels after his No. 2 is killed by a Russian drone bomb during an earlier mission in the same forest.

The work is not graphic; there is no hint of the horror and humiliation of the man’s death. Nothing could convey that, and no one should see it. When we speak to Bunchak, he seems torn between feeling that his work is “not hard enough,” not going far enough to convey the reality of the battlefield, and knowing that “a snuff video is not art.” A work of art, he says after a moment, can at least “make you think about the hard things, the horrible things, the scary things – in a safe way.”

You Ain’t Even Try is composed of found material – film footage, computer graphics, animation. “You’re a fucking murderer,” repeats an AI-generated child’s voice over shots of forest and fields and the sound of church bells. Watching it feels like you’re delving into Bunchak’s psyche.

Bunchak blames himself for not having his first aid kit with him at the time of the attack, when he and his comrade were carrying an ammunition box across exposed terrain. But no first aid kit could have saved the man whose bones and lungs were exposed by the blast.

“I feel guilty because I was in command and had the responsibility,” he says. It seems a terrible, unfair burden, added to the sense of loss. (Of the 60-man company Bunchak was part of, 11 died. Of the rest, only five or six escaped without serious injuries.)

Towards the end of our conversation, my Ukrainian colleague Artem Mazhulin asks a question that is perhaps the most obvious. “Do you think the Russians feel guilt?” he asks Bunchak.

“I’m not thinking about the people of Russia,” Bunchak replies. “I’m thinking about all the people around us and what they feel. Because what they feel is the future of my country.”