The War Diaries: Ukraine’s Writers Chronicle a Nation Under Siege
- Matthew Parish
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
When the Russian full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Ukraine’s streets filled with the sound of sirens, gunfire, and the grinding machinery of war. But amidst the thunder of artillery, a quieter battle unfolded on the pages of notebooks, blogs, and torn sheets of paper: the struggle to bear witness. Ukraine’s writers—poets, novelists, journalists, and schoolteachers alike—picked up their pens and began to chronicle not just the destruction of their cities, but the endurance of their people.
These war diaries have become one of the most vital, human, and heartbreaking archives of the conflict: a collective literature of survival, mourning and defiance. They show how language can be both shield and sword in a nation fighting to define its future.
The Urgency of Testimony
On the first night of the invasion, Ukrainian poet and translator Ostap Slyvynsky began keeping a diary, later titled The War Did Not Start Today. In his brief, minimalist entries—often no longer than a paragraph—he captures the numbness of those first days:
“February 25. The sky is full of warplanes. The city is full of silence.”
His words, like many others’, were shared not through official media but on social platforms, where readers around the world followed his reflections in real time. These writers were not merely recording events—they were building psychological bridges between the fractured hours of war.
Many Ukrainian authors have taken a similar approach: diaristic fragments, updated almost daily, often posted online before being translated or archived. This immediacy is a defining feature of Ukraine’s wartime literary output—raw, unfiltered and urgent.
Poetry in the Ruins
Poetry, in particular, has flourished amid the wreckage. Writers like Lyuba Yakimchuk, Iya Kiva, and Halyna Kruk have used verse to express what prose often cannot: the surreal juxtapositions of war, the sharp intimacy of grief and the endurance of hope.
Yakimchuk, who fled Donbas in 2014 and again in 2022, wrote in her poem Prayer:
“Protect my home,
My mother, my son,
My word.”
Her words became emblematic of a cultural resistance—one that insists on lyricism even in the face of annihilation. During a performance at the 2022 Grammy Awards, her poetry was read to a global audience, showing that Ukraine’s voices were not only surviving the war but reshaping global perceptions of it.
Writing from the Front
Not all war writers have been civilians. Soldiers, journalists and medics have also produced diaries from the front. Stanislav Aseyev, a Donetsk-born writer and former prisoner of war, returned to document the war from a new perspective. His earlier work, In Isolation, described his captivity in a secret Russian-run prison. In recent years, his updates from frontline zones like Bakhmut and Vuhledar have shown the raw psychological cost of modern warfare.
One young soldier-turned-blogger, writing under the pseudonym “Quiet Step", published short essays on life in the trenches:
“We make jokes about the mud, the food, the Russians. Humour is our body armour.”
Such firsthand accounts—often riddled with slang, satire, and brutal honesty—help demystify the experience of war for those far from the front. They also become documents of record, preserving the language of wartime life in all its coarse, necessary absurdity.
The Women Who Wrote Through the Siege
Many of the most profound diaries have come from Ukrainian women writing under siege. Journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk compiled first-person accounts and testimonies into The Lost Island, exploring the early chaos in Kyiv and the southern regions. Her sharp, journalistic prose captures not only events but the psychological oscillation between dread and duty.
In Mariupol, a teacher named Olena kept a handwritten diary as her city crumbled around her. One entry reads:
“We haven’t heard birds in a week. Just the whistle of shells. Children still draw them flying, though. Maybe they remember the sound.”
These women—teachers, aid workers, mothers—became both caregivers and chroniclers. Their diaries form a unique body of literature: domestic, observational, and quietly radical in their refusal to surrender interior life to the war.
The Archive of Defiance
Recognising the cultural importance of these texts, Ukrainian institutions and international partners have begun collecting and translating them. The Ukrainian PEN Centre, Lviv Book Forum, and projects like Voices of War and Ukraine War Archive are gathering testimony for posterity.
These archives do not just preserve literature—they resist historical erasure. They counter Russian disinformation with lived experience. They ensure that the world will remember the war not only in terms of territory lost or won, but in words written by those who lived through it.
Language as a Weapon of Memory
At its core, the Ukrainian war diary is more than a document. It is a form of moral armour. In every cramped shelter, candlelit bunker or refugee hostel where a Ukrainian reaches for a notebook, the act of writing becomes a declaration: We are here. We feel. We endure.
These texts are already shaping how Ukraine will be remembered—and how it remembers itself. In the future, when the maps are redrawn and the reconstruction begins, it will be the diaries, the poems, the fragments of everyday thought that reveal what truly happened to the soul of the country.
Conclusion: The Nation That Writes
Ukraine’s battlefield is not only lined with trenches and drones—it is inscribed with words. In the silence after a siren or the darkness of a blackout, Ukrainians have continued to write. Their diaries remind the world that war is not just a series of explosions or military manoeuvres—it is millions of interrupted lives. And in Ukraine, many of those lives have chosen to respond not with silence, but with ink.
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Reading List
War Diaries, Memoirs, and Testimonies
The War Diary of Yevhenia Belorusets
Author: Yevhenia Belorusets
Language: Originally in Ukrainian/German; translated to English
Where to read:
Overview: Day-by-day reflections from Kyiv during the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Sparse, poetic, and deeply personal.
In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas
Author: Stanislav Aseyev
Publisher: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2022)
Link: Harvard University Press
Overview: A journalist’s account of life under Russian occupation and his imprisonment in the Izolyatsia detention center.
Voices of War: Ukrainians Share Their Stories
Project: UkraineWorld
Overview: Short, translated testimonies of civilians, volunteers, doctors, and soldiers from across Ukraine. Continuously updated.
Poetry Collections (in Translation)
Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine
Editors: Oksana Maksymchuk & Max Rosochinsky
Publisher: Academic Studies Press (2017)
Link: Publisher site
Overview: A landmark bilingual anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, including works from the Donbas conflict and early stages of the war.
Apricots of Donbas
Author: Lyuba Yakimchuk
Publisher: Lost Horse Press (2021)
Link: Publisher page
Overview: A powerful collection of poems by a Donbas-born poet. Explores themes of exile, identity, and loss. Some were featured at the 2022 Grammys.
A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails
Author: Serhiy Zhadan
Publisher: Yale University Press (2023)
Link: Yale University Press
Overview: Zhadan is one of Ukraine’s most celebrated poets. This is his response to the war—a lyrical, gritty portrait of a nation in resistance.
The Voices of Babyn Yar
Author: Marianna Kiyanovska
Publisher: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (2022)
Link: Publisher page
Overview: Poetry commemorating Holocaust victims at Babyn Yar, later taking on new resonance during the Russian bombing of the site in 2022.
Multilingual and Multimedia Projects
Ukraine: War and Resistance (Photo + Text)
Project: New York Review of Books + PEN Ukraine
Link: NYRB Collection
Overview: Poetry, essays and first-person accounts paired with striking wartime photography.
Museum of Civilian Voices (Rinat Akhmetov Foundation)
Type: Video + text testimonies (available in English)
Overview: Thousands of stories from civilians affected by the war, categorised by region, age and theme.
