On 27 June, a Russian Iskander missile struck a bustling pizza restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. The attack claimed the lives of 13 people, including four children, and left 60 others wounded, some critically. The restaurant, a popular spot for local residents and international journalists, was at full capacity when the missiles hit.
Among those present that day was Anastasia Taylor-Lind, a British-Swedish poet and photojournalist, along with her translator and friend Dima. They were in Kramatorsk to document a long-term project funded by the National Geographic Society, which involved reporting on the environmental impact of the war in Donbas.
The hypersonic missile struck at 7.32pm. Taylor-Lind recounts hearing it approach and, with a split second to react, preparing to throw herself to the ground, but she only had time to close her eyes before the explosion. Glass fragments pierced her arm and leg, while plates of food were scattered with shards, leaving her unsure whether the red splatters staining the tables were blood or tomato sauce. As emergency responders went to the scene, a large crowd gathered. About a dozen people were rescued from the ruins.
Among the dead were two 14-year-old twin sisters, Yulia and Anna Aksenchenko, who were about to complete their eighth-grade studies. A 17-year-old girl also lost her life, and a baby at a table on Taylor-Lind’s left received severe head injuries.
The Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina, 37, succumbed to her injuries from the blast four days later. She had been sitting at the table on Taylor-Lind’s right.
Taylor-Lind had spent a decade documenting the war in Donbas, which began in 2014, but until that moment her encounters with violence had been as an observer, bearing witness to its impact on the lives of others. This was the first time she had experienced the horrors of war on a bodily level. It took her time to process the pain and trauma. Months later, her response as a poet was to pour her feelings on to paper.
“I never inhabit the voice or experience of others in my poems, so the only way that felt right was to approach the strike from my own closely observed perspective,” she says. “I write poems about things I can’t photograph, things I hear or feel or think, which can’t be expressed, or have no place to be expressed in images.”
In April 2014, Russia installed separatist proxies in the Donbas region who seized government buildings, sparking a reaction from the Ukrainian military. More than 10,000 people died in the long conflict that ensued. A large part of Moscow’s justification for its full-scale intervention in Ukraine in 2022 was the claim – dismissed by the UN – that Ukrainian military action in the Donbas conflict amounted to genocide.
Taylor-Lind’s poem, published by the Guardian, serves as a medium to unravel her fragile fragments of memory, arranging them chronologically in the first person and present tense.
Through her poetic expression, she found solace and a deeper understanding of what she and others endured on that horrific day. It helped her “to understand what had happened to us and what I experienced”.
“There is so much I am unable to articulate about my own experiences of reporting through my photographs,” she adds. “And that frustration has pushed me towards poetry over the years.”
