A photographer traveled 10,000 miles through Ukraine. This is what he saw

Photographs by Byron Smith
Story by Oscar Holland, CNN
Published September 1, 2024

A group of displaced Ukrainians flee Irpin, a suburb of the capital Kyiv, in the early weeks of Russia’s invasion.

In Byron Smith’s new photography book, Ukrainians are pictured fleeing by any means possible — crammed into cars with pet dogs, waiting to board trains to Poland or simply taking to suburban streets with infants and backpacks in hand. As a photojournalist whose work often focuses on the plight of migrants (a mission that has taken him from Greek refugee camps to the battle for ISIS-controlled Mosul, Iraq, in 2016 and 2017), his instinct was quite the opposite: to run toward the danger.

“I feel like if you see these masses of people fleeing, it would be fake for me to really sympathize with them if I didn't go and see what they were fleeing from,” Smith told CNN in a video interview from Istanbul, Turkey.

Documenting Smith’s travels through Ukraine in the year following Russia’s unprovoked invasion in February 2022, “Testament ‘22” is a contemplative portrait of a nation at war. The 192-page tome juxtaposes color with monochrome, defiance with despair, hope with fear.

The American photographer's bleakest images speak to the horror of a conflict that has, according to various estimates, already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides. In the Kyiv suburb Irpin, authorities evacuate a civilian on a stretcher past a half-collapsed bridge; in nearby Bucha, where the Russian army stands accused of committing thousands of war crimes, a gravedigger covers his face, apparently overcome with grief. (Russia has denied targeting civilians in the town, saying that images of bodies on its streets are fake.)

Local police help civilians evacuate the Kyiv suburb of Irpin.

A gravedigger in Bucha preemptively digs for new arrivals in April 2022 after Russia withdrew from the city.

Elsewhere among the monograph’s 136 images lies the lifeless body of an unknown man killed by Russian shelling. “We were in no man’s land — it’s just us and bodies in the middle of the park,” Smith said of the photo, recalling how he and a small group of journalists were caught up in mortar fire in Irpin. “You hear street fighting, and you're taking cover after you hear things whizzing over your head. You don't know what it is. You don't know what it could be.”

“It’s hard to even go back to that time,” he added, still visibly troubled by the incident.

Yet, war can bring out both the worst and best in humanity, and Smith’s images spotlight community, compassion and the type of spirited resilience that has seen Ukraine make significant territorial gains in recent months. Civilians clear rubble to rebuild neighbors’ homes; children make a clubhouse from discarded Russian munitions boxes; elderly swimmers take a dip in the mine-laden waters off Odesa, despite local police prohibiting them from doing so.

Ukrainian soldiers with the call signs “Raven” and “Gun” near the front lines in Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region.

Volunteers clear rubble from a bombed-out home in the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv.

People sunbathe on a boardwalk in Odesa, where sea mines now post a threat to both ships and swimmers.

“That kind of encapsulates that spirit I found,” Smith said of the swimmers, “from the people on the frontline to the people just going about their lives.”

Smith’s journey began in southeast Poland, just days after Russia’s full-scale invasion, where he began documenting the influx of people escaping west from Ukraine. The photographer soon crossed over the border and made his way to Kyiv, via Lviv.

“In the beginning, it was just chaos,” he recalled.

A damaged kitchen wall at a home in Chernihiv.

A woman walks by pigeons in downtown Odesa.

As the initial bedlam evolved into entrenched frontlines, Smith crisscrossed Ukraine on different assignments. He estimates that he covered around 10,000 miles in the first year of the war.

Being a freelancer meant Smith had to assume the burden of logistics and finding work, and his travels around the country often depended on “how much money I had or how much time I had,” he said. But it also afforded him the freedom to find lesser-told stories, often visiting battleground towns months after their liberation to piece together what had occurred.

“A lot of my colleagues are newspaper photographers, and they’re out there shooting every day for the newspaper. Then (their photos are) on the pages for that day... (But) I have more time to go back and cultivate it and try to present it in a different way,” he said, describing his book as a “slower form of journalism.”

Ukrainian refugees line up at a railway station in Lviv to board a train to Poland in March 2022. Less than one week into the war, 1 million refugees had left their homes, according to the UN.

A young Ukrainian in an abandoned building in Chernihiv that was hit by a Russian airstrike.

Refugees flee Irpin amid intense fighting that followed Russia’s unprovoked invasion.

“I wanted to be a bit more methodical in the way I covered this (conflict), without hopping from one big thing to the next... I wanted to give people a more subdued, maybe more sober, look at everything.”

The book was released last weekend to coincide with Ukraine’s Independence Day, and is punctuated with quiet, intimate moments and handwritten notes featuring Smith’s personal recollections. Though not arranged chronologically, the photos take readers on what Smith called an “emotional narrative,” opening with scenes of rocket fire and people fleeing the early days of the war.

Another of the opening photos shows a woman saying goodbye to her partner, who was later killed, at the border crossing with Poland. “It's one of the last pictures they have together,” Smith said. “So (in the book) it’s kind of foreshadowing all the darkness that’s to come.”

A man and his girlfriend say their final goodbye in Medyka, Poland, before he crosses into Ukraine to fight for his country. She said he was later killed in action.

The title references “My Testament,” an 1845 poem by Taras Shevchenko in which the author asks to be buried among the fields, rivers and steppes of his “beloved Ukraine.” The photographer recalled reading it as he first ventured to Kyiv.

“It's pretty much (Shevchenko’s) last will and testament... And I'm riding into this war zone, the Russians are invading and I’m like, ‘Wow, I actually don't have a will and testament for myself, for my parents or family, or even anything to really leave behind for anybody.’ That played on me a bit, and it became the backbone for the story.”

The book serves, too, as a testament to the people of Ukraine, whose stories Smith felt compelled to share with the world. Its publisher, Verlag Kettler, believes the photographer’s body of work can contribute to the “overwhelming evidence” of Russian crimes.

“No one has officially asked me to submit work, but I did have (photos) presented in Congress on Capitol Hill, and the Ukrainian ambassador to the US was there,” Smith said. “So, on some level, it’s getting in front of the eyes of policy-makers, which is a dream for a photographer, because you feel like you’re actually having some kind of impact.”

Correction — This story was updated to clarify that the book’s captions were not directly handwritten by Smith.

A woman looks out from a train entering the Lviv railway station from Kyiv.

“Testament ‘22 – A Visual Road Diary Through a War Zone,” published by Verlag Kettler, is available now.