In 2017, London felt heavy. The Brexit referendum had left the city drained, uncertain of itself — retreating from something it hadn't fully named yet. Everything seemed out of place, as if something had shifted, and not for the better. I felt it too. Meanwhile, on the other side of Europe, Ukraine was moving in the opposite direction. Despite its struggles, the country was determined to leave its past behind and align itself with the West. In a moment when much of Europe felt like it was closing in on itself, Ukraine felt like an opening. I wanted to see it for myself. I also needed to find out whether I still had anything of my own to say with a camera.

That's how I ended up in Ukraine for the first time. What I hadn't expected were the people. They pulled me in — friends who became family, and through whom I discovered a place that kept revealing itself — its history, its culture, its complexity. I kept returning to Kyiv, and from there I began to explore further — Odesa, Kharkiv, and all the way to Mariupol’. Everywhere I went, I could feel what the Euromaidan had left behind — particularly among those born after independence, there was a defiant hope in a European future, a sense that things could genuinely change. But that hope existed alongside a brutal reality: Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea and its proxy war in Donbas.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, everything changed overnight. In the early months, I focused on helping my friends reach safety across the EU and Britain. By spring I had travelled to the South Caucasus, where many had sought refuge, and witnessed firsthand what it meant to start over in a foreign country — not by choice, but by necessity. Suddenly, many of my Ukrainian friends, now refugees in the South Caucasus, found themselves living alongside the Russian diaspora — some of whom had fled in protest, but many of whom seemed to have relocated as if on an adventure, working remotely from a place their country was destabilising, dodging international sanctions while their imperial worldview remained intact. For the region, none of this was abstract — a place where Russian aggression is not history, but lived experience, and where everyone there knew, in their own way, exactly what was at stake.

I keep returning to Ukraine. All of my friends there carry on with daily life under constant shelling and frequent blackouts, under the permanent shadow of Russian aggression. Others, who once had ordinary lives — the same hopes, problems and routines as any of us — are now serving in the army, forced to defend their country and families against a foreign invader. And yet, amid this struggle, Ukraine is fighting not only to survive but to become more itself. A real independence, deeper than the political one, is taking shape. Ukrainians are reclaiming and decolonising their culture and language, restoring a heritage that decades of Russification had tried to absorb, distort and erase — appropriating Ukrainian symbols, traditions and history into its own imperial narrative. What was once suppressed is now both resistance and identity — a country fighting to redefine itself, blending the old with the new, reaching toward something that feels, for the first time, entirely its own.