123. PERSPECTIVE: Kanykei Tursunbaeva and Mark Neville on operating under conditions of war, photography in conflict zones, and the project ’Stop Tanks with Books’
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Welcome to the War on Ukraine update from Kyiv podcast. I'm Jessica Gnauer, a senior lecturer in international relations at Flinders University in Australia, and I'm talking today with Kanakei Tusunbaeva and Mark Neville. Kanakei is a journalist, translator and interpreter, and is also a senior research associate at the European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kyiv.

Mark Neville is an award-winning photographer who works at the intersection of art and documentary. Mark's work has engaged with far-reaching human issues, including mental health, war, poverty, issues of contaminating waste in people's environment and the right to play in childhood.

Since 2015, Mark has also been involved in a photography project documenting life amidst war in Ukraine and resulting in the book Stop Tanks with Books. So I look forward to discussing some of your activities and projects on the podcast today. Thanks for joining me on the podcast, Kanake and Mark. Thank you so much, Jessica.

So, Kanake, as I mentioned at the outset, you're a Senior Research Associate at the European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. You yourself are not originally from Ukraine. Could you talk a bit about how you came to work there and how you came to live in Kyiv yourself? Sure. Just one small note that the Academy has an office in Kyiv, but I'm based in Odessa. Ukraine has become my home. I have been living in this country for almost a decade.

I was born in Kyrgyzstan and then and I did my university in other countries, university degrees. So I came here to work originally as a journalist and then I just stayed in this country and it has become my second home. As for the academy, I have been working in one of the research institutes, the Center for Criminology, for many years. The way academy works, we are

trying to do most of our work for English speaking audience as well and we have a lot of partners from overseas. In simple words, Academies, one of its main goals is to popularize interdisciplinary scholarship in Ukraine

Also, Academy, it cooperates very closely with several publications and several research institutes. Main areas are photojournalism, investigative journalism, the history, criminology. Information security is a very large chunk of Academy's focus. Radical anthropology, philosophy, psychology.

And Mark, you have a diverse and impactful body of visual work that I mentioned at the outset, including your work in Ukraine that we'll come to shortly. So how do you choose which projects to

to get involved with? First off, thank you for having me, Jess. I guess I need to make projects that I feel very strongly about because it takes three, four, five, six years sometimes to make a project and that requires a lot of juice, you know, a lot of energy. It's really got to be something that I feel very strongly about. I work with photography, but I'm not really a journalist. I trained as an artist.

I'm particularly interested in the way in which we interpret images, we receive images. One of the things that I really have focused on is targeted book dissemination. So I quite often make a photo book as an end product of one of my projects and disseminate that book to a target audience.

And as I understand it, you have operated sometimes within conflict zones, within war zones, taking pictures. Can you talk a bit about the sorts of challenges and considerations that go into operating under those kind of conditions? Well, I don't like it. You know, I really don't like it. And I see the damage it does to me and other people very clearly.

Clearly, you know, my first experience was helmed Afghanistan. I'm 57 now. I was 45 when I went to Afghanistan. That was my first experience of being in a war zone. So I was invited by the Imperial War Museum in London to be an official war artist.

So they've been doing this regularly for 100 years or so, the Brits. And so I got sent to Afghanistan to be kind of embedded with 16th Air Assault Brigade, which is the biggest brigade in the British Army, the paratroopers. I had no experience in a war zone before. And the people who sent me, the curators, the people from the art world, had no experience directly of what it was like to be in a war zone either.

So although I agreed to go, I really didn't know what I was letting myself in for. So after three months with special forces effectively in Afghanistan, I came back unsurprisingly with post-traumatic stress disorder. And even though I saw some really awful things, I would say it's the accumulation of the stress

and knowing that I might lose a leg or an arm or be killed every day, having that in the back of my mind, going on patrol with soldiers, hearing and seeing the most awful things, the accumulation of that stress over three months,

was too much and I came back and I suffered adjustment disorder you know I could not adjust to civilian life anymore so it took me about two years and I recovered fully and then my next experience of war has actually been this one Ukraine so I moved here in 2020. So how did that come about how did you get involved with working on a project in Ukraine?

Funnily enough, you know, it's an interesting story. I'd written a book about mental health issues in the British military called Battle Against Stigma.

And I sent it out to a target audience of mental health charities, prisons, everywhere I felt that veterans who are suffering from PTSD might have ended up. In fact, I had meetings with the Ministry of Defence in Britain about the book after my experience in Afghanistan. I said, listen, you know, you can write a chapter in the book celebrating your achievements in the field of treating veteran mental health.

But the only thing I'm interested in is getting this book out to veterans who are suffering from PTSD from water trauma and encourage them to come forward and seek help. So first off, the Minister of Defence in Britain were delighted. And then within a week, they quickly changed their minds and decided it was risky. The book was printed in Spain and I spent all summer 2015 sending them out to the target audience.

prison libraries, mental health charities, homeless centres, all the places where veterans who don't get treated end up.

And then out of the blue, I got this email from Kiev Military Hospital saying, we heard about your book about war trauma. And we have all these people coming back from Donbass, missing arms and legs. But not only that, you know, they're psychologically wounded and traumatized as well. Do you have a Ukrainian language version of your book, Battle Against Stigma? And I said, well, funnily enough, I don't.

But I was so impressed that this country was so forward thinking and courageous in approaching me and wanting to learn how to treat their veterans, where my own country had effectively tried to ban the book. So I had it translated into Ukrainian, sent it to them. And I thought, no, that's not enough. I'm going to go and visit them. So I went to see them. And I decided then in 2015 to make this book called Stop Tanks With Books to try and garner support for Ukraine's fight for independence.

Mm-hmm. And can you talk a bit more about how that project then evolved? So that was back in 2015 when you decided, okay, I'm going to commence this new project, Stop Tanks With Books, that's more specifically related to the ongoing war in Ukraine, which at the time was more confined to the Donbass. I don't know if Kenny Kay would agree with me or not, but I mean, I very much was under the impression that the war wasn't going to go away. You know, it was either going to

there's a protracted frozen conflict indefinitely or more likely it would escalate and at some point there'd be a full-blown invasion so I had the concept for this book Stop Tanks with Books way back in 2015 since then I've been to the front line many times

and was very much aware that this is an ongoing war. And even in Kiev, I felt that this was a whole nation was being traumatized because of this conflict in Donbass. You know, it wasn't something just localized. It had impact for everyone. Everywhere I went, be it Odessa or Kiev or even the West Ukraine, way back from 2014 onwards, you would meet people displaced. You know, you wouldn't have to search hard to find them. And by 2017, I think 2.5 million people had already been displaced.

displaced. And the West was just not talking about it, not covering it. I was very much aware that I wanted my next book project to be something which would garner support for Ukraine. So what I tried to do was really weaponize the form of the photo book.

So I combined pictures I'd taken all over Ukraine for six, seven years with ethnographic research from the Center for Eastern European Studies in Berlin, with short stories from Luba Yakimchuk, who was living in Luhansk when the first wave of invasion came in 2014.

And you know, it wasn't fun back then. People were kidnapped, tortured. So Ukraine was very much aware what Russian occupation meant. So what I tried to do with all these forms of documentary, photographs, ethnographic research, a call to action as well from the international communities found in the book,

urging the West to allow Ukraine to have a fast track to EU membership, NATO membership. So this cocktail of different forms of documentary all came together in the book. And then I sent it out to a target audience of 750 people worldwide, ranging from celebrities, the super rich, NATO members, the media, everyone who I felt had it in their power somehow to

to significantly support Ukraine in real terms. I rushed to get the book out after six years working on it, and we got the 750 copies out just a week, one week before the war began.

I mean, I woke up in my apartment in Kiev on the 24th of February, as Kaniké would have done in Odessa, to the sound of sirens. You know, nothing can quite prepare you. I mean, because we're all animals, effectively. So it's not to do with being strong or weak. It's just the fundamental nature of being an animal is that it's a physical reaction as much as psychological. I don't know how Kaniké feels about it. I would completely agree with you. The person...

you are before the war and after the war, completely two different people. And yeah, as you say, it's a constant pressure, psychological pressure. And sometimes you don't even notice, you know, but when you talk to people, for instance, colleagues that have lost their parents because they

They were not on time running to the shelter and the particle of the shell hit them. Or when you talk to the, we have small rescue medics team, when you talk to them, you're never the same person. There are good things about this. If you approach it as a challenge, you become more mature, I mean, more responsible, more

But yeah, it's crazy. And when kamikaze drones, for instance, fly over the head and hit the building, which is 10 meters from you. Also, if I may add, there was a prominent neurophysiologist, I don't remember his name right now, but he said that human beings, they live based on the model of the future. In order to be able to live, a person has to have that future.

anything that he's going to but in a war zone and in a war country what happens to people that they spent a long period of time and still are spending in uncertainty you never know when it's going to end what is happening tomorrow and if this going to end so there's a problem with the model of that future it's so true it's the first time I've thought about it like that mm-hmm

So Kanike, as you mentioned, you live in Odessa and obviously Odessa has been under quite heavy fire from missiles and et cetera since Russia's full scale invasion. So can you talk a bit about how your life has changed, but also how has the work of the Academy and your work with the Academy changed since?

since Russia's full-scale invasion? Yes, absolutely. So Odessa is a very special city, as people know it. I mean, it's very culturally diverse. It's a Jewish city with great sense of humor. The life and work has changed completely, like 180 degrees. The way we were working, the way we were living, of course, is very different. And it's not only for Odessa, it's everywhere like this.

Lately, for the past several months, it has been very hard with the electricity, which in turn affects heating and water. Yeah, sometimes I work in the parking lot because it's used as a bomb shelter and it has even a better Wi-Fi than here, than at home. And it has a place where you can charge your devices.

So what happened was the work, roughly speaking, from 100% of our focus and potential of what academy used to do, we maybe try to focus on 30% as much as we can. All the rest of attention goes really to stuff that we were never meant to do. Like we have a small team of people that provide first aid, that rescue people. And among them, there are people that

have no expertise in that, like just normal technicians, computer engineers, scholars, lawyers. Also, we support a circle of independent journalists. Some of them are related to us. Some of them have no relation to us. So it's with the help of our friends overseas and partners

We supply aid to scholars that need them. We have been evacuating a lot of people from, I won't name the names of the regions, but from dangerous places. A lot of projects were stopped because they're not relevant or not enough people to do that. So the Academy's priority, even in the war, it's going to be to show the international community that Ukrainians

Scholars are here. There are people that are working because scholars also have their own world. So the Academy of Scholars made a special issue for American behavioral scientists, which is titled War in Ukraine.

So Professor Harvey Kushner, he's a worldwide recognized expert in terrorism. It was his idea to come up with such an issue and to get the voices of Ukrainian scholars that are working in these conditions here in Ukraine. Most of them had no internet, had to write their pieces in the bomb shelter. And so this, what we think makes this issue special and important, we

because of in which conditions it was produced in. It is an amazing issue with different pieces that look at different questions. For instance, does Ukraine have a right to be a member of the European Union? It also gives a very deep analysis of how different Ukrainians from Russians in terms of their culture, mentality, architecture.

Oh, one of the scholars pieces, Professor Lunov, Dr. Matzev, Lipsky, Professor Hoskins. So those pieces also tackle important topics such as mental health of people, peace engineering and the role of NATO.

One of the main goals of the Academy, we want to establish an English language publication, which would provide high quality analysis about this part of the world. So Mark, I guess just finally, what's in store for you in 2023? You're obviously still in Ukraine, you're living in Kiev. What projects are you currently involved in at the moment? Well, I'm director of this charity, Postcode Ukraine, which fuses humanitarian aid delivery with Ukraine.

my own attempts to document the war. One of the recipients of the book that I sent out, Stop Times With Books, his family is a wealthy collector of my work, and they got in touch with me last April and said, what can we do to help? And so I said, well, I don't think it's enough just to send me back to Ukraine to take pictures.

I mean, all my life I advocated for the power of art, the power of photography to change the world. But when the war came in real terms, I actually felt that photography was a luxury, actually. So I said to this wealthy collector, I said, well, listen, can you send me back and help me set up a charity? And then I will document, you know, humanitarian aid deliveries.

because these people in the frontline towns, they've had everything taken from them. So I don't feel comfortable turning up to frontline towns empty-handed. So now when I go, it's to deliver generators, aid, medicine, and it's a totally different dynamic than just turning up as a photojournalist. So over the next few months, my charity will carry on delivering humanitarian aid, generators, food, etc.

the frontline towns and we're also supporting other charities grassroots charities that we think are doing the most important work in Ukraine and I'll carry on documenting that process and trying to find resonant contexts places like recently I had an exhibition of my Ukraine images it's

Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office in London. Two weeks ago, I met with the Permanent Undersecretary to talk with him about the challenges, basically, that Ukraine faces. And having visited some of these frontline towns, Bakhmut and elsewhere, and you speak to the soldiers and they say, the problem is...

that as soon as the supply of weapons stops, Russia pushes back again. So even if there's a slight pause, Russia will push back. So I think considering that Ukrainians are fighting for all of our democratic freedoms, the least we can do is make sure that they're properly armed and supported.

Yeah, absolutely. And Kanakay, you mentioned that your country of origin is Kyrgyzstan. How is Russia's full-scale invasion being viewed from the point of view of Kyrgyzstan?

Thank you for asking that question. Things that I will say are my views. Well, first of all, Kyrgyzstan is one of the poorest countries in Central Asia. And it depends financially, ideologically, in every sense, it depends fully on Russian Federation.

I'm sure people, normal people, are against this war. However, the country officially didn't take any side for obvious reasons. To put it very simply, if the country wants to survive, they have to be with Russia, kind of that way. Well, thank you so much, Mark and Kanake. I appreciate you being on the podcast today and stay safe. And I certainly hope that we see a conclusion to the war victory for Ukraine this year.

Thank you so much, Jessie. Thanks for listening and thanks to Gonca Verol for our theme music.