Portland-based photojournalist Justin Yau has been on the ground in Ukraine since before the Russian invasion.
Alex Lourie
There have been nearly 600 confirmed civilian deaths in Ukraine during the last three weeks, including an American journalist who died on Sunday. Portland-based photojournalist Justin Yau has been on the ground in Ukraine since before the Russian invasion. He’s captured bombardments, evacuations and the deepening humanitarian crisis there. We talk with Yau about his experiences covering the war in Ukraine.
Note: The following transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: Justin Yau is a Portland’s based photojournalist who started taking pictures as a student, taking pictures of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. He then spent many long nights covering racial justice protests in Portland as a freelancer in the summer of 2020. Then, in January, as Russian troops were massing along the border, Yau went to Ukraine. He has been there ever since, capturing the Russian bombardment, the Ukrainian resistance, and the deepening humanitarian crisis of civilian casualties and evacuations. Justin Yau joins us now to talk about what he has been seeing. Welcome.
Justin Yau: Thank you for having me, Dave.
Miller: When did you decide to go to Ukraine?
Yau: I think I decided and made concrete plans to go in November of last year, when the Russian government started massing hundreds of thousands of soldiers on Ukraine’s borders. This happened once before in April, and, of course, Russia did annex Crimea and back a proxy war in the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014. I decided to go in November, that’s when I made my decision, but I’ve always been interested in Ukraine and its place in the Bolshevik Revolution, all the way to the Cold War and World War II. The history and geopolitics of Ukraine has always been something of great interest to me.
Miller: So you decided in November. Where did you first go when you actually arrived in late January?
Yau: I first arrived in Kiev and the plan was to go to the Donbas region and cover some of the frontline. You know, frontline defensive positions that the Ukrainians have set up throughout the eight years of war that they’ve had since 2014.
Miller: At that time, when you were there, this wasn’t that long ago, but this was before the war as we know it now. Not just sort of an ongoing eight year skirmish-slash-annexation, but before the major bombardment of the country’s biggest cities started. What were you hearing from the people around you about what they thought was going to happen?
Yau: There was definitely a dichotomy there. The majority of the people thought that a full blown invasion, described by Western news outlets, was an impossibility. No one really believed that something like that might happen. But, of course, there are people who did believe that military action may be on the horizon. So, as the troop build up happened, there were many civilian militias that popped up. Territorial defense forces held weekly weekend trainings for volunteers. So there is a dichotomy. There were people preparing, and there were people who just couldn’t believe that such an escalation can happen. Although now we see that it did.
Miller: In that lead up time, now, that was clearly the lead up to the war as we know it, among other things, you did a series of photos of a training event, a sort of a weekend training event for civilians. Can you describe that event?
Yau: Yes, that was a weekend training held by the Kiev Territorial Defense Forces, and it was essentially an establishment and training of Kiev residents to form some kind of home guard as a last line of defense, so to speak, in case of war. It was held in the outskirts of Kiev, in an abandoned, what I believe was a cement factory or collective farm. The place had been abandoned for years and it’s been used for people who play airsoft guns for a while, but now it’s been used to train individuals on military combat maneuvers and weapons handling. We saw people from all walks of life. You’d see yuppies, rich IT professionals, arriving to training in their Teslas, and you’d also see 60 year old grandfathers, who themselves had fought in Afghanistan in the Soviet Afghan War, showed up to training. You’d have a huge range of people, who were differently equipped. There were people who owned their own private, American-made AR-15s, and there were people who just showed up in tracksuits and were given plywood cutouts to train with.
Miller: In some of the pictures that I’ve seen of yours, from those trainings, it’s almost like I can see smiles on the people’s faces. I mean, what was the mood at that time? Pre major invasion?
Yau: It was definitely somewhat tense, but I think a lot of people still, in the bottom of their heart, did not believe that something like that would happen. I spoke with one person, his name is Andre. He said to me, ‘you know, I read the news every day. I see the news that the Russians are massing troops on our borders. It makes me really upset. It gives me anxiety, and doing this alleviates that anxiety. You know, I’m doing something in response to that.’ So I think a lot of people felt that. A lot of people joined out of a sense of patriotism, and community.
It is a weekend event. And ultimately, there are friends hanging out in the woods together with military equipment. So that’s why some of them were smiling, I think.
Miller: Groups like that, people who a month ago were graphic designers or teachers or bus drivers, how much are they actively involved in fighting?
Yau: I can’t comment on exactly how much my subjects, the ones I photographed, are involved in fighting.
Miller: I don’t mean those in particular those individuals, but I mean broadly, the people who were civilians just weeks ago. How much are they being called in to fight?
Yau: I think when the invasion happened, the territorial defenses had had lines around the corner, days on end of people joining, and a lot of those people would be these volunteers, who were previously IT professionals and whatever else. A lot of them are actually not directly fighting on the front lines, but they are manning defensive positions in Kiev, on the outskirts of Kiev, along highways and avenues of approach. They are operating checkpoints, conducting traffic, and searching vehicles, and in some cases even detaining suspicious people, suspected of saboteur or reconnaissance activity on the part of the Russians.
Miller: What did you do when the nationwide invasion started?
Yau: I, like a lot of Ukrainians, actually did not believe that a full scale invasion would happen until it did, the night of. I was actually in the Donbas region when that happened. That week, I had organized everything with the local press officers, that I would cover the trenches and defensive positions in the Donbas, so on the 24th, in the early hours of the morning, I actually didn’t really sleep that night. I was just paying attention to the news. We, my team and I, left Bakhmut, this small town on the northern Donetsk Oblast, and we drove through the night, from four am. I think we arrived in Kharkiv, a large northeastern city in Kiev, by 7 to 8 a.m. That’s when I got the photo of Olena, the 53 year old teacher whose face was bloodied by one of the first missile strikes.
Miller: For people who haven’t seen that photo, and it may be the photo of yours that has been spread the most widely, can you, first of all, just describe the image? And then can we hear about the circumstances behind it?
Yau: It’s a middle aged woman with kind of wispy blond silvery hair, and her face is completely bloodied. She has her head partially bandaged, there’s blood on her scarf and on the sweater that she’s wearing. She’s really dazed, she was trying to explain to us what was happening. The blood on her face is still really fresh, I remember that, and there were tears coming out of her eyes as we spoke. I took and filed two photos, and I believe two other photographers in my team, Alex Fleury and Wolfgang Schwan, they also filed photos of the same woman.
Miller: What were you able to learn about what had happened to her?
Yau: We actually didn’t have a translator or fixer at the time, our translator had to take some time off to be with his family. So, using google translate, we were roughly able to communicate with her that we were American journalists, and we had stumbled upon this terrible, terrible event. I don’t quite remember what she said exactly, but she told us that her name was Olena, she was 53, she’s a teacher, she had nothing to do with the war. She told us that she got the lacerations on her face when the sheer force and impact of the explosion had knocked over the mirror, and the shards of glass had cut her face and head.
Miller: So after you took that picture, and sent it to the photo agency that you are connected to that can then sell this photo to news sites around the world, what happened?
Yau: My photos ran in, I think, The Mirror, and The Standard, a British and a Belgium newspaper. Wolfgang Schwan’s photo was run a lot more places. Another AFP photographer of ours, he also took a photo of the woman. I think Olena became the face of the war, the face of what the Russian invasion looks like to the common person in Ukraine, and what that means for them, and the danger that they’re in.
Very soon after that, I had posted a video of the bombed apartment complex, and of course the photo that you saw on my Instagram, as well as in the newspaper. A lot of people said that it was all fake, all of this was fake, that I was fake news, that every photographer that was there had used fake footage from 2018 in a gas explosion in an apartment complex in Magnitogorsk. Of course, this is not real. If you had looked up the articles from that time, just typed in ‘Magnitogorsk gas explosion 2018′, you’d see that these sources have been photoshopped. They just photoshopped my picture, the picture of Olena, on top of these old articles. I understand that Olena and her daughter had come under intense harassment from people online. They called her a crisis actress. They called her fake news. They said she was working for NATO and the Americans.
Miller: How do you process this? This isn’t new obviously, we’ve seen versions of this after Sandy Hook. I mean, there are 9/11 Truthers out there. There’s a long list. But what people are accusing you of is the exact opposite of what you’re trying to do. You’re there as a photojournalist to capture and show to the world, who’s not there, what’s happening, and then the images that you actually produce as part of that work, you’re being accused of doing the exact opposite. How do you think about that?
Yau: Like you said, we’re all aware of people calling out fake news and the conspiracies of Sandy Hook and things like that, but I guess when it happens to you, you feel very differently about it. They can call me a liar, and it’s fine. I know myself, that I was there. Anyone who does research would look into the metadata of my photos and videos will understand that I was there, that those videos were taken on February 24th, 2022. What really makes me upset and sad is the harassment faced by these victims of war. Olena, who’s face had been disfigured, suddenly by such a terrible thing, now has to put up with all this harassment and hate online. I think that that’s what’s truly, really evil, what’s happened to these people. That really breaks my heart, more than being called a fake journalist or fake news.
Miller: Let’s turn to another one of your photos. It’s of an older woman being evacuated, and it looks like she’s being pushed in a shopping cart. First of all, did I have that right? There are people around her, so I couldn’t see completely, but it looks just like a supermarket shopping cart.
Yau: It is, and this is a destroyed bridge that leads from the town of Irpin to the town of Romanovka, both of which are kind of suburb towns north of Kiev, about 20 to 25 kilometers away from the city center of Kiev.
Miller: What was happening, broadly, that day?
Yau: That was one of the first days of a ‘green corridor’, or a humanitarian corridor, where a kind of cease fire is agreed upon in a certain area, so that civilians can flee. To my knowledge, Ukrainian forces had destroyed the bridge to stop the Russian advance, so a lot of these refugees had to cross the rubble to get to the other side, where buses are waiting to ferry them to bus stops and train stations away from the fighting.
That woman, that old lady, was on a shopping cart like you said, it’s true. A lot of people with mobility issues, they are the ones who are the last to leave. That is, the sick and infirmed, the elderly, or people with disabilities. Throughout those days, that’s a lot of people who were leaving, the ones who did not leave in the weeks before. I think that day, I believe it was March 8th or March 9th, I don’t quite remember, there was a terrible snow storm that lasted about an hour and a half that made the river swell a lot more, so it made the crossing even more difficult. A lot of local volunteers, whether it be Territorial Defense Forces, local police firefighters, and Ukraine army personnel manning the checkpoint at the bridge, were helping people across. They jerry rigged homemade stretchers, wheelbarrows, in this case shopping carts, to help people with mobility issues cross this rubble and this flowing river.
Miller: In another one of your photos from relatively early on, we see people welding together huge I-beams to make what looks like a gigantic version of a children’s jacks. Like the throwing game of children’s jacks. What were they doing?
Yau: They’re building tank traps, or Czeck style hedgehogs, to be used at checkpoints and choke points in the camp defensive positions around the city. They were welding together with scrap metal in the shipyard to make that kind of thing. I think something that’s funny and unspoken about this image was that the people, the crew doing this, was actually a stage crew. It was a kind of a stage company that built sets and designs for plays and music festivals. They were all fixie bike enthusiasts, and together, them as friends came together and said, ‘hey, how can we help the war effort?’ And they decided to weld together scrap metal to make tank barricades.
I think that’s one of the very many ways that citizens of Kiev who are not involved in direct combat or defense of the city have come together to aid the war effort, whether it be cooking food, delivering supplies, giving out medical training or giving medical attention to people, and it’s heartwarming to see this group of people come together. They remind me of a group of friends that I have in Portland but, as heartwarming as it is, it is also really bleak and sad at the same time that these people are at this point in a semi encircled city, with hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers at their doorstep, and they’re doing this.
Miller: I noted that you’ve covered tense and sometimes violent situations in the past, pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, the racial justice protests in Portland, but this is different in such a major way. The scale of this, we can’t compare in any meaningful way what you’ve covered before and what you’re doing now. This is a war, the biggest conflict on European soil since World War II. What have you been learning about how to cover a war in the last couple of weeks?
Yau: I think having a great team that communicates is very important. I think having a team of people who have more experience than you in this kind of thing is very important, a team that works well together, that takes every possible precaution to keep each other safe. A group of friends that look out for each other. I think that’s very, very important.
Miller: Is this the team that you’re talking about here? Since you’re a freelancer, this is one that you sort of have chosen, have cobbled together, yourselves. I mean, it’s not like you have an editor at a particular paper who you’re working for, right? Or a fixer or translator who has been assigned to you from a network. It’s up to you to make your team?
Yau: We kind of organically came together; we had all met in Portland, in fact, in 2020, covering the racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd. That’s where we had met, was outside the federal courthouse in downtown Portland, and we had met again on January 22nd in Washington DC, during the inauguration, where nothing happened, but we had stayed in touch ever since and we found we’ve become friends over the years. Now, I’m very lucky to be able to work with these people. This is a great team, and we kind of organically came together as a group. Our translator is somebody we found together, and he’s part of the team now as well, and we were very happy to have him.
Miller: Are you all more or less on the same page about where to go? There are a lot of potential fronts in this war, a lot of big cities that are being bombarded, a lot of people fleeing from different places, going to different places. So a lot of places where you could be taking pictures or telling the story. How do you decide together where to go?
Yau: We usually will sit down and talk things through. We all work for different people; as freelancers, we’re on different assignments every day, we report to different people, and we have a different mission, and when that comes up, we will have to split up the team, but mostly, we’ve agreed. We come to unanimous decisions to work together and go to the same places.
Miller: In the last few days, as your Twitter feed has noted and as we’ve seen in a number of publications, one American journalist was killed and another was injured. How have you come to think about the danger that is an inherent part of this job?
Yau: Yeah, and I’d like to say that two more have died today. Yes. It’s definitely a part of the job, and it’s definitely always on my mind. I would say that I do have constant, I wouldn’t say constant, but really frequent anxiety about these things. I’m just a naturally anxious person. I would just take every possible precaution. And if I know that I tried my best, then there’s nothing else that I can do, I guess that’s how I think about it. I check my kit every day. I make sure I have all the medical supplies that I need. Make sure the members of my team have all medical supplies as well.
Miller: What are you carrying? What medical supplies do you have in your bag right now?
Yau: I have a pretty standard blood trauma kit; I have gauze, combat gauze, pressure bandages, chest seals, a tension pneumothorax needle, chest decompression needle, and a nasopharyngeal. Pretty much everything that you would need for a gunshot or shrapnel wound, and a whole bunch of tourniquets. You know, 90% of combat deaths are from massive blood loss, so stopping bleeding is definitely very important. We have hemostatic bandages and agents as well as tourniquets.
Miller: Justin Yau, thanks very much for giving us some of your time in your evening, and take care of yourself. Thank you.
Yau: Thank you so much for having me.
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