I walked through a non-descript entrance on the side of Kyiv’s central station, climbed a flight of stairs, and suddenly I was in an enormous marble hall. I had never seen it before, despite my many trips to Ukraine’s capital. It had a deep red ceiling covered in white stucco, and a Socialist Realism frieze along the sides depicting different parts of Ukraine, the dark gray mining area, the blue Carpathian Mountains, the yellow cornfields. Above my head seven huge chandeliers were hanging, the size of baby elephants.
At the other end of the hall, I spotted a woman wearing paint-splattered trousers, her long blonde hair tied up in a bun. “I feel like a Disney princess in here,” she laughed. Lesia Khomenko is one of the country’s most prominent artists and Ukrainian Railways have allowed her to use the station’s Red Hall as a temporary studio.
Lesia was creating her biggest ever painting to hang in the main window of the station opposite the escalators which carry passengers to the platforms. The 21-by-12-meter work called Movement echoes the rhythm of the moving staircase. It features a cross section of Ukrainians: a wounded soldier, a mother with children, a volunteer paramedic, an artist clutching a rolled-up canvas, a rescue dog, and even a bearded barista. Keeping the country caffeinated is a vital part of the war effort, Lesia told me.
Real people were invited to pose for photographs on the escalator when she was preparing sketches for her painting, but they are painted in an abstract manner rather than figuratively, streaking past like a giant multi-colored waterfall. She told me she is creating “a new visual language” to talk about the way the conflict has transformed Ukrainian society.
Becoming Soldiers Overnight
The day after the full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, Lesia and her mother, her husband, her sister, her daughter, her dog, and her cat squeezed into her battered old Skoda and drove to the town of Ivano-Frankivsk, a town in western Ukraine. Her husband, Maxym Robotov, an artist and musician, soon joined the armed forces and Lesia started work on a new series of paintings titled “Max in the Army.”
It was inspired by a selfie he had sent her from his military base in which she was struck by the change in his body language. Her full-length portraits depict Max in jeans, trainers, and a hoodie along with other men who have also been turned into soldiers overnight—engineers, lawyers, and musicians—all in casual clothes but saluting with one hand and holding a weapon in the other.
Lesia and her young daughter evacuated to Poland and eventually to the United States where she now lives. We first met this spring in her New York studio as she was preparing for a summer exhibition in Kyiv’s Pinchuk Art Center.
“Monte Carlo by Day, Aleppo by Night”
During my week-long visit in early August, Kyiv did not look like the capital of a country at war. Before the deadly strike later that month on the Darnytskyi district, which killed 23 people, and the Iskander missile attackjust days later on the Cabinet of Ministers, the city center showed little sign of conflict—hardly a broken window in sight. Under blue skies, pavement cafes and restaurants were full, people strolled and rollerbladed through parks and even swam in the River Dnieper.
“Here they joke that it’s like Monte Carlo by day and Aleppo by night,” Lesia said. Not long after she arrived from New York, she got an air raid alert on her phone and decided to spend the night in the Golden Gate metro station. Feeling nervous, she went down to the platforms armed with a sun lounger and a sleeping bag. “A few people were playing cards, others were trying to sleep,” she told me. “Lying on the chaise longue, I tried to pretend I was at a beach resort. But when they switched off the escalator and dimmed the lights, it felt like an underground inferno.”
Lesia’s huge banner for Kyiv station features people from all walks of life and seems a metaphor for the Ukrainian society rallying around a common goal—resisting Russian aggression. On my first visit after the full-scale invasion, a successful counter-offensive was underway in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. It seemed as if the whole country was united to fight Russia.
Democratic Resilience
Now I wondered if that sense of solidarity was disintegrating. There had been a string of scandals over the use of state funds and dubious land deals implicating people close to President Volodymyr Zelensky. One notable case—that of Timur Mindich—was linked to military procurement. When Zelensky signed into law a bill undermining the autonomy of two key anti-corruption agencies, thousands took to the streets in cities across Ukraine. “Mr. President are you running a government or a racket?” asked one placard. “My dad didn’t die so others could steal,” read another. It was the first major demonstration against the government in more than three years of war.
But for Lesia, the street protests were a sign of democratic resilience. “It’s dangerous to gather in large groups—we know we can be targeted from the sky,” she said. “But people were determined to make their voices heard and in the end the government backed down.” Ukraine, she argued, is better run today than it was in 2014, but if it fails to tackle graft, it could lose European Union support. “Then we will just instantly disappear as a country,” she added. “We will be occupied, and all our identities will vanish.”
Railway Workers as Therapists
At the time of a full-scale war, Kyiv’s central station is a place of exits, arrivals, and uncertainty. Above all, it is a place of pain and separation. You see huddles of people embracing, often in tears. You also witness euphoric scenes on train platforms with hugs, laughter, and bouquets of flowers. Travelling around the country by train, I have been struck by the upbeat attitude of carriage attendants as they check tickets, distribute bedding and glasses of tea. One comedian joked that that railway workers aren’t just conductors—they’re therapists too. Under shelling, he quipped, they distract terrified passengers by revealing the ultimate secret: how to grow the perfect tomato.
Lesia is not the only artist focused on keeping the world’s eyes on Ukraine. I dropped into Olexiy Sai’s studio the day before he left for the Burning Man Festival. Last year, he presented a giant installation in the Nevada desert entitled I’m Fine. From a distance, the large brightly colored letters recalled a fairground or hippy commune, but up close you saw that they are made from red, blue, and yellow road signs from frontline towns, scarred and chewed up by bullets and shells. The work turned the metal wreckage into a bold statement of survival and defiance.
This year Olexiy created a more ambitious piece, Black Cloud—a 15-meter high, eight-ton inflatable canvas sculpture filled with 2,500 cubic meters of air. Designed to pulse with strobe lights, the structure was paired with a soundscape of missiles, sirens, and explosions orchestrated by the Ukrainian war veteran and musician DJ Tapolsky. “I want the cloud to look as big and scary as possible,” Olexiy told me, “It’s going to be most visible at night.” The idea, he added, is to alert people to the reality of the war despite US President Donald Trump’s promises of a peace deal. “If it is not stopped this conflict will spread far beyond Ukraine. The whole world is entering a turbulent zone, so my work is a warning to act before it’s too late.”
Sadly, his cloud of doom was ripped in half by a hurricane-force dust storm on the festival’s opening day in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. To add insult to injury, the accident coincided with Ukrainian Independence Day. Olexiy and his team were upset but undeterred. They reworked the remains of the cloud into a new installation—giant black letters spelling out NO FATE. It refers to a famous line from the Terminator movie: “There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves,” words the heroine carves into a table, signifying her belief in free will over a pre-determined future.
Apathy is certainly not Olexiy’s style. Many artists’ works were damaged by the storm but while some of them retreated inside their tents and opted to party instead, he rolled up his sleeves. “It was quite an experience—not fun but memorable,” he told me on his way back to Kyiv. Now he is planning to rebuild his cloud before it goes on an international tour. It will be accompanied by video performances, including a reading of a Crimean Tatar poem against tyranny that had been censored during the Soviet era.
In a Facebook post, the Black Cloud’s producer, Vitaly Deynega, put a positive spin on the hurricane in the desert. He said the destruction of the installation amplified international media interest and the global security concerns it addressed. In short, he wrote, it is a metaphor for Ukraine’s ongoing ordeal. “Over the last few years we are used to building, taking devastating blows, rebuilding, and continuing to work again.”
Lucy Ash is IPQ’s On the Ground columnist. She is an award-winning presenter of radio and television documentaries and author of the book The Baton and the Cross about the Russian Orthodox Church.