“This scene was outside a supermarket in Kyiv a few hours before the 36-hour curfew earlier this month. It’s a long queue because everyone was trying to get as much food as possible before the lockdown. It’s a very typical scene right now. You also see long queues at cash points limiting the world to 200 Ukrainian hryvnia [about £5]. ‘
Talking to him through Signal while he is under curfew in the apartment lent to him by a resident of Kiev, my first question is: why? What made him make such a dangerous journey into a living nightmare that others desperately want to escape?
“The Opera and Ballet Theater is easily the most beautiful building in Odessa, now surrounded by sandbags and these big black hedgehogs made by volunteers in factories across the city. They are cut off from the old railway line and are located on all roads and it is impossible for tanks to move through them. Painted or glued to everything is the phrase: “Russian warship, go to your wedding”. This has become a real slogan. You see it everywhere. “
“I guess doing my job is a compulsion,” he says. “I think the same is true for photojournalists and journalists covering conflicts. We want to tell stories that we would otherwise assume we would not tell. “This has always been my intention in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Yemen and in all the other places where I have worked in the past.” Butler depicts what is happening in war zones, refugee camps and conflict situations with beautiful, delicate paintings in ink and watercolor since he joined the British Army in Afghanistan at the age of 21. His work has been published in newspapers and magazines around the world and is on display at the Imperial War Museum and V&A. He dislikes the term “war artist” and prefers to describe himself as a report illustrator. “The reality is that I plan what is happening around the margins of war,” he says. “I think there’s always room around these vulnerable, sensitive places to tell bigger, slower, quieter stories, a visual description of what’s going on there. “It’s not just about blowing up tanks and helicopters – it’s about what happens on the margins of brutality.” As Butler waited at Odessa station last week to catch the train to Kyiv, a scene of the kind he is interested in playing. “The curfew at 20:00 had started and I felt eerie in the dark. Then a man named Volodymyr pulled out his acoustic guitar and started playing some Ukrainian songs and people started singing together. The guard came and told him to be quiet, but everyone said no, let him play. So he played and his friend distributed flowers, pink tulips, to every woman in the crowd. “It was a great moment.”
“Seeing and hearing this guitarist at the Odessa station, I was impressed by the contrast between what was happening in front of me and the fast-moving things we saw on our front pages and on television screens in recent weeks. “That was the human element of the war, the things that are happening far from the front lines.”
While Butler has the utmost respect for photographers, he believes a depiction of the effects of war in a few hours offers a different perspective. “It’s not like hitting a shutter and then leaving. You can not “steal” a plan. Everything must be done with the permission of the people in the image. It is soft and open. It’s not threatening. “
“This is the coffee in the food market of Odessa. It is currently fully created for the hundreds of young volunteers who come and offer their time. Many of them work in the morning and then come in the afternoon to help. All of these orange hi-vis are volunteers. “They package donations from citizens and shops and put them in boxes and send them to military units, the ground defense, all over the country.”
Yesterday, in Kyiv, where artillery shells were heard in the background all day, Butler went out with two volunteers, one a human rights lawyer and the other a mother, who were helping anyone who could not leave their homes. “We visited a woman named Madame Olga. She was 99 years old and she was afraid that someone might enter her house because she thought they would come to take her away. She wanted to stay at home, whatever the situation. As I was painting her, she told me that she was too weak to move to the bomb shelter when there was an air raid, so she and her daughter stayed in the apartment and hoped that any bombs would be missing. This is the political cost of what is happening. Madame Olga is not at war, but war is largely a part of her life.
“This is Madame Olga, 99. She is almost completely blind and deaf, she does not want to leave her home, so she stays there during the air raids with her 79-year-old daughter, hoping that the rockets will not find them.”
“She is 100 in August and she invited us to her birthday. He lived through the Great Famine – Holodomor – and World War II and is now going through that. She told me that she is so anxious that she forgets the words to describe how she feels. The stress is so great that he can not explain it. It was very moving and I think this is an example of a painting that is a gentle way to sit with someone and listen to what they have to say. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done with a camera, but I hope the designs offer a different dimension. “
George Butler’s work in Ukraine co-funded by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting George Butler’s Drawn Across Borders: True Stories of Migration is released by Walker Studio (£ 15). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
