Diaries of War

Starred review from October 2, 2023
Side-by-side first-person narratives—one Ukrainian, one Russian—depict in heartbreaking detail the devastation of the war in Ukraine in this visceral work of graphic journalism from National Book Critics Circle Award winner Krug (Belonging). The narrative is structured as a dual week-by-week diary, both visually polished and emotionally raw. K is a Russian-born Ukrainian reporter who divides her time between the front lines and Copenhagen, where she sends her kids to live with her mother. D is a Russian artist who “fell in love with freedom” as a teenager during the collapse of the Soviet Union. He hates the war and what Russia has become. Throughout, Krug juxtaposes everyday images in revealing ways: kids in the background are still kids—D’s play Mario as K’s play Minecraft. But K and her circle fight for their lives (“My goal is to survive, to help other people survive this war and to preserve our common heritage”), whereas D’s immigration attempts are at first philosophically driven, then grow in urgency after the Russian government institutes a military draft: “I’m ready to go to prison if that’s the price I have to pay,” D says. Krug’s drawings favor close-ups: hands holding dirt with a small plant sprouting, half-faces singing (or boycotting) the Russian national anthem. This powerfully conveys the chaos that war wreaks on civilians.

December 1, 2023
Having explored her German family's part in World War II, Krug now turns to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. When war in Ukraine broke out in February 2022, Krug turned to two acquaintances, a Ukrainian journalist and an artist from St. Petersburg, and asked about their feelings. From their answers, set in two columns, she developed this 52-week illustrated narrative. Both respondents, "K." and "D.," greeted the first moments of war with shock. K. took her children from Kyiv to the relative safety of Lviv, while D. discussed emigrating with his wife and children. "It's impossible to breathe freely here," he says. "You live with the fear that they might come for you." As time passed, D. documented the increasing repression that accompanied the demand that Russian citizens support Putin's war; meanwhile, K. chronicled the increasing resolve of her compatriots to resist. "I saw the photographs of the massacres in Bucha and Irpin," she notes. "The only thought I have in my mind is that I don't know how to live in a world where something like this happens." Krug's thought experiment might have been more meaningful had the two respondents not been so like-minded: Both decry the war and oppose Putin while insisting on Ukraine's sovereignty, and both liken Russia's invasion to that of Nazi Germany 80 years earlier. D., visiting neighboring Latvia, was surprised to discover that many Russians in that country supported the war, but he notes that they were in the minority overall, even as, back at home, "the place where Russian culture is most actively canceled is Russia itself." Both of them hope for peace, but, as K. writes, realistically, "The animosity between Ukrainians and Russians will remain for years, decades even." A necessarily sorrowful but insightful view of a war whose horrors are ongoing.

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