Veteran Fellow

INDEX - Autumn 2025 1 September – 30 November 2025

As part of the fellowship, Yevhen will spend September to November in Lviv working on a literary project:

With the support of INDEX, I’d like to organise and prepare for publication a collection of short stories titled Veterans’ Fables (working title). These stories are drawn from my own experiences as well as those of my fellow soldiers — both men and women. They are diverse: some are humorous, others tragic, heroic, or harrowing. Collecting such a wide range of episodes is a deliberate choice — it’s the only way to even try to capture the truth. Propaganda is monochrome. Truth is always messy — and rarely pleasing.
Yevhen Shybalov

Yevhen Shybalov

Yevhen is a professional journalist who spent over eight years as a Donetsk-based correspondent for the weekly Dzerkalo Tyzhnia. He is also a humanitarian expert and a veteran of the Russian-Ukrainian war. In 2015, Yevhen left journalism to focus on humanitarian and peacebuilding work in Eastern Ukraine, including with the Geneva-based international NGO The Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. There, he studied the impact of war on the region and developed training materials for peacebuilding initiatives.

On 24 February 2022, Yevhen voluntarily joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces as a grenadier. He took part in combat operations in the Kyiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions. In May 2022, he was captured and spent seven months in Russian captivity. After being released in a prisoner exchange, he returned to the front as a UAV operator. In 2023, he was demobilised and went on to lead the European Integration Department at the Ministry of Veterans Affairs of Ukraine, working on aligning veteran policy with European and NATO standards.

Today, Yevhen works as an independent consultant on security, humanitarian action, and veteran policy. He is a recipient of the Honor of the Profession journalism award (2015) and was awarded the For Resilience medal in 2024.