Reflection from Sumy

13 April 2025, Hotel Voskrezensky, Sumy 

It's early morning, and I am having a WhatsApp conversation with a friend in Amsterdam, trying to explain why I'm not in the hotel shelter every time the oddly American voice in my alert app announces another in an endless sequence of air raid alerts in Sumy: 

Somewhere during this conversation, two explosions happen nearby. The first has the quality of a bag of cement being dropped nearby and feeling the impact in the air and the floor. The second is much louder, much stronger, and feels closer. I’ll learn later that these were the ballistic missiles that Russia launched into the heart of Sumy’s old town, three blocks from my hotel, but this all comes later. 

The first explosion is close enough that I can hear it clearly. I’m not really sure what to do. I go sit in the bathroom briefly, but tapping its walls, it’s clear that whatever they are made of doesn’t satisfy any reasonable ‘two walls’ rule. I look out the window, to see whether I can see anything, before realising what a stupid thing that is to do. Then the second explosion hits. Much closer. 

I grab my journal, camera and backpack and leave immediately. In the hotel lobby, staff are all on their phones – checking on friends, I assume – and we all head down into the shelter until it’s clear that things have passed. I’m not panicked exactly – more like incredibly on edge. A feeling that won’t pass for hours. 

Later in the afternoon 

Volodymyr, Anna and Maryna (colleagues from the journalism department at Sumy State University) have been taking me around town to see some of the sites of previous attacks by Shahed drones. I’d no conception of the damage that even a lowly drone could do. One of our first stops is an enormous apartment block, out of which the strike has ripped three floors. I can see the floor of the topmost apartment flopping down into the enormous cavity below. Some rooms still have fittings and remnants of the lives of the people who lived there. 

I don’t know how to describe it. It’s surreal? It’s solemn. It’s terrifying, perhaps even sublime, in the darkest possible sense of the word. Like encountering the mark of some terrifying force. Something from which nothing could really save you if it came for you. As though hell itself reached out to tear a fistful of human life out of a wall. It’s a cold site. Struck some time ago. It’s still terrifying to see. 

15 April 2025, Sumy, Petropavlivska Street 

[Taking photographs of the aftermath for the Sumy Red Cross] 

Writing later in this journal about taking photographs at the site and trying to reflect on where I went and what I saw, it’s impossible. I have only fragments of memories of the scenes inside and hundreds of images. The photographs act like a kind of index – I can recall fragments of when each was taken, but that’s about it. I remember so much broken glass and needing to step so carefully around debris. I recall that the Red Cross flak jackets seemed lighter than my own. I recall the ceiling fixtures dangling like demented Christmas decorations from the ceiling, and rooms appearing as though they’d been picked up and shaken like snow globes – desks and chairs and fittings and paper all chaotically mixed and jumbled. 

I wonder whether the lack of specific memory is a kind of emotional defence. I don’t think I feel sad or traumatised (though in the comments from friends and family in the days to come, I’m clearly mistaken). I remember being in shock that there exist weapons like this. Trying to understand the physics that could do this to a building. That could reach into every room and just completely fuck them up like this. Wondering what it would have been like to be a person in this space on a Sunday morning. How would it have been possible to survive? A building is meant to be a solid thing. Something that cannot deform or break in the manner I am seeing. Certainly not in an instant. 

Afterwards, Oksana from the Red Cross and I go for coffee in a café nearby. I mostly just want the caffeine, as I’ve no appetite at all. I think I had a black Americano. I definitely had a pistachio croissant. I’d never seen one before and was surprised to discover that I was starving hungry eating it. Looking down on the floor, I see a piece of glass under the table – that squarish-kind that means it was a fragment of some shatter resistant pane. It must have dislodged from my boot. 

I pick it up and put it in my pocket. It feels like it’d be disrespectful, somehow, to throw it in the trash.