I first came to Ukraine in 2018, drawn by the familiarity of war and those who serve in wars, searching for a world and community that I thought I’d left behind years before. What I found was an inspiration, a tribe of revolutionaries, ordinary men and women, most without military training, who self-deployed to the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and stopped the Russian insurgency in the Donbas.

Unlike the wars I fought in in Afghanistan and Iraq, these fighters weren’t under a contract or an obligation to serve a government. They weren’t motivated by money or benefits or job security. This tribe was driven by something far more powerful––what they truly believed in and a vision for change.

For four years I’ve been following and documenting these revolutionaries, walking alongside them as they move from the front line to the peace life. I’ve laughed with them, cried with them, drank far too much alcohol with them, raised glasses in memory with them, and after February 24th, when the Ukrainians, again, rose to fight and inspired the world, I suddenly realized that I had become one of them.

There was once an undeniable thread woven between myself and the 2014 revolutionaries, the experience of war and the experience of a collision; when the impossible becomes possible, when everyone turns in towards each other instead of against each other, when a land we call home is invaded: for me, it was September 11th, 2001, and for them, the Maidan revolution, Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, and insurgency into the Donbas in 2014. But February 24th bound us in a new way, because it became one that we shared together. Because Ukraine, in fact, became my home. --J.T. Blatty