I met Roman Trokhymets in Kramatorsk, a front-line city in eastern Ukraine. He had just come off a rotation in Bakhmut, exhausted but steady. A sniper with the Azov Brigade, he recorded his experiences at the front so others could see what the war demanded of the people fighting it.
Two weeks later, he was in a hospital bed with another concussion — his fourth. The pressure wave from an explosion had taken him down.
Concussions don’t add up; they compound. The damage is invisible, but constant.
He would later tell me, “It’s some kind of curse to have so much invisible damage.”
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He would return to the frontlines. Then came the night the war followed him to dinner. A Russian missile tore through a Kramatorsk pizzeria where he was eating with his sister and friends. Thirteen people were killed. Dozens were injured. He stayed to pull others from the rubble before going to the hospital.
“When you go to battle, you prepare yourself mentally,” he said. “But when civilians die, children ... it’s different.”
I saw him again months later in Kyiv. He was noticeably thinner and slower to find words, but he was still intensely present. The battle outside had quieted for him; the one inside had not.
City noise felt like electricity. He wore headphones to blunt the shocks. Sleep came in short rations. Some days, he lost consciousness. On better days, he tried to build a bridge back to himself.
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That’s when he showed me the canvases: red and black. Blood and ground, he said.
“When it mixes — this is what infantry soldiers see day by day, night by night,” Trokhymets said.
He wasn’t trying to make statements so much as relearn a rhythm that made life possible.
“It scares me a lot to become this darkness after war," he said.
Before the war, he studied architecture. Now he paints and sculpts — often skulls. And he noticed something: they all smile.
“It’s interesting, because we were born to smile,” he said.
It sounded like a line meant for someone else until you watched him hold the clay and decide what shape the day would take.
Trokhymets still shows up on Sundays in Kyiv at the vigils for Azov prisoners who can’t come home. He stands among families with photos on posterboard, the names, the dates, the small handwriting that says, "Please don’t forget." He posts memorials when a brother falls. He keeps going.
“I need to go through this dark tunnel of my subconsciousness,” he told me. “To find the light at the end.”
He said it simply, not as a promise, more as a plan. For a moment, I could see who he was before the shrapnel, before the blast wave, before the night of fire at the restaurant — a man certain that light is something you walk toward.
For Ukraine, and for Roman, survival isn’t the end of the story. It’s the start of the harder part: learning how to live after.
