Alevtina Kakhidze Interview: Donbas, War Testimony & Ecology

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/04/19

Alevtina Kakhidze (b. 1973, Zhdanivka) is a Ukrainian multidisciplinary artist known for incisive drawing-performances that braid personal history, war testimony, and plant–human ecologies. Trained at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv (1999–2004) and the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands (2004–2006), she lives and works in Muzychi near Kyiv. Since 2018, she has served in Ukraine as a United Nations/UNDP “Tolerance Envoy.” Significant recognitions include the Kazimir Malevich Artist Award (2008) and the 2023 Women in Arts — The Resistance prize (Women in Visual Arts category). Recent highlights include Ukraine’s National Pavilion, From South to North, at the inaugural maltabiennale.art (2024) and the solo exhibition Plants and People at Galeria Arsenał, Białystok (October 24, 2024–January 19, 2025). Her ongoing research and performance strand Follow the Plants frames ecology as a pacifist methodology amid conflict.

In this interview with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Kakhidze recalls Donbas 2014: local collaborators, naïve hopes, propaganda myths about shale gas and Russian language. She recounts recovering her mother’s body with Red Cross help and a schoolmate-turned-director, who was later imprisoned. Zhdanivka’s brief liberation in August 2014, Minsk’s withdrawal, and the 2022 phase shaped her view that Russia’s 2022 phase is crueller and that support near Kyiv is scarce. Kakhidze links “Follow the Plants,” perennial grains, and militarized “kill/gray zones” to climate damage. Accepting mortality, she urges global responsibility: think globally, act locally.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Let’s start. I think the point about your mother is an important starting point. From your mother’s notes, what were some of the key points or takeaways you found while reading them, before 2022 and now?

Alevtina Kakhidze: Yes, this is an important question. If you want to go very deeply into it, the way the Russians acted in Donbas before 2022 was a bit different. In Donbas, they had more civilian supporters. Even my neighbours believed the naïve idea that, with Russia, they would be more prosperous and economically successful.

That was in 2014, not now. Now they are completely lost—they don’t have water. They’ve realized that everything they imagined was madness. There was even a man—I went to school with him, we were in the same class, and we even had a relationship. He was very enthusiastic about this so-called new power. But later, they put him in a cellar.

I know this because when my mother died, I tried to do something with her dog. I didn’t want to go myself to retrieve her body because I knew it would be dangerous—I am openly pro-Ukrainian and a well-known artist. If you Google me, you’ll see many articles. The Red Cross helped me to bring my mother’s body, but they asked me not to tell journalists because they want to keep helping others quietly. So I got back my mother’s body, but the dog stayed behind.

The dog is still alive. When I started talking to this old friend from school, he told me, “Alevtina, I’m the director of the biggest mining factory in Europe.” That’s true—it’s a large enterprise. Why did he become director? Because the previous one had left, it was apparent that the occupation was chaotic in every sense.

He promised to take care of the dog. Then I started calling him, but he didn’t answer. I sent many messages—nothing.Set featured image So I searched for him online. Even in Ukrainian news, it was reported that he had been captured by the armed forces of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic.

He had been proud to hold a position there, but then they imprisoned him. Later, I lost contact with him because I lost my phone, and he probably changed his. My mother’s friend told me that he became skinny after his imprisonment, but they eventually released him. I would say that for some young people who were very pro-Ukrainian, staying in Donetsk became unbearable.

Or so-called Donetsk People’s Republic—it was dangerous, and most people left. 

Jacobsen: For people like your mom —an older woman —she could stay without such problems. What was her age at that time, by the way?

Kakhidze: In her seventies.

Jacobsen: Oh, yes. 

Kakhidze: But in Bucha, Irpin, or Kherson, it didn’t matter what your age was—you could be shot.

Jacobsen: I mean more in terms of if push came to shove and you had to flee, you’d need a vehicle. You can’t go far on foot.

Kakhidze: Yes, but we could have helped her. We were waiting for her. She didn’t want to leave her house. What I wanted to say—my point is that in the Donetsk area, until 2022, the Russians acted through many collaborators, primarily local, and they weren’t as cruel toward the population. They weren’t completely mad.

There were some soldiers from deep inside Russia. I remember a story my mom told. She was going to the market, and a young man in a Russian uniform asked her where he could buy cigarettes. She said, “You don’t know where to buy cigarettes?” He said, “No, I came from far away to protect you.” And my mom said, “Protect us? I don’t need any protection. Give me your phone number, I’ll call your mother and tell her that you could lose your arm or leg here, or even be killed. Let me call her.”

I said, “Are you crazy to talk to him? He’s holding a Kalashnikov.” And she said, “Come on, he’s so young.” My mom had worked in a kindergarten, and for her, anyone under twenty was still a child. She said, “He was like a kid. I was talking to him as if he were my student.”

Actually, there were some people from deep Russia, but most of those with weapons were locals. For instance, my neighbour once asked my mom, “What do you think, should I take money from the Russians to stand at a checkpoint for ten thousand rubles?” And my mom said, “No, Vitya, better not to do that.”

But the Russians, after 2022, are much crueller. They don’t have the same strategy or policy of acting through locals. Around Kyiv, they found almost no supporters—maybe a few marginal people. In my village, I don’t know anyone who supported them.

But if you talk about my mom’s city back in 2014, even on her street, there were many people sympathetic to Russia. I don’t think they truly understood what they believed in. Now they’ve changed their minds. They don’t want this“independence” anymore.

Jacobsen: And what does independence mean to them now, when they’ve changed their minds?

Kakhidze: At that time, they believed Russia would bring them independence from Kyiv.

Jacobsen: So they thought they were becoming “Little Russia”?

Kakhidze: Exactly. But if you look deeper, it’s hard to understand. I remember that at that time, my mom was very pro-Ukrainian. She argued constantly with people who believed in the so-called independence of the Donetsk region alongside Russia. She fought with them and argued passionately. She could be stubborn—almost crazy about it.

For example, she once said, “Alevtina, can you explain to me—is it possible that Kyiv could poison all the people in our city with shale gas?”

“Alevtina, is it possible that Kyiv, eight hundred kilometres away, could poison people in the Donetsk area with shale gas?”

That was myth number one. 

Myth number two: they were terrified that people in the Donetsk region would be forbidden to speak Russian. Even now, people still talk to Russians openly in Kyiv there—you know this. But in 2014, they were drowning in Russian disinformation.

If you came to my studio near Kyiv, I could show you a ton of propaganda my mom brought from Donetsk. All of it claimed that people couldn’t even speak Russian at home. Russia carried out a massive propaganda campaign against these poor people, my neighbours. I can’t even describe how effective it was. Whatever Russia does in this world, it lies. They are number one at lying.

So, first, there was the myth that shale gas from Kyiv would kill people. Second, the myth that people in Lviv were all“Banderites”—as if that meant something evil. It was not very nice. These people lived in total fear of Kyiv. They believed Russia would somehow protect them. Because of that, Russia didn’t need to use much weaponry at first. They used hybrid tactics instead—psychological and informational warfare—to paint Kyiv as absolutely evil.

But at the same time, all those older people, like my mom, still travelled to Kyiv to collect their pensions. They actually received two types of pensions—one from Russia and one from Ukraine.

Jacobsen: I didn’t know that.

Kakhidze: Yes, it was utterly absurd. Ukraine’s army was still fighting for the region until January or February 2015, and then the Minsk Agreement was reached. My city—Zhdanivka—was occupied by Russia in April 2014. But the Ukrainian army entered the city and liberated it on August 16, 2014.

Jacobsen: So it was several months of occupation.

Kakhidze: Yes, several months. Ukrainian authorities remained in the city until September 20, 2014. Then, under the terms of the Minsk Agreement, a dividing line was established, and the Ukrainian army had to withdraw from my city. So, my mom was thrilled because, for about a month and a half, she felt that Zhdanivka would remain part of Ukraine—but it didn’t. That was only after the first Minsk Agreement, not the second one.

Jacobsen: You’ve served as a UNDP Tolerance Envoy since 2018 and received the Kazimir Malevich Artist Award in 2008 and the Women in Arts—The Resistance award in 2023. What do those recognitions mean to you?

Kakhidze: The Kazimir Malevich Award was a long time ago—2008, at the beginning of my career. It was meaningful because it was the very first edition of that award, and I was nominated. It gave me confidence as a young artist.

About the Tolerance Envoy role—it’s interesting. That was during the Russian–Ukrainian war, though at that time Ukrainian society wasn’t yet fully aware of how serious the conflict would become. I was travelling across eastern Ukraine as a “tolerance envoy.” But honestly, it was a bit of a strange concept. They said, “We’ve noticed that Ukraine doesn’t have enough tolerance.”

Jacobsen: For being invaded?

Kakhidze: Exactly. They thought the problem was that Ukrainians weren’t tolerant enough. So they created this idea of tolerance envoys who would “work on it.” There were about twenty of us—writers, musicians, artists. I did what I already do in my artistic practice, except this time I was technically paid for travel expenses. Actual fee? One hryvnia per year—for tax purposes.

So I was going to the eastern part of the country—Donetsk, Kramatorsk, Bakhmut, Kostyantynivka, all those cities. Some of them no longer exist now. I met with people, showed them my art, and spoke with them. It was really humanitarian work.

I wanted to remind them that Kyiv hadn’t forgotten them—that we were with them. Since I’m from that region, it was personal. I grew up there before moving to Kyiv to study art. My mother was still living there at the time.

So for me, this “tolerance envoy” role became a way to do something concrete and human for the people living near the occupied territories and the front line.

Jacobsen: That’s not an uncommon feeling. There’s often frustration within Ukraine that the so-called “West” tends to issue statements of concern or condemnation rather than taking more decisive action. Sending money helps, of course—Canada’s done that—but as the joke goes: “Money is great, but money is not munitions.” When you’re being bombed, statements of concern don’t stop missiles. Peace sometimes means fighting an aggressor.

Kakhidze: I’ll tell you another joke: money always has a limit. You can’t buy a nuclear bomb.

Jacobsen: That’s from the earlier era of gallows humour. You were denuclearized, of course, after the Soviet period.

Kakhidze: That’s true.

Jacobsen: I haven’t published this yet, but I once visited one of the decommissioned nuclear sites. You go down twelve stories underground to the control room, and they show you this old video—something being destroyed by a nuclear strike—to demonstrate what the site was designed for. Now it’s basically a war scrap yard and living museum. 

So, shifting topics: social realities, war, and plant–human ecologies. You trained at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv, wanted to be an artist from early on, earned awards like the Kazimir Malevich in 2008, and later, Women in Arts—The Resistance in 2023. Maybe the “tolerance envoy” title was a little naïvely optimistic, but it was still recognition.

When you’re portraying social realities and plant–human ecologies, what are you trying to express—about the relationship between humans and the environment, and about Ukrainian social life, or even human life in general?

Kakhidze: So, ecology: I work with children a lot. Recently, I created a colouring book where they could draw their own answers and colour them in. I pulled three bags and asked them to imagine what they’d put inside.

One bag was “freedom for yourself.”

One bag was “freedom for our country.”

And one was “freedom for the whole planet.”

I told them they could fill each bag however they wished—starting from their own, as individuals, or thinking about the bag for the planet. And one child said something that really struck me: “If I don’t put humans in the bag for the planet’sfreedom, everything will be fine.”

Since Russia escalated the war, everything has become worse for the environment. Every border conflict now demands more weapons. You see this, too, right?

Jacobsen: I do.

Kakhidze: The war in Ukraine brings more CO₂ emissions, more fires, more destruction. It’s a climate crisis multiplier. But if we’re being sincere, the front line in Ukraine is also the coldest region—it has no agriculture now. Do you know that?

Jacobsen: That’s a good point. I didn’t know that.

Kakhidze: Yes, but we can’t celebrate that. The loss of agriculture doesn’t mean the land heals—it just means the land dies differently. And beyond Ukraine, Russia’s aggression has frightened everyone. Poland is afraid; the Baltic states are worried. The escalation affects the entire ecosystem—political, social, and environmental.

Germany has started to think seriously about it, too. But overall, people around the world aren’t spending enough time thinking about how to address the climate crisis. And this is not Ukraine’s fault—it’s the fault of Russia and other authoritarian states like China and North Korea.

As an artist and researcher, I’ve been studying how human systems influence the climate crisis, and what I’ve learned in recent years is quite revealing.

First, our global agriculture is based mainly on annual plants rather than perennial ones. You understand what I mean—wheat or grain could be perennial. In fact, perennial wheat already exists. I visited Kansas State University in 2021, where they’re researching it. There I just found out about The Land Institute.

Perennial grain means we don’t have to disturb the soil every spring. When we don’t plow the soil, we burn less fuel, release less CO₂, and maintain soil health. Annual crops—because they require constant tilling—disrupt that balance and increase emissions.

Secondly, perennial plants don’t release the same volume of CO₂ as annual crops. The Earth—whether created by God, nature, or something else—was once covered by meadows and forests, not by vast fields of annual plants.

But now, our landscapes are dominated by sunflowers, corn, and wheat—all annual crops. That’s why the front line in Ukraine has effectively become the coldest strip of land on the planet—no agriculture grows there anymore.

Jacobsen: That’s fascinating. As a related note, a Romanian journalist colleague told me recently—and a Ukrainian lieutenant confirmed it yesterday—that the area is no longer strictly a “front line.” The Romanian called it a “kill zone,” while the Ukrainian called it a “gray zone.”

The difference is subtle but essential. A gray zone or kill zone isn’t an active line of combat—it’s a vast, deadly stretch of land where almost no one can survive. With drones and remote warfare, either side can strike across, maybe, twenty kilometres or more. So if you enter that space, it’s pure destruction. No one farms there. And there have been reports—credible ones—of Russian drones bombing farmers on tractors.

Kakhidze: Yes, we are talking about a kill zone.

Jacobsen: So, to your point, “front line” sounds too narrow. The kill zone, or gray zone, can stretch 20 kilometres wide. They measured along roughly 1,200 kilometres of front. Multiply that by twenty, and that’s the scale of land we’re talking about.

Kakhidze: Yes, I’ve read that. These scientists are soldiers too—botanists who joined the army. Every day they’d eat breakfast—soup and bread—and then measure soil temperature before returning to their military duties. Two people sharing one trench: a botanist and a soldier. Fifteen minutes for science, and then back to war.

So, talking again about how I convey ecology—what I mean is this: people around the world still don’t understand that we’re all in the same box. The Russian-Ukrainian war is not just a Ukrainian war. It’s not only our problem. It’s a global one, deeply tied to ecology.

Until people in every country recognize this—and start investing not only in defence but also in science—we won’t solve it. I mentioned the perennial grain earlier. It exists at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. I visited them. The idea came from a scientist who was imprisoned and later killed under Stalin’s regime. He proposed perennial grain nearly a hundred years ago.

People need to devote more time and funding to science if we want humanity to survive for the next thousand years. If we continue consuming without awareness—if we say, “It’s someone else’s war, it’s not our concern”—we will lose the planet.

No ecological plan will succeed if countries like Norway, Sweden, or Canada think they can maintain clean environments while other parts of the world burn. That’s impossible. My message is to think globally but apply those thoughts locally.

I’ve often debated this in my own mind, especially with the ideas of the French philosopher Bruno Latour. Do you know him?

Jacobsen: Yes.

Kakhidze: Bruno Latour—the philosopher of science and ecology. Right. He died in 2022 in Paris. When he was still alive that year, he wrote something remarkable: “This morning I received two pieces of news—one was a new report on the climate crisis, and the other was the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. I don’t know which news is more tragic.”

He said he couldn’t decide which was worse: the climate crisis report or the invasion. In my opinion, that’s a foolish statement. The Russian-Ukrainian war is not separate from the climate crisis—it’s both problems in one.

Jacobsen: That’s a fair point. The invasion’s impact on emissions, agriculture, and infrastructure was immediate—within a quarter or two of an economic cycle, the environmental damage was measurable.

The effects on agriculture were immediate, especially in countries that depend on Ukrainian grain. Many people didn’trealize how deeply reliant the world was on those harvests. Even the Ukrainian flag symbolizes that—the blue for sky and the yellow for fields of grain.

Kakhidze: I recently spoke with people from Africa who told me that the price of sunflower oil has tripled since 2020. For them, that’s devastating.

Jacobsen: It seems Latour didn’t grasp this interconnectedness. From a logical perspective, it’s what we’d call a false dichotomy. These aren’t two separate crises. The war and the climate emergency are the same problem expressed at different scales—one global, one local.

The invasion diverts global focus away from addressing planetary warming, while simultaneously worsening it. Russia is a significant oil producer. Putin’s regime depends on high oil prices to survive economically. Even when prices drop, he finds buyers—India, for instance—who will keep the market alive.

It’s a selective kind of blindness: recognizing both problems but failing to see their integration. Fundamentally, these are the same crisis—different human actions feeding the same destructive system.

Kakhidze: I was deeply disappointed that he couldn’t see this. For me, it’s two problems in one package—or two for the price of one. Why hesitate to say that?

Jacobsen: I think that kind of hesitation often comes from comfort. Societies that have solved their infrastructure, food, and healthcare issues—places like France or Luxembourg—live in relative ease. For much of human history — over the last 250,000 years — survival was an everyday struggle. That sense of urgency has been dulled.

Comfort breeds detachment. People lose perspective on how fragile stability really is. In those environments, there’s a lot of what we call “waffling” or “flip-flopping”—politicians who avoid conviction or urgency.

If Luxembourg invaded France, there would be less hesitation in responding. But when a crisis is elsewhere, especially in Eastern Europe, people deliberate endlessly rather than act when outside it. It’s like a headache. Once you have it, that becomes the sole concern.

Kakhidze: Yes, but if we’re talking about ecology, then your metaphor about a headache fits perfectly. The climate crisis is that collective headache. Wherever emissions increase—anywhere on the planet—it hurts us all.

Jacobsen: Climate change is a global headache. And, unfortunately, even understanding that requires basic scientific literacy. For example, in Canada, about a quarter of people still reject evolutionary theory. They believe humans were created 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, an idea traced back to Bishop James Ussher’s chronology from the 17th century.

Ussher calculated the age of the world by counting biblical genealogies and concluded that creation began in 4004 BCE—on a Thursday afternoon, no less.

Kakhidze: [Laughing] The Maya people in Guatemala must find that funny. They say, “We are on the land of the Maya,” so everyone claims some ancient heritage.

Jacobsen: True. In a sense, we’re all on Neanderthal land, too. There was a Ukrainian shared joke about that, actually.

Kakhidze: Really? Tell me.

Jacobsen: In Canada, we have land acknowledgments—ceremonial statements recognizing some Indigenous territories. Some are historically accurate; some are apparently debatable. There are about 600 First Nations bands across the country. So, a Ukrainian shared a meme once, which said, “I would like to acknowledge that I am on the unceded territory of the Neanderthals,” maybe referring to places like Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Dnipro, or Odesa. It’s a darkly humorous comment on how far back you can trace the roots of belonging.

Anyway, I recently gave a webinar at a humanistic education school, and someone asked me about the impact of humanist education in the so-called “Third World” (their term) compared to the “First World.” I pointed out that terms like East and West, First and Third World, developed and developing—they’re losing meaning. They’re placeholders from another era.

Today, with mass travel and instant communication, the boundaries are porous—more like Swiss cheese than walls. Even“the West” is a confusing term. Geographically, it would never include Japan or South Korea, but culturally and politically, they’re considered part of the Western world. So are we talking geography or values? Because, through time, values shift and overlap.

And when people talk about “East versus West,” they rarely include African nations in those categories, even though Africa itself has both East and West. The more we talk, the clearer it becomes: we’re all in the same boat, the same ecological and geopolitical system, to your point.

Mass travel and communication make that shared reality more visible, even though many groups are retreating inward—nationally or regionally. You see this in the United States, where isolationism is on the rise. The country withdraws from global cooperation—cuts USAID funding, erects tariff walls, pulls back from international engagement. And when they step away, someone else fills that gap.

Of course, Ukrainians have fair critiques of what they call “the West.” But the bigger picture is that these old geopolitical categories are dissolving. Over the next few decades, they’ll probably collapse entirely in 20th-century use and meaning. Kardashev described a Type I civilization as a global one, which seems emergent. If we make it, then these are its birth pangs. 

Global challenges, e.g., climate change, nuclear proliferation, and pandemics, don’t respect borders. They’re statistically distributed but globally bound.

Kakhidze: Yes, exactly. When you’ve lived in war for twelve years and still keep creating, your perspective changes. As an artist, I don’t think like someone in constant danger anymore. Everyone in Ukraine has already accepted the possibility of death. If someone is genuinely terrified of nuclear weapons, missiles, or drones, they can leave Ukraine. It’s possible for anyone—even men. You can cross the river. Many have deserted that way.

Jacobsen: Yes, that happens in any war.

Kakhidze: When I talk about these global ideas, it’s because I’ve already gone through the imagination of being dead. I’ve accepted that possibility. So now I think from a place beyond fear—almost from the perspective of being dead already, if that makes sense.

Once you’ve accepted the possibility of being killed, your thinking changes. You stop being trapped by small personal worries—your “headache,” as you called it. You begin to think about the world differently, from outside of your own survival.

It’s not a normal perspective. When you live in a peaceful country, you think about saving money for retirement or planning for old age. In Ukraine, no one believes that way anymore. If you aren’t planning a long-term future, how can you think about the world long-term?

So we live between two extremes—day-to-day survival, and a distant, almost abstract future. It’s a strange place to exist, somewhere between human and animal, between life and something beyond it. And that makes me wonder what will happen to the world as a whole.

Jacobsen: That’s a profound way to put it. I was travelling with a Ukrainian colleague. They shared a humorous meme playing on stereotypes. It showed three people: a Frenchman saying, “I will die for love,” an American saying, “I will die for freedom,” and an Eastern European saying, “I will die.”

Kakhidze: Yes, but for Americans, “dying for freedom” feels like an outdated idea. You can see that inside their democratic system, no one is really dying for freedom anymore. And the French dying for love is also a stereotype. I teach in France, and I know them well.

Even within Ukraine, there are so many different reactions. Some of my artist friends joined the army voluntarily. Others fled. Some stay home, trying to avoid meeting the people who might check their passports and send them to fight.

Men in Ukraine must carry what we call something like a “military ticket.” I’m not sure of the exact translation, but it’s essentially documentation proving you’re registered as a potential member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Jacobsen: Like an exemption card or enlistment record?

Kakhidze: Yes, something like that. Anyway, all these national stereotypes still exist. Americans aren’t really so devoted to freedom as they claim, and when I was in France, I didn’t notice people dying for love either. These are just myths.

Jacobsen: Now, some Ukrainians can develop dark humour in war. Stereotypes can abound. Thank you for the opportunity and your time today, Alevtina.

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