KHARKIV, Ukraine — On a cold and cloudy morning in Ukraine’s second city, our tour guide Kirill met us at our hotel. Twenty-seven, with dark, combed-back hair and a neatly trimmed beard, he spoke excellent English. He welcomed us warmly and led us to his dusty blue Honda. His father drove and, as we headed northeast, I was reminded of the first lesson from a hostile-environment training course I once took: Wear your seatbelt. He drove like a man who had grown used to being the only person on the road.
Thirty minutes later, we stepped out onto damp earth slicked with iced-over puddles. Towering above us were the shells of Soviet-era residential apartment blocks. This was the Saltivka district, in the city’s northeast, and it’s where Russia’s 2022 invasion first reached Kharkiv. Two years later, the invasion has stalled but it’s unquestionably still a war zone. Concrete buildings pockmarked by bullets and shrapnel, scorched by fires, and bearing gaping holes from missile strikes. A pair of anti-tank obstacles called hedgehogs blocked the door at one entrance. This is the kind of devastation most of us will only ever see on TV, and to be up close is to be transported—the cold silence in a place designed to be brimming with life, the broken glass crunching underfoot, the doors standing open to dark hallways. This is where people once lived.
Climbing over rubble and up the stairs of one building, Kirill explained what happened here. These apartments were the scene of door-to-door fighting. "The Russians thought we would meet them with flowers," he said, "but they were wrong." Most of the personal belongings were gone from the apartments, but in one battered dwelling, among the rubble, an unbroken drinking glass painted with bright flowers and a ceramic mug lay on the floor. The printing on the mug read, "SHINY, May hearts be filled with joy to their content, Just a wee bit more goodness, And every day is new, Brighter than yesterday!"
When I was planning a reporting trip to Ukraine, I had invited my friend Jason to come along. (I would call him a professional tourist, but he prefers to be called a "traveler.") When I told him Kharkiv was on my itinerary, he immediately responded with a video of a Canadian man being guided through bombed-out neighborhoods, with a link to book a tour.
Jason had done a few “war tours” before, in Kyiv and Kabul, but I had mixed feelings. I’ve seen this kind of tourism condemned as "ghoulish," and I cringed remembering images of teens posing for smiling selfies at Auschwitz. But friends who lived through disasters have welcomed the tourists who came after, appreciative of the attention and awareness they might spread—and the money they would spend. The fees paid to war tour operators are significant income in Ukraine. The average monthly salary in Kharkiv is around $500. Jason and I paid $315 each for the day with Kirill.
As we continued to walk through Saltivka, air raid sirens sounded, as they do many times almost every day and night in Kharkiv. We were still only 15 miles from the front. Kirill, and the few residents we saw out and about, continued on with their business unbothered.
In this part of Kharkiv, the destruction is profound, but the resilience is just as visible. New buildings have already gone up between the hulks of bombed-out structures, and residents have moved in. In some of the sturdier old buildings, the holes in the facades are being patched, boarded-up windows are being replaced, and people are returning to their homes. New playground equipment stands bright against the concrete and cloudy sky.
Our next stop was a large parking lot. This was where the home improvement store “Epicenter” stood until last May. Russia dropped three missiles on it during a busy weekend shopping day. Two detonated inside the store. Nineteen people were killed. You can watch video of these bombs from surveillance cameras. I can't stop picturing it happening at my local Home Depot. The blue and white sign in front of the store is still standing, but the building has been torn down and the rubble removed. A shopping mall that shares the Epicenter parking lot is still open; life goes on. Jason asked our guide to go inside to look around.
The mall was warm and brightly lit, with colorful storefronts and soft pop music playing from the speakers. There is a Zara and a McDonald's, though both were closed like half the stores in the mall. A kiosk in the atrium was selling military equipment—guns, scopes, binoculars, body armor. As we made a loop around the first floor, yet another air raid siren started blaring. No one paid it any attention.
On to Kharkiv's Central Park, where normally, even in winter, the park would be lively, Kirill tells us. But the Russians have shelled it often enough over the last couple years that many people are afraid to come. Still, other than the sparse attendance, there were no signs of war here. The park has been lovingly restored each time it is bombed. There is a lake—now frozen—where swans and ducks swim in the summer. Sports fields were in pristine condition. The beach volleyball courts looked so new I wanted to take off my shoes and jump in the sand. Red benches and ornate street lamps line wide promenades. A Ferris wheel anchors an amusement park, which is still closed, as are all the little cafes and restaurants. I could see myself here on a leafy, warm summer afternoon, walking with friends, bringing a picnic or stopping in a café. This is one effect of war tourism: It makes it easier to picture what life was like before being turned upside-down.
Back to the car and a few merciful minutes of warmth as we drove to get lunch near the center of Kharkiv. Heading through a plywood door and down a wooden flight of steps, the restaurant is called "Palyanytsya," the word for a type of Ukrainian bread. "Palyanytsya" is now a shibboleth—Russians struggle to pronounce it and so, Kirill told us, some fighters used it as a password.
Sitting over our plates, I asked Kirill about some of the criticism directed at war tourism—crass, ghoulish, exploitative. He was unmoved. "Half the money we make from these tours goes to the Ukrainian military," he explained. "The rest pays our expenses for the website, the technology, and the people." He runs a tour like ours once every week or two, and says everyone who has come so far has been defined by their curiosity, wanting to see for themselves what the war is like. He echoed sentiments I heard in conversations with other Ukrainians on this visit: They appreciated people coming to see what was happening. They wanted us to see, and to go and tell people. And in Kharkiv especially, they wanted us to know how much they love their city.
After my visit, as I rode the train west across Ukraine, I thought of my friend Gwen Filosa. Her coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath was part of the work that won the staff of the Times-Picayune two Pulitzer Prizes. I asked her about disaster tourism in New Orleans, an industry that still exists nearly 20 years later. She told me that even when the tour buses came, locals—who had much bigger problems to deal with—seemed to feel like the tourists were paying their respects rather than gawking. She also emphasized the importance of outsiders coming in and documenting, spreading the word, and keeping attention on them. "People forget they care without it."
Thinking about my own unease with the idea of war tourism, I had conjured images of people doing it to show off to friends or to gain social media clout—focused on themselves instead of on the stories of the people living through the conflict. This type of tourist surely exists. But is there any point in trying to police motivation? If they don’t bother the locals, I tell myself, well, their money’s just as good as mine. I don’t know if I’m just trying to convince myself.
Jason told me that he’s planning a trip to Syria in the spring. I'm not sure if I will go.
