A Landscape, Simplified

This is a long story, and it represents the sort of range that I want The Mortar to have. Solomiya magazine was launched shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with the aim of showing the world an alternative picture of life in the country. We delivered their fourth issue to Stack subscribers in February 2025, and Iryna’s story stood out as my favourite. It’s simultaneously a roadtrip, and a field study of obscure flora, and a meditation on the nature of Ukrainian identity today, and it’s guaranteed to show you a fresh perspective of a country you might think you already know.

“Why don’t we go on a road trip?” I ask my dad as we finally overlap in Ukraine. I’m back for a while, having researched the history of monoculture farming in Ukraine from afar. He’s back, for good this time, having tried out life as a war refugee in Europe. It’s mid-July. The heatwave is at its peak, searing 38°C at noon. The car’s air conditioner is broken. Yet days after my proposal, we find ourselves on the road, North of my hometown, Kropyvnytskyi, in central Ukraine. We are searching for kurgany (Ukrainian for “kurgans”) – ancient burial mounds. At least I am searching for them, and my dad is happy to join me on the adventure.

Most are drawn to kurgany out of curiosity for what lies inside them, and from an archaeological point of view, there can be plenty: Scythian gold, vessels, Trypillya mugs, skeletons, tools, jewelry. But I am more interested in what’s on top of them, and the surrounding landscape they shape and belong to. 

Kurgany, if still intact, can be small islands of steppe plant species that survive amidst surrounding fields of vegetation. Most of the time the landscapes they inhabit are monotonous: a single-crop agriculture field, where their preservation often depends on the goodwill of a farmer who tends to them. I come home to Kirovohradshchyna (the Kirovohrad region) to photograph the plant communities that exist around mono-crop fields. I want to document what it's like to be a neighbor to fields of rapeseed, wheat, or maize, sharing the soil and the space. Ukrainian steppe areas have been shrinking as agricultural fields expand, but I want to see how their territorial disputes manifest spatially and what happens in the places where steppe and crop fields coexist. 

I anticipated feeling miserable, or at least sad when arriving at these steppe isles, but being there made me feel a joy similar to that of a sailor who first sees land after weeks on water. “Kurgan!” I shout, spotting the first one from the passenger seat. I am the shturman, the navigator, on this road trip, so my dad obliges and pulls over into the dusty road to drive up as close as we can. It is about 8 a.m., but the sun is up and scorching. I get my camera ready and a bag to gather some plants. 

While pacing around it, I can vaguely hear my dad describing the kurgan to someone on the phone: it’s big, maybe four or five meters high, and a couple of apricot trees are growing on both sides. I move closer to investigate: the apricots are sweet; it’s that perfect apricots-from-childhood level of sweet. The presence of shrubs and the maturity of the apricot trees reveal that the kurgan might have been vskrytyi, meaning “opened” in the jargon of those who are after kurgans’ insides – similar to the term “autopsied,” used by morgue workers when “opening up” a human body to determine the cause of death. Digging into the kurgan alters the soil composition, making it possible for trees like this apricot – which wouldn't normally sprout here – to grow. The kurgan’s treasures were most likely taken long ago. Still, the good news for those interested in what's on top of it is that the excavation probably happened at least a couple of decades ago, allowing the perennial grasses to grow in thick bushy bundles, and for the layers of vegetation to develop beneath them.

My climb uphill is prickly but rewarding. At the top, I find kovyla, or “stipa” in English, a signature steppe plant. It's soft to the touch and its bundles make beautiful waves when the wind blows. But I lack the knowledge to comprehend what I’m looking at – I’m no botanist and cannot distinguish which of the nearly 30 kovyla species found in Ukraine this one is. Their Ukrainian names are the most affectionate: kovyla naikrasyvisha (stipa the most beautiful; Latin: Stipa pulcherrima), kovyla poetychna (stipa the poetic; Latin: Stipa poetica), kovyla obludna (stipa the deceitful; Latin: Stipa fallacina), kovyla dyvna (stipa the weird; Latin: Stipa adoxa). Almost all of them – 28 species – are in the Red Book of Ukraine, an official list of endangered plants, animals, and fungi that should be legally protected. 

As we drive on, we meet Volodymyr, our future companion. Volodymyr is whom people in Ukraine call chornyi arheolog (literally “black archaeologist”), meaning that he spends part of his year digging into the kurgans – with a shovel – and the rest of the year selling or gifting what he finds. “Some big things I found there!” he shouts, as we struggle to hear each other over the power generator that roars outside of the cafe where we met. I barely catch the names of some former Ukrainian presidents, members of the political elite, and their sons to whom he sold the kurgan’s treasures. Typical clientele, hungry for Scythian artifacts, I suppose. I am not after Volodymyr’s knowledge of kurgans’ insides. Rather, I am after their locations, and advice on where to find those that have not been vskryty yet as these are the ones where I can find rare steppe habitats, not (heavily) touched by agriculture. Understandably, I come across as suspicious.

Volodymyr refuses coffee but stuffs his wooden pipe with tobacco and asks me why I’m interested in the kurgans. I give him my well-practiced spiel: “It’s the plants. I write about the land in Ukraine and want to explore what grows near agricultural fields.” Most people are content with this short version of the story. Plants, agriculture, land – all makes sense! But Volodymyr squints his eyes pensively. “Go on,” he nods and releases a cloud of intense tobacco smoke. I realize the stakes: either he decides I’m his competitor looking for treasures or, worse, an undercover state or police worker, which would make him shut down completely. I need to find the right words to explain why someone in their right mind would drive a few hundred kilometers in excruciating heat, dragging their father along to photograph plants. I tell him I write, but don’t believe the language alone can capture what is happening with land degradation in Ukraine. I explain that I brew my own photographic developers out of plants I collect to later develop my landscape photographs in the darkroom, and I tell him I worry that we are completely underestimating how bad the health of the soil is. I can see Volodymyr relax in his chair. He must be an artist himself, or at least someone with a sensibility to relate to an act that seems utterly nonsensical, borderline foolish to others. He asks me a few follow-up questions, but out of curiosity this time, rather than suspicion. “Why are we wasting time?” he smiles cheekily as he finishes smoking, and the three of us get in the car. 

As we drive through the rural landscape north of Kropyvnytskyi, the constant presence of crop fields outside our windows is no surprise. Numbers can never convey the full story, but they are important for grasping the scale of the issue at stake. According to the World Bank Group, arable land comprises the majority – 33 million hectares – of Ukraine’s territory. A small fraction is dedicated to growing berries and fruit trees, while an even smaller amount is used for cattle grazing. But most of it – 23 million hectares – is sown with agricultural and technical crops, such as wheat, sunflower, maize, rapeseed, and soy. For some areas, like the one we are driving through – the Kirovohrad region – nearly all of the region’s land is arable, forming a patchwork of oddly fitting rectangular pieces if seen from a satellite’s perspective.

“Take a left here!” Volodymyr commands, and we drive uphill, pulling over near a row of houses. We get out of the car – no kurgany in sight – but I follow my companion further uphill, passing yellow toadflax, known as Linaria vulgaris (льонок звичайний), and bush grass, known as Calamagrostis (куничник) along the path. Kurgans aren’t easy to find; their locations aren’t usually disclosed publicly, supposedly to protect them from illegal digging. Still, I managed to find an open-source map online with hundreds of pins marking where kurgans are supposed to be. I studied this map carefully while planning our road trip. Volodymyr, however, doesn’t need a map. Our first encounter as we reach the top of the hill is a large plastic sheet, used to cover a dig site overnight. But it’s been here for longer than a night. The folds in the material reflect sunlight and resemble the skin of an oily creature that lurks in the orange-brown dust. It’s pretty common to find a kurgan in such a state. On previous trips, I often arrived at what I had thought looked like a kurgan on the map, only to find a rubbish pile, a barely noticeable lump in a plowed field, or even a supermarket. 

As we walk further, I stumble upon a treasure – Astragalus dasyanthus (астрагал волохатоцвітий). Like most species of kovyla, it is also in the Red Book of Ukraine. I kneel to feel it with my hand: it's fuzzy and soft. It makes me smile. I found Astragalus dasyanthus in the middle of one of its two blooming cycles. It looks a bit withered now, but I know it will bloom again in a few weeks. 

A guilty pleasure this road trip allows, a harmless make-believe, as if it’s just another ordinary summer. We drive around, carefree, looking at plants, as if there isn't any war. We might even stop by the Dnipro to swim, indulging in a brief escape. What is this if not a perfect summer day? Even the soundscape plays along. The air raid sirens rarely reach us, and when they do, it’s a distant, faint echo – easily drowned out by the car radio. 

Astragalus dasyanthus is known for its healing abilities. Common in herbal medicine, it strengthens the immune system and aids blood coagulation, helping to reduce bleeding in case of an injury. As I make a photograph of it, a shadow falls from the top of the hill – a man in military uniform. Behind him is a machine gun stand, a portable air defense system (PPO) ready to shoot down the drones and missiles that Russia sends our way. “This is a military object, it’s prohibited for civilians to be here,” he informs us. Volodymyr reacts swiftly – I can tell he’s done this before. “Apologies, sir! We’ll be right out! She’s just interested in plants,” he says as if to diffuse any tension (because, really, what kind of threat does an interest in plants pose?). We stand there for a few seconds, contemplating one another and ending our interaction in the now all-too-familiar phrase: “berezhit sebe!” (take care of yourself). The suspension of disbelief, the ‘as if’, is shattered. The war is here, even on this remote kurgan, nestled alongside the medicinal steppe plant.

Having driven further north, making our way to what we hoped would be another kurgan, Volodymyr and I walked on the seam of the sunflower field and posadka, a windbreak. “Here a little fox was catching a little mouse, and here a little boar was passing by,” Volodymyr says, pointing to what looks like shallow, unintelligible burrows in the dusty path. Being able to tell who and what was here by the traces they leave behind proves to be a useful skill a few minutes further into the field. According to my map’s geotag and Volodymyr’s memory, we should be standing right in front of the kurgan. Instead, we can only infer it was here by a slight rise in the ground, a barely visible oval hump about 20 meters in diameter. We are both disappointed, though not surprised. The kurgan was plowed, and it, or what remains of it, is not the first one I will find amidst the rows of sunflowers in such condition. With the intensification of large-scale agriculture in the late Russian Empire and the early USSR’s "New Economic Policy," more of the steppes had to give way to arable land. Sunflowers, a staple mono-crop in Ukraine, have been planted here for over 100 years.

But the sunflower is not the only companion to the remains of the kurgan. As we wander back to the car, I stare at the windbreak. It hardly offers any more diversity than the field itself: it’s all primarily black locust, or Robinia pseudoacacia (акація біла). Ecologists in Ukraine have been advocating for its ban for decades. Native to North America, in Ukraine, the black locust is an invasive species because it suppresses the growth of other trees in its vicinity, quickly turning an area into a black-locust mono-forest. Local birds avoid nesting in its branches, migratory birds can’t feed on it in the winter, and its roots do not form connections with the fungi common in Ukraine. It seems to be a bad neighbor, all in all. The government eventually conceded and prohibited its use in forestry in 2023. 

Once laid to rest beneath the steppe grasses, those buried in kurgans now lie beneath a mono-crop – in this case, sunflowers. Centuries have passed since people were buried here, and with time, the kurgans have shifted from sites of grief and commemoration to mere landscape features. But staying true to their original purpose forces me to reckon with the kinds of landscapes in which humans are laid to rest.

“Як умру, то поховайте 
Мене на могилі 
Серед степу широкого 
На Вкраїні милій, 
Щоб лани широкополі, 
І Дніпро, і кручі 
Було видно, було чути, 
Як реве ревучий.”

When I am dead, then bury me
In my beloved Ukraine
My tomb upon a grave mound high
Amid the spreading plain
So that the fields, the boundless steppes 
The Dnipro’s plunging shore
My eyes could see, my ears could hear
The mighty river roar
(Translated by John Weir)

These are the opening lines of Taras Shevchenko’s renowned 1845 poem Заповіт (Testament). “Коли умру я від кохання / То поховайте серед трав” (When I die of love / bury me amidst the grasses) echo the lyrics of a Ukrainian folk song, “В саду осіннім айстри білі” (White asters in the autumn garden). “Де ти хочеш бути похованим—там і твоя земля” (Where you want to be buried / is where your land is) writes Nadia Hlushkova in her 2022 poem, “Саме це тебе і спасе” (It is this that will save you). And this sentiment lives on even today. An artist I met in Lviv, who now serves on the frontline, once told me about the landscapes of the Kharkiv region, where he spends most of his days. “If it comes to it, I’d prefer to die under an oak tree,” he said, “but my comrades and I joke that, realistically, death will most probably find us somewhere in the windbreak lying under the acacias.”

Driving further towards the Dnipro, Volodymyr takes me to one of his favorite kurgans, tsarskyi (royal), meaning it’s big and that Volodymyr has plans for it. We pull over. I see the kurgan from the roadside – a green isle standing just a couple of dozen meters into the wheat field. Amongst its various plants, I encounter one I’ve never met before: common milkweed, or Asclepias syriaca (ваточник сирійський). It’s a peculiar kind of thrill, seeing the farmer’s source of fear eye to stem, the plant being nearly the same height as me. Among farmers, common milkweed is commonly referred to as “weed number one,” and as “one of the worst enemies of every agronomist.” 

Native to North America, this edible plant’s presence worries crop producers in Ukraine. Once it infiltrates a field, it displaces grains and oil crops alike. It spreads quickly, is drought- and frost-resistant, and roots itself deep into the soil. My hands feel sticky after touching it – milkweed coats its leaves with a thick layer of wax, successfully defending itself against insects and pesticides. The tactic is so effective that there’s currently no herbicide that would let agronomists free the fields from it entirely. 

Common milkweed has surfaced in Ukrainian media numerous times and has been brought to attention mainly through Alevtina Kakhidze’s art and gardening. Kakhidze has long been fond of the double meaning of this plant: it’s an invasive species in Ukraine, and its common name, vatochnyk, serendipitously evokes Russian invaders. For many Ukrainians, vatochnyk has become a derogatory term for Russians, deriving from the root “vata,” meaning “cotton.” It is often used to describe someone who supports Russian propaganda as it metaphorically turns a human mind into “vata.” Kakhidze’s strategy of dealing with this vegetal invader is a preemptive one – she cooks and eats the “enemy.” Looking at the milkweed’s tall stem on the kurgan slope, I wonder how far it has already spread into the surrounding wheat field. Who will win in this silent battle for land, and do we need to rethink who the enemy and aggressor is here? 

Milkweed represents neither an agricultural crop nor native steppe vegetation. I wonder if, perhaps somewhat unfairly, it became a scapegoat in discussions on protecting steppe plants – as if the story of “natives” against “invaders” is all there is. But when we look at who displaces whom in Ukraine’s vegetal world, it is not the “invasive” species that displace the steppe vegetation – it’s the crops. According to Ukraine’s State Statistical Service’s recent yearbook, Agriculture of Ukraine, the crops that occupied the largest amount of land as of 2021 were: winter wheat (6.9 million ha), sunflower (6.6 million ha), maize (5.5 million ha), rapeseed (1.3 million ha), and potatoes (1.2 million ha). This publication offers a reckoning with scale: before Russia’s full-scale invasion, these five plants occupied 21.6 million hectares of land in Ukraine – nearly 40% of the entire country’s territory. Each of the crops, except potatoes, is an export crop, meaning more than half and in some instances, as with rapeseed, nearly all of it, is grown for sale on international markets. The full-scale war has hardly influenced the ratio. We may hold onto the image of vibrant steppe ecosystems when thinking of Ukraine’s landscapes, but the reality is brutal and monotonous.

When monocultures spread, they spread through displacement. As we drive through the fields, I pay extra attention to what grows on their edges. One plant is almost always present on the roadsides – cornflower or Centaurea cyanus (волошка степова). A native to Europe, this plant used to be a common weed in the fields of corn and other grains, until intensive agriculture came about with effective methods of removing undesirable life from the field. There’s no more cornflower to be found in the neat and uniform rows of maize, and so it is squeezed out to the margins. I often spot them on the roadsides in the company of other steppe natives, many of which are medicinal plants: yellow bedstraw or Galium verum (підмаренник справжній), field larkspur or Consolida regalis (cокирки польові), yellow toadflax or Linaria vulgaris (льонок звичайний), reed grass or Calamagrostis (куничник), timothy or Phleum (тимофіївка), fleabane or Erigeron (злинка), common wormwood or Artemisia absinthium (полин гіркий). Their proximity to the crops doesn’t imply a harmonious relationship; rather, they exist at the edges, pushed aside by the expansion of cultivated land. 

The fragmentation of steppe by monocultures is not an unintended consequence of industrial agriculture, it is the mechanism that has been designed to operate through takeover. Often, this is even a legal process: the land is leased long-term, plot by plot, the seeds are sown into the soil, and rental agreements contain no legal obligations to preserve the health of the land. The same applies to purchased land, with private land ownership legalized under the 2021 land reform law. The verb that comes up often in this context is vidzhym. Literally, it means to “press out,” but this word has a double meaning in Ukrainian. In criminal slang, vidzhaty refers to taking land, business, or property by force – to “press out” in a metaphorical sense. In agriculture, vidzhym describes the process of pressing oil crops – rapeseed, sunflower, soybeans – to extract oil. In both cases, vidzhym, represents a maneuver that has a trajectory, an expansive movement of agricultural mono-crop plantations, a greasy press operated by obscure algorithms and financial transactions.

When there is no more space into which the steppe plants can be displaced, the expansion of the mono-crop fields becomes a squeeze. In the popular imagination, a kurgan might still be a small hill rising above the sea of feathergrass. In reality, most of the time it’s an isolated hump, separated from the surrounding landscape by the sharp line of a plow that precisely traces the base of the kurgan, encircling it. The movement of the steppe is inward, contracting. The kurgan curves in around itself. There is no rhythm, only a monotonous loop towards less, until it is no more.

I am neither alone nor the first one to view kurgans as remainders of the steppe. Ukrainian botanist Ivan Moysiyenko, working at the Kherson State University, has long studied the communities of flora at kurgan sites. Over five years, Moysiyenko and his colleagues meticulously gathered and documented plants from kurgans in the central regions of Ukraine. They collected more than 700 species from over 100 sites – places of “floristic richness,” in botanical terms. Regardless of the size of a kurgan, the team found an average of 107 species of vascular plants inhabiting each one, making the case for their protection as not only culturally important sites but ecologically significant ones, too. 

The interests of steppe plants are represented by scientists, like Moysiyenko, along with many other environmentalists, researchers, and civil society members in Ukraine. Ecologists have long been campaigning to save Ukrainian steppes, with Oleksii Vasyliuk and Oleksii Burkovskyi being particularly influential in articulating the challenges and the solutions for protecting the steppe. This support base, however, is being constantly dwarfed by the financial and political efforts that go into promoting agricultural plants. Ukraine’s agricultural oligarchs, large companies, subsidiaries of foreign firms, Western financial institutions, and steady investment into big agriculture all form a solid lobby for mass-produced export crops. In the quest to increase productivity, large amounts of fertilizers and pesticides are poured into the soil, onto seeds, and sprayed directly onto crops as they sprout. It is not a fair game.

It’s not only the disproportionate levels of support showered over different plants that determine the nature of Ukraine’s landscapes; it’s also the expectation society places on plants. Some, like black locust, are harshly judged for being anti-social and not contributing to making a good habitat for others. Others, like rapeseed or sunflower, get away with only contributing, supposedly, to the country's economy – no care for the kind of habitats they make (unliveable, largely). What if we judged crops by their ability to support entire ecosystems, rather than simply their profitability? How many other species of plants and animals do they support or suppress? Are they a good home for birds? Do they provide suitable habitats for worms, fungi, and bacteria in the soils beneath them? How well do they sustain life beyond their own? This isn’t about cultivating productivity or usefulness, but about noticing the relations that different plants make and unmake.

While we may have learned to recognize the intense, devastating destruction that Russia brings to Ukraine’s environments, we have yet to learn how to pay attention to the slower forms of destruction lurking in our midst – the gradual displacement of steppe plants from the Ukrainian landscape, fuelled by the tantalizing promise of extracting peak yields year after year that slowly dispossess the soil of bacteria, worms, nutrients, bugs, water, and, ultimately, its life-sustaining capacity. The environmental humanities scholar Rob Nixon calls this lurking form of destruction “slow violence” – “a type of harm that occurs gradually and over time, and is often not seen as violence at first.” Extensive farming of a single crop in the same area while repeatedly dismissing crop rotation principles or the land’s need to rest has been the modus operandi of Ukrainian agriculture for too long, leading to the exhaustion of our landscape in favor of profit. 

In Ukrainian law, land degradation is not limited to the physical destruction of soil properties. The key legal document governing the land treatment in Ukraine is the “On Land Protection,” dated June 19, 2003, № 962-IV. Land degradation, according to the law, is a “natural or anthropogenic simplification of the landscape, deterioration of the state, composition, useful properties and functions of the land and other natural components organically connected to the land.” I find the notion of simplification in the legal document fascinating. Health, therefore, must imply complexity, and diversity – at least de jure. I think about the 90% of steppe vegetation destroyed by agriculture and human settlements. I think about Moysiyenko’s findings of over 100 plant species per kurgan that are usually only 20 meters in diameter. I think about the vivid colors I saw on those kurgans. There doesn’t seem to be a study that shows how many plant species would occupy a similarly sized area in a rapeseed field, but I expect the amount would be: one. Perhaps an occasional milkweed resisting the effects of herbicides would bring the count to two at most. What else, if not a total simplification of the landscape, do the monoculture plantations present? 

In some publications, one can still encounter the claim that steppes occupy 40% of Ukraine. However, this is misleading and outdated. The number comes from school geography book-type visualizations that divide Ukraine into six “physical-geographic zones,” with the steppe being one of them. But these maps haven’t kept up with the pace of changing agro-ecological landscapes. In reality, steppes make up about 3% of Ukraine’s land, a minuscule amount compared to the nearly 60% occupied by agriculture, most of which are just five crops. The 3% is a pre-war estimate, with actual numbers likely being significantly lower, given that most of the ongoing war has been unfolding in regions where the largest pockets of steppe remained. 

Somewhere along the way, the steppe got mixed up with the field. I, too, am complicit in this confusion. I grew up in Kropyvnytskyi under the illusion that the landscape around me was the steppe. The vast, rolling flatlands stretch in all directions, with nothing obstructing the view of the horizon as soon as you leave the town. It took me a while to realize it wasn’t steppe but vast, rolling flatlands of agricultural fields. Something in my young imagination conflated these fields with steppe grasslands. Perhaps it was a lack of ecological knowledge. Perhaps I was not paying attention. I don’t recall caring that much anyway: it was vastness, flatness, something to drive through, transitory, a between-cities space to pass through and let my gaze roll over, like perekotypole, tumbleweed. 

But the confusion, or perhaps deliberate obscurity, about the steppe is historical, too. “Nakedness” is part of the imperial imaginary of the steppe as a lifeless void that needs to be developed into productive agricultural land to gain value. This has been described by researchers Darya Tsymbalyuk and Anna Olenenko, and its evidence I also found in the land-use statistical publications from the 1880s in my hometown’s library, which mention the “wild steppe” that “awaits its cultivator.” But there’s only so much accountability for destroying the steppe we can ascribe to the historical process. The mix-up of the steppe and the field eventually becomes institutional, with the former missing from Ukrainian legislation.

Even though there is a legal definition of steppe in Ukraine’s Law “On Land Protection,” it doesn’t translate into protection on the ground. As ecologist Oleksii Vasyliuk stresses, on the current maps of land use, the steppe is categorized as agricultural land: hay fields, pastures, badlands, unusable lands, land with sparse vegetation cover – anything but the steppe as such. A colonial gaze on the steppe has crept into the Ukrainian legal system and cartography, offering more protection to the crops than to steppe plants. 

I fear that the imaginary of the steppe as an absence – in our minds, historically, and institutionally – is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. First, we couldn’t see the steppe and now it ceases to exist. With every third species in the Red Book being a steppe inhabitant, the list keeps growing with each new edition. The steppe’s “wilderness” was once used as a derogatory term, and now it’s one of the last islands of the most diverse multispecies habitats, cornered into a strict shape in the middle of fields, isolated. The photographs I took around the kurgans are a form of documentation, of witnessing, of saying “I see you.” It’s my way of paying attention to the life I fear might not be there the next time I return. It’s a way of remembering that the monotonous field is not the only thing this place ever was. 

Anthropologist Anna Tsing proposes the concept of “modular simplifications” to explain what happens when a landscape is reduced to its commodity production function. In these mono-crop landscapes, she writes, “everything but that which is required for the reproduction of the economic product should be eliminated.” The affinities between her analysis and Ukraine’s policy-makers’ attunement to the dangers of simplicity within the landscape have a lot to offer for comprehending decolonization in Ukraine. If we are to think and do decolonization in any meaningful way, none of our colonial legacies should escape our attention. This includes looking carefully at landscapes. The extractive, export-oriented, large-scale agriculture that began with the late Russian Empire, firmly established itself during Soviet rule, and up until this day continues to eat away the steppe, demanding vast amounts of toxic agrochemicals to support it. This is an uncomfortable and dark part of our heritage that Ukraine has become reliant on, and which it continues to reproduce. But, as with other imperially poisoned gifts, it can be critically examined and remade with an orientation towards social and ecological justice.

On our way back south, my father, Volodymyr, and I pull over to the roadside again – this time not to explore another kurgan, but to let a long column of army vehicles heading east toward the frontline pass. The wheels of some trucks are so large that it seems like I could walk under the machine without bending my head down. Since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, the frontline has become a staple in the news and everyday conversations: the demarcation line (лінія розмежування) between the temporarily occupied territories and the territories controlled by Ukraine. In 2022, it grew into a full-blown battlefield frontline advancing from the north, east, and south with Russia’s army. But there is another line to pay attention to – one expanding outward within Ukraine, that razor-sharp line, delineating the steppe and the field.

Solomiya is an English-language magazine that was founded in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It presents diverse perspectives on contemporary realities and social issues in Ukraine and beyond through visual art, text, and design, blending personal experience, documentary practices and discourse.

Iryna Zamuruieva is an artist and researcher. She’s currently at the University of Oxford, writing a PhD dissertation on the history and political ecology of agriculture in Ukraine. Iryna is interested in photography, feminist theory, ecocriticism and the concept of “nature” in literary and scientific thought. Her Instagram is home to photography of kurgans, flowers, and other obsessions.

Lera Bolkonska is a London-based illustrator from Ukraine, creating illustrations and fine art through mixed traditional media. Her work centers on people and animals, capturing their inner worlds, emotions, and distinct personalities. Embracing imperfection and spontaneity, Lera’s practice resists social norms while celebrating individuality, nonconformity, and feminist perspectives. instagram.com/lera.bolkonska