Jack Crosbie left his desk at The Santa Barbara Independent in 2013 to try to make it as a foreign correspondent, a goal he set while studying at UCSB. He covered the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan for The Independent, before attending Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. In May 2015, he traveled to Ukraine to cover the ongoing conflict there, primarily as a photojournalist. Since then, his pictures have appeared on Vice News, MailOnline, and other online outlets. He's worked on both sides of the new border between the government-controlled Ukraine and the Russian-backed separatist Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics, as well as covering the United States' training mission in the western part of the country. Here is his first-hand look at the current situation in Ukraine and what it's like to live under the constant threat of war.
The beekeeper led me through the tangled remains of rebar and a wrought-iron gate, around the side of his house, skirting the pile of rubble that used to be his living room wall. In his backyard, he had half a dozen hives, honeybees lazily buzzing around them. A few of the hives were smashed. He popped open an intact one, prying off the wooden cover. Bees rose out, crawling on his bare face, diving in and out of the sheets of honeycomb inside. Some flew into the beekeeper’s fields, pollinating his crops — tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, strawberries, and snap peas that we ate right out of their pods. My two words of Russian did me little good, and his English wasn’t much better. My translator hadn’t arrived yet, so I followed the beekeeper through his fields communicating in gestures and staying close on his heels, wary of mines that soldiers might have dug into the soft earth. He took me back to the house, where he pulled out a jug of homemade vodka that he kept hidden from his wife, under a pile of newspapers. We chased down the fiery liquor with spoonfuls of honey, while a swallow flew laps around the living room, in through the broken window, out through the car-sized hole a tank shell had blown through the house this winter.
The beekeeper was lucky — his house still had three rooms relatively intact. Most of his town, Nikishyne, is completely leveled. It lies 60 kilometers northeast of Donetsk, the largest rebel-held city in Eastern Ukraine, and 12 kilometers from Hrabove, where Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed last year. In late December, Nikishyne was caught between Russian-backed rebel forces loyal to the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Ukrainian army desperately trying to stop the rebels from advancing on the nearby town of Debaltseve, a major transport hub. Tanks, artillery, and infantry from both sides poured into Nikishyne, battling house-to-house down its main road and leveling everything in their path.
