War Drawings Reveal the Human Stories Headlines Leave Out

In Kramatorsk, after a Russian cruise missile struck a residential apartment building, George Butler saw the building’s front blown open, with a living room and kitchen exposed. Burnt belongings lay among the rubble. Weapons inspectors stood nearby, an excavator cleared debris, and journalists interviewed people at the scene. One woman had soot on her face. She gathered belongings from the rubble, placed them on the ground and sat on them to keep them safe.

Butler drew the scene twice. The first sketch shows the building’s exposed rooms; in the second, a yellow excavator and emergency personnel stand among the debris, while the woman sits in the foreground on her belongings. But Butler’s attention also went around the back of the same building. There he found books blasted into a rose garden. Petro, a 70-year-old man out on his morning walk, had stopped to pick them up and arrange them in neat piles.

Petro told Butler:

Butler drew him bending over the books among the roses and debris. The contrast between the exposed apartment and Petro’s careful work is one way to see the multiple truths Butler says can exist in a place at war. Over more than two decades drawing in places affected by war, he has returned to that realization. In Kramatorsk, Petro—a gentle presence amid atrocity—was the person who stayed with him.

George Butler draws in ink on location for magazines and newspapers. During weeks in Ukraine, he made it his mission to be slow and delve deeper, working with local translators and fixers to speak with people whose stories might otherwise go unnoticed. “The news can tell us what happened, but the drawing can show us how it felt,” he says.

In Kyiv, he met Madam Olga, who was 99. She was too old to leave her bed when the air-raid sirens sounded, and kept a Bible beneath her pillow. She was muddled, Butler recalls, confusing Putin and Hitler. Then she took the translator’s hands, held them about six inches from her face and said, with sudden clarity, “If you be quiet, I will tell you the story from the beginning.”

Olga was born in 1923. As a child, she was taken with her father to a collective farm and survived the Holodomor, the famine Butler says killed four million Ukrainians. During World War II, she was enslaved by a Nazi family. She told him that they once fed her worms. On another occasion, she ran away to a police station, but the policeman returned her to the house. When the war ended, she began walking home to Ukraine. On the way, she met the man who would become her husband. They married and had four children; she lived another 80 years. She died peacefully in her sleep a couple of months after Butler met her, before her 100th birthday.

Butler says that without the process of drawing, he would not have shared that moment with Olga or been able to pass her story on. Her portrait, rendered in spare black-and-white lines, is one of the drawings he showed alongside his account. For him, drawing is not only a way to make an image. It gives him a reason to stay, observe and listen long enough for a person’s account to emerge.

George Butler says news can promote destruction before humanity, polarize and fatigue its audience, and give an illusion of certainty. Faced with that, people may feel helpless or hopeless, or turn the news off. His response is to wander streets, stand on corners and seek out people he describes as unsung and understated.

Oleg, a 23-year-old mixed martial arts fighter and football fan, joined the Ukrainian military with his football friends to fight the Russians. Butler drew him at home, being served borscht by his mother, Lisa, an English teacher from the town. Oleg posed with his Kalashnikov and, less conventionally, his guinea pig, Almond. During the sitting, he whispered to the animal, “You are a big pig. You are a big pig.”

The drawing places the armed soldier and the guinea pig in the same frame. Butler says that people like Sergey remind him these stories are continuing as he speaks; the source does not make clear whether Sergey is a different person from Oleg.

Another subject was an architect whose house fell on his head when it was hit by a Russian missile. Butler met him in hospital with a bandage around his head. When Butler asked if he could draw him, the architect grinned and said he would draw Butler too. They arranged to meet the next day in a ward room, where the windows were still sellotaped up in case of an explosion. They had no language in common, but sat and drew one another. Both were shy about their work; like artists, Butler says, the architect blamed his tools for the quality of his picture. Butler showed the two drawings side by side: his ink portrait of the architect with a bandaged head, and the architect’s pencil drawing of Butler on lined paper, dated 30.04.22. The exchange was reciprocal: each man sat to draw the other.

George Butler has drawn people in Syria, Tajikistan, Gaza and Iraq as well as Ukraine. The stories he shares, he says, are only a few among hundreds. He asks why, in an age of immediate news, people need to know about Almond, the architect, Olga, or the other people he has met. His answer is that they could so easily have been one of us. They are, he says, the true consequences of war: ordinary people with terror poured into their lives, resisting it with their hearts.

Butler ends with a distinction between the image and the time spent making it. “It isn’t really about the painting at all,” he says. Drawing is his excuse to sit a little longer and give time; it is the way he knows how to observe and see properly. He urges people to witness these stories, not consume them—to be deliberately slow and cherish human connection.