The Brooklyn Rail

I’ve known George Gittoes for twenty years, since Leon Golub first introduced us in 2004. Golub was a big fan of Gittoes’s films, including his Soundtrack to War, part of which was included in Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11. Gittoes is an Australian artist and filmmaker who has worked in conflict zones around the world for four decades, in Cambodia, Nicaragua, Congo, South Africa, Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, Tibet, and Mozambique. With his partner, the actor, singer, and musician Hellen Rose, they have most recently lived and worked extensively in Afghanistan and Ukraine.

Gittoes and Rose first went to Ukraine in March 2022, less than a month after Putin’s Russian army invaded Ukraine. They went to show solidarity with the people of Ukraine and to make films and collaborate with Ukrainian artists and musicians as part of their life’s work to demonstrate that art is stronger than war. They made a film called Ukraine Guernica—Art Not War, and are now working on another film titled Humanity in Danger—Ukraine.

They returned to Ukraine in 2023, and again, in October 2024, in order to be there when the results of the 2024 US presidential election were announced in November. I wanted to talk with them about the response to those results among the Ukrainian people.

Gittoes knows more about the line between the living and the dead than anyone else I’ve ever known. He and Rose spoke with me by Zoom on November 27, from Kyiv.

David Levi Strauss: Hello George and Hellen! I’m speaking to you now in Kyiv, where you first went in March 2022. The Russians attacked Kyiv on the 5^th of March, and retreated the 4^th of April. It’s been reported that some Russian soldiers were issued parade dress to wear when they marched through Kyiv. They thought the Ukrainians wouldn’t put up much of a resistance and they’d take the capital in a few days. But they were dead wrong.

George Gittoes: In fact, it was amazing that we got in to the city at all, at that point. The Russian tanks surrounded the city, and all the world’s media were saying that it would only be a few days before Kyiv fell and they came in, and the young soldiers were guarding our street like it was the central target. We were staying right on the Maidan (Independence Square), where the Maidan Revolution (also called the Revolution of Dignity) happened in February 2014. This is the symbolic place where Putin wants to set up his government.

The soldiers in the streets were so young, just kids really, and suddenly they’ve got a uniform and a gun, and Hellen is sending me down with hot soup and tea for them. We were expecting Russian tanks to come rolling down the street any time, like in World War II.

But the Russians didn’t get in to Kyiv, because the Ukrainian army blew up the bridge at Irpin, which is the main bridge into the city. And the Russians were so frustrated by this that they took it out on all the people who were waiting in their cars to try to get to safety across the bridge. The Russians killed everyone—burned them up in their cars. There were dead babies and women and children and old people, and the smell of death was overpowering.

And the Russians also destroyed the Central House of Culture in Irpin, even though there were no Ukraine defenders fighting from there. It was just that Putin wanted to deny that Ukraine has a culture of its own, and the House of Culture symbolized all that. I was taught in school that Kandinsky was Russian, but he actually grew up in Odessa and was Ukrainian. The same with Malevich—he was born in Kyiv.

Hellen Rose: As was Bulgakov, and Nikolai Gogol was Ukrainian!

Gittoes: So Putin targeted places of art everywhere, and he just blew the House of Culture in Irpin to pieces, for spite. And sadly, the Russians are not all that accurate, so the houses all around it were also destroyed. But the House of Culture became a symbolic center for us, too. We’ve done exhibitions there of Ukrainian artists, and performances, and have kept working with local artists to paint a series of large murals over the exterior bombed-out walls, demonstrating that bricks and mortar can be destroyed, but not the creative spirit.

Strauss: The two of you timed your trip this time so that you would be in Kyiv when the results of the presidential campaign in the U.S. were announced. And you talked and wrote to me about how, when you got there this time, after almost three years of constant war, a lot had changed in the minds of the people. Can you talk about that change?

Gittoes: The change is enormous. Well, the first time we were here, the city was almost empty because nearly everyone evacuated as the Russians surrounded it. But there was a sense of bravado in the air among those who'd stayed. And then the second time we came, in 2023, it was still a bit like that. But now people have gone past their limit, you know? The three years of war has really messed with people. They've got pictures of all those who've died, and there are some days when between 1000 and 1200 are killed at the front line, and you can't escape it. Every street, every corner, has got these pictures and the stories of those who died. And you can imagine, with that amount of death, the funerals are constant. Everyone's lost someone.

Rose: I think the most disturbing thing about this trip is that everyone is about half-a-minute away from bursting into tears. When I went out and did a children's workshop a couple of days ago in Irpin, I asked one of the teachers, “How are you coping with the traumatized children?” And I looked at her and immediately, all the blood drained from her face, and she said, “They’re all traumatized. We're all traumatized.” And it is absolutely terrifying for them to think that they would have to live under the Russian regime, after what the Russians did in Irpin and Bucha and everywhere. It’s unthinkable.

Gittoes: Yes, and so that gets to the question of a “Trump deal.” We watch and listen to the same media and the same news channels here as you do in the US, and none of them are reporting what we can tell you now. They're all assuming that Trump's going to come in and make a deal with Zelensky and Putin. But what we're discovering is very, very surprising for us. The bottom line is, everyone is saying that they've paid too high a price now. It’s cost too much. They’re not going to accept a deal.

When Trump first got in, there was this universal joke told here, with everyone saying, “Set your watch now, because in 24 hours the war will be over, and we can all go on holiday. Trump says he’s going to make a deal in the first 24 hours.”

When the electricity goes out, we go to one or two cafes that have generators and we write and draw. And we were there one night when a young woman came in, maybe 22 or 23, and I looked down and saw that she had a prosthetic foot, a metal foot (like many of the people on the streets here now). Helen struck up a conversation with her. And then I asked her the big question, thinking, actually, of you. I said, What do you think about Trump getting in and saying that there's going to be a deal with Putin? And her eyes went suddenly steely, and she looked down at her foot, and she looked at me and said, “Our new religion is ‘Victory or Apocalypse.’ Either we will have victory over Putin or we will have apocalypse: victory or death. There is no other choice.” And after that, we heard everyone saying that.

Rose: Because life under Putin would be a living hell for Ukrainians. People in Poland are terrified. Everyone in Lithuania, Moldova, all of those surrounding countries, they’re all terrified. Finland has been preparing for an attack for a long time. They’ve built a massive underground bunker system in case of a nuclear strike. And as you know, Putin has threatened the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Apparently, on Russian TV, he is constantly talking about completely annihilating England!

Gittoes: We’ve had all kinds of people, from all walks of life in Ukraine, tell us that, if Zelensky accepts a deal with Putin that is brokered by Trump, there will be civil war in Ukraine. And we had never heard that before.

Rose: Ukrainians are incredibly united on this. I've never heard Zelensky say that he was prepared to make a deal. No. I've only ever heard him say that he wants Crimea back, because for them, this started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea.

Gittoes: One thing that’s hard for Australians and Americans to understand is that Ukrainians don't have parties here. It's not party politics; it's personality politics. And so when they get rid of someone, it may be that the group around that person only has, you know, a maximum of 20% of the vote and so if Zelensky is going to make a deal with Trump, there would probably be a massive revolt where they just get rid of Zelensky and put in someone else, and one of the most likely candidates, who has been suggested, is their former president, the guy that's most critical of Zelensky, Petro Poroshenko. They think he would not accept the deal. That he could see this as an opportunist and see it as a way of coming back into power.

Strauss: It’s now clear that the Ukrainians are fighting for all of us. If they wouldn’t have fought like they have, we would all be in trouble. Their fighting is preventing World War III, and if they lose . . . .

Gittoes: If Putin is allowed to win, the repercussions for the whole world will be terrible. The military strategy to concentrate the battle in Kursk was in order to give them more chips on a bargaining table. They want to hold Kursk, and that's leaving them weak in other areas, and it’s the reason the Russians are getting the territorial gains that they are. I'm a huge fan of Zelensky, but there seems to be a disconnect between the possible pragmatism of Zelensky and the actual feeling of the Ukrainian people as a whole. And when I talk with people, and say “but surely Zelensky knows how people feel,” they put their hands behind their ears and say, “but will he listen?” So what I'm seeing on TV is that the world is expecting Zelensky and Trump to do a deal, but what we're getting on the ground is that the people won't accept it. It’s universally rejected.

Strauss: And the question is, what happens then? I mean, if Zelensky and Trump do work out a deal, and the people say no, what then?

Gittoes: There is still a cult of the strong leader in this country, and they're hoping that Trump can outmatch Putin. And they also recognize that Trump has such a big ego, that he would not want to go down in history as the Neville Chamberlain of the war in Ukraine, who with the Munich Appeasement of Hitler in 1938 over his invasion of Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, made the worst deal in history. I don’t know if Trump even knows who Neville Chamberlain was, but there must be people around him who can tell him, and maybe he won’t want to be seen as the person who was weak and enabled Russia to rebuild their forces and start World War III.

Robot War: Drones & Landmines

Rose: The new thing I hear young people, 18- or 19-year-olds, joking about is "Fascist Fight Fascist; Robot Kill Robot." And they're just hoping they're not going to be caught in the crossfire.

Strauss: Yeah, I just read that an incredibly high percentage of casualties in the war in Ukraine now are due to drones. And George, you were saying that many of these drones are made in Ukraine, and Ukraine has always been very technologically advanced, and always more technically advanced than the Russians.

Rose: And they’re making ocean drones, that they’ve used to destroy Russian destroyers in the sea. They took out a Russian nuclear warship with one of those drones.

Strauss: You were telling me about drones developed by the Ukrainians that could fly into a battlefield, pick up a wounded soldier, and airlift them out to safety. You called them “robotic Hemingways.” I have a general, visceral, animal dislike of robots, but using them to rescue the injured and also to clear mines is heartening.

But I also just heard that the US has now shipped a lot of American anti-personnel mines for use by the Ukrainians. They said this was because the Russians are now sending foot soldiers, Russians or North Koreans, in first for assaults on the ground, and they need landmines to combat this.

You and I both worked against the scourge of landmines in the 90s, in cooperation with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and we both know that mines stay in the ground for years, sometimes decades, and they keep killing and maiming people far into the future. The US is one of only 35 countries that have always refused to sign the Mine Ban Treaty.

Gittoes: It's another ongoing evil that's come out of this war. As you know, I worked for about 12 years for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. And it's the same with cluster bombs. Cluster bombs are terrible, and now both sides are using them. But the difference between cluster bombs and landmines, and I've dealt with both, is that cluster bombs are random, whereas there's a certain pattern to anti-personnel mines, which enables you to find them and dig them up. But the way cluster bombs drop, they're just like falling rain. There's no pattern to it. And people are going to be losing limbs for many years to come.

But the Russians started it, and they’ve been doing it since the beginning of this war. The worst experience I had of landmines anywhere in the world was in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ten years after the Russians were gone, mines were still killing people. But yes, now there are 50,000 Russian and North Korean soldiers in Kursk, and one way to slow them down is with mines, and I think it's the only way they can because it's such a broad front. And the Russian forces have been making gains in in Donetsk and all these other places. So a lot of dying and bad things are happening because they're waiting, you know, for what happens with Trump.

A New Generation in Ukraine

Strauss: I know that both of you have made alliances with a new generation of Ukrainians, a new underground of young people that are coming with a different attitude and they are not all disillusioned or paralyzed by trauma.

Gittoes: They’re vegans, they won’t wear anything fashionable or use anything like plastics, made out of petrol, and they’re very well read. Many of them are on a spiritual quest. Some of them are pacifists, but they’re also all passionate about winning this war. They’re philosophically anti-war, but not about this conflict.

Rose: Well, you know, they’re fighting for their own lives. Putin is trying to drag humanity down and backwards into the bloodbath, and they’re fighting back, with everything they have.

Some of them are neo-pagans. I’m working with this guy in a band called ZWYNTAR (“Graveyard”), and they’re singing ancient songs set to new music, and doing a secret concert for the Third Brigade.

Gittoes: I’ve never seen such a strong union between the kind of artists and intellectuals we’re describing and frontline professional soldiers. Artists are made to feel noble and good here now in a way that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Everyone says this is a battle for their culture.

In every studio we go into, all the art we see here, is pretty dark. No one’s doing Matisse, no one’s doing Monet, you know? It’s all Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and Käthe Kollwitz. It’s all dark because they’re surrounded by darkness. And you know, that’s my territory, because I’ve spent fifty years at war, and this is how my art has always been. So now I’m in a place where I’ve got a whole generation of young artists working here and no one is making art about art. They all believe that art has to be about what they’re living through, and what they’re living through is very, very dark.

Rose: George and I are well aware of the fact that art can be an incredibly unifying thing. I’m weary of art not meaning anything. I think art has a powerful purpose. And, of course, every autocrat wants to shut that down. Every autocrat wants to shut down the channels of communication.

I want my art to mean something, to have a purpose. I’ve seen so much injustice, and I’m so sick and tired of injustice. And I’m sick and tired of bullies like Putin and Trump.

Gittoes: We’re going to do this till the end, whatever the end is.