The Soldier Who Brought My Ghosts Back

A Ukrainian soldier’s sketches met my war-torn childhood. Across borders and decades, our wounds spoke. His art screamed. My memories answered. Together, we refused to forget.

It is May 2025, and I am resting briefly in Poland, at the threshold of another season of reporting from Ukraine. In a few days, I will cross into a land that no longer needs introduction to the world’s sorrow, a country whose struggle has defined this generation’s understanding of resistance, identity, and survival. But today, I write not only as a reporter on the cusp of conflict, but as a Kosovar who has, through the strange geometry of war, become bound by thread and thunder to Ukraine’s fate.

This story begins not with the crack of gunfire, but in the quiet, haunted dusk of my own past. I was a teenager when the war found us in Kosovo. I know what it means to be displaced, silenced, forgotten. That war etched itself into my bones, its screams, its absences, its bitter wind sweeping across refugee camps and burial sites. The faces I met then were etched with the same strain I would come to see again in Ukraine. And so, when the bombs began to fall on Kharkiv, when Russia’s machinery once again rolled into a sovereign land, I knew I had to go. Not just as a journalist, but as someone whose history has prepared him for this task.

In the late summer of 2024, amid the smoke and rubble of Kharkiv, I met Ruslan Pikhota¹. Soldier. Artist. Witness. His office, dimly lit and hushed by the war’s pause, was not where I expected to find one of the most urgent voices in contemporary Ukrainian art. And yet, there he sat, uniformed, weary, sketching a grotesquely comic image of a Russian general, the map in his hands upside-down. “It’s my latest diplomatic analysis,” he said, half a grin betraying the exhaustion in his eyes.

There was nothing contrived about Ruslan. In the unlikeliest of spaces between the siren’s cry and the drone of distant artillery he painted the truth of war in lines that stung and lines that healed. His sketchbook was his rifle, his ink a volley against forgetting. And in those pages, I saw my country too, Kosovo in 1999, reborn in every smudged silhouette and every scarred caricature.

That encounter changed us both.

Through a bridge made of trust and reverence, I introduced Ruslan to Gani Jakupi, a man who has made it his life’s work to raise the stature of graphic storytelling through GranFest² in Pristina. Jakupi is no mere curator, he is a builder of bridges between silence and voice, trauma and testimony. When he invited Ruslan to Kosovo, it was more than an artist’s invitation. It was history folding into itself, Ukraine’s war finding its echo in the alleys and libraries of a country that knows too well the cost of silence.

That Ruslan stood, this May, in Pristina, presenting “Në Llogoret e Ukrainës – Ditar i Luftës 2022–2025” in the National Library, is a moment that words struggle to encompass. Twenty-five years after NATO’s intervention saved our existence, a Ukrainian soldier stood among my people and showed them their reflection in his own sorrow. It was not spectacle, it was communion.

Reporters captured the moment with the reverence it deserved. Besarta Elshani of Koha Ditore³ told it with clarity and care, spotlighting not only Ruslan’s bravery, but the significance of his book being published in Albanian. Shaban Maxharraj⁴ reminded us that this is not simply about art, but about “resistance and therapy” — a lifeline for a man who faces death each day and still finds the will to draw. These accounts matter. They are part of the fabric of witness, and they remind us that journalism, when done with heart, is itself a form of resistance.

It is not enough that these stories were told. They needed to be told by more. Where were the correspondents of the big mastheads, the Western media giants who so often decide what war is worth watching? In a time when misinformation clouds the skies thicker than smoke, it is the truth-tellers who must not flinch. This festival, and these reports, stood firm.

There is something poetic, no, something necessary in knowing that while I prepare to re-enter Ukraine, Ruslan has stood on the soil that shaped me. That he has seen the scars of my childhood home, and left behind his own. That his voice now echoes in a language I dream in. This is not just cultural exchange, it is soul recognition between two peoples stitched together by loss and defiance.

We don’t write these stories to provoke pity. We write them because memory is an act of rebellion. Because art that emerges from bunkers and blood has the power to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed. Because somewhere, a child in Kharkiv or in Gjilan and Gjakova, might one day find in these lines whether in ink or prose, not only the record of a crime, but the promise that someone bore witness.

And that is the least we can do.

When I next meet Ruslan, it will not be in a quiet office. It may be in a trench again, or a village razed by shelling. But we will shake hands not only as journalist and subject, but as brothers in this unspoken fraternity of those who cannot look away. We are bound not by profession alone, but by something deeper. A rage against forgetting. A love for those left behind. A belief that in telling the story, we fight back.

Until then, I rest, for a moment only in Poland. And I carry with me the image Ruslan drew of me last year, camera in hand, ducking gunfire. Beneath it, he scribbled: “Please don’t look into the lens. And don’t shoot.”

In the chaos of war, it is perhaps the most absurd, and the most human, of prayers.

Dear reader, we live in an age where numbness masquerades as strength, where silence is often rewarded, and remembering feels like a burden too heavy to bear. But in Ruslan’s trembling lines and the dust of my own memories, I’ve seen a truth that cuts deeper than any wound: that to remember is to love. And to love, even amidst war, is to declare that humanity still exists, fragile, defiant, eternal. If art can cry out in the dark, if memory can reach across borders and say, I see you, then maybe, just maybe, we are not as lost as we fear.

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1. The Art of Defiance: Ruslan’s War

In the trenches, war steals everything, homes, futures, lives. Yet Ruslan fights with ink, not bullets. His art shames tyrants. His laughter defies death. Will we listen? — The GPC.

Njeriu që pikturoi ëndrrat e fëmijërisë është në Kosovë

Në Prishtinë është Ruslani, në Ukrainë po kthehem unë. Dy luftëra, dy popuj, një dhimbje dhe një zë që refuzon të heshtë. — Revista SPOTLIGHT.

2. GranFest — Facebook Page.

3. Romani grafik – armë në luftë e kohë të jashtëzakonshme — KOHA Ditore.

4. Arti si terapi psikologjike e dokumentim i frontit ukrainas — KOHA Ditore.