Shelters, missiles and drones--a photojournalist speaks (Part 1)

American photojournalist Patrick Patterson first appeared on the radar of this editor when he volunteered to come to the aid of Ukrainian refugees flooding into Poland at the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Later came his travels to various parts of the war zone and stark, stunning photos, often in crisp black and white. The Corners caught up with Patterson shortly after his most recent stint in Kyiv and far beyond—and the tales he had to tell were as stark and honest as his photography. Below is the first of a three-part series in which the displaced Texan came clean on what he saw, but equally important, what he has felt while both experience the profundity of war… and the Ukrainian people.

[Please note--further photos in the Patreon version of this story AND FOR NOW that story is open for all who hit the Patreon link on the site.]

Part one—bombings during the month of May

TC: Before we dive into it, please tell us a bit about yourself and just how you wound up in Ukraine.

Patterson: I grew up in Beaumont, Texas, and went to school at Lamar University where I studied photography with my mentor, Keith Carter, a Texas based photographer. I covered stories from Texas death row to immigration on the southern border. I happened to be on the phone with Will Richardson, an expat in Warsaw, who said: “You should come to Ukraine and we should do some stories. Long story short, I went the first week of the war.

At first I hung out in Medyka and travelled up and down the border and visited different border crossings. Ultimately, I decided to relocate in Kyiv in June.

TC: What was your first experience of Kyiv?

Patterson: When I first went to Kyiv… in some sense it is still the same today as it was in that first June. It just depends. I try to explain this to people, but it’s rather hard to make them understand. Typically, I would wake up, go to my café or go to the pub, write, edit photos, go grocery shopping. Things were normal—as normal as they could be. Then in October, specifically Oct. 10, there was the first change. This was the day of the first incoming missiles that struck. That became a routine—every Monday we would get a new round of missiles.

I didn’t go to a shelter. But for the next four weeks every single Monday we had either drones or missiles. They were hitting various parts of Kyiv. The air defense wasn’t set up the way it is today. But any time an air alarm sounded it seemed like background noise. Usually nothing happened.

[Later in the year] my hotel room—where I stayed the first three weeks I lived in Kyiv--was hit. The exact room was directly hit by a missile. I was at an apartment by that time. That was New Year’s Day.

There were air raid sirens sounded that morning. We had decided to go to the botanical arboretum. That was like two-and-a-half hours after the air-raid sirens sounded. On the hill were three Ukrainian soldiers with air defense missiles. I was there standing when they were coming in.

I asked if we should be go to the church because there was a church, but nobody wanted to go there because it was a Russian church.

We stood there with in an open field as the missiles flew over.

A missile hit where I had stayed, the Hotel Alfavito. My assumption was that the missile was intended for another target.  It hit the very room where I had stayed. That exact room.

TC: Did you spend your time primarily in Kyiv?

Patterson: I based myself out of Kyiv for a year, and I spent most of my time in Kharkiv and the Kherson region. I would go out to  Izyum, Lyman and to smaller villages in between, such as Beryslav, Mykolaiv. I also went to Odessa.

This was my first time I’d ever done anything like this. This was my first rodeo.

TC: I’ve always understood that in war zones, prices go up fast. Petrol costs can make war reporting difficult. Is that what you experienced?

Patterson: It was fairly inexpensive [for a war zone]. It cost about USD 50 to fill up a car. In Kherson, getting to Kryvyi Rih was a day trip. It wasn’t so expensive. It was exhausting, however. It would take six hours to get from Kryvyi Rih to Beryslav—and there were holes from tanks or explosions on top of Ukrainian roads. Izyum would be a three-day trip. I’d go back to Kharkiv or Poltava. Three days or five days return to Kyiv to process everything.

TC: How did you deal with the risk?

Patterson: I was pretty cautious and tried to prepare as much as I could. The risk was more or less artillery fire. In Beryslav we were targeted directly by Russian tanks. We could see across the Dnipro River and into Kakhovka. I was with a group setting up Starlink. It was the first time anyone in Beryslav was able to communicate to an outside city. Then first shell came in.  Russian artillery spotted us or maybe collaborators called it in.

When it happened I was talking to people on the street. The first shell came in. Then the second came in. They call it bracketing . They would hit in front of us, then they hit behind us. I was going backward, reversing the car, and then punching it forward.

I didn’t see a single military vehicle. No military at all on our side. I saw one police car. These shells that were coming in were landing in people’s homes.

They probably fired a minimum of 12 shells.

TC: So you jerked the car backward and forward again and again to dodge tank shells? They just kept landing behind you and in front of you?

Patterson: All I knew is that I did not want to sit still. I didn’t want to be in the car. I wanted to be lying flat on the ground or against an exterior wall facing the opposite way. There were kids that were spread eagle against walls. But one child was like “fuck you guys, I want to go down the street and play.”

His parents were saying, “No. Stay close to us.”

TC: That sounds surreal.

Patterson:  It’s the first time I’ve ever heard that sound. I dove and incidentally jumped on my fixer. I lay on top of these people.

But the child’s dad stayed in the  middle of the street. He was like what are you doing? This is normal. There were also people riding down the street with humanitarian aid. They did not ride slower or faster.

TC: You felt like you were targeted? They must have seen you and these people setting up Starlink if there were no other military personnel there, right?

Patterson: That felt personal. I knew that they knew where we were.

TC: You mentioned difficult times in Kyiv. Was this right at the beginning of the war? I’m assuming this, as this was a time when we were getting calls to try to get people out, and in fact it was very difficult to get out of the city.

Patterson: No, I meant the month of May 2023. It was intense. It drained everyone. It was the first time apart from the first couple of weeks of the war when people in Kyiv really paid attention to the sirens. I remember one woman—once an alarm sounded within seconds you would hear the elevator in our building. The woman who lived next to me—she was gone. We didn’t make fun of her, really, but we would time it. How long was it going to take for her to leave her flat and evacuate.

Then came May 16. I was on my balcony. Every alarm I would go on my balcony and would film everything. I had not yet been jolted, if you know what I mean. If it was a drone attack I felt safe—I don’t know why—until the night that the drone kept coming closer. Suddenly, it was literally right outside my window. This drone was coming directly for my building. When it got to the point it was so loud that it was on top of me I knew I needed to bail. By the time I got to my door, the first explosion from air defense happened—they missed, but this was right outside my apartment.

I left my apartment and got in the corridor where the elevator is. If you can’t make it to a shelter you want to get between two walls. I was next to the shaft. The drone was looking for a Patriot system. We had part of a Patriot in our neighborhood somewhere. When the Patriot missiles came into Kyiv we started noticing that the attacks were happening close to my apartment.

TC: So how often did the rockets come in?

Patterson: May was every night.

TC: And what happened with this one?

Patterson: When the air defense guys hit it I was already down to the first floor. The windows blown out of the apartments. The shockwave was intense. The building next to me caught on fire. The next day a drone hit the building behind me, wiped out the top three floors. Killed a woman.

TC: And this was every night?

Patterson: In May it was every single night. I started sleeping in my clothes. I would be running down the street and missiles were flying over my head. In May every time you would go out, you would see people’s faces—you would see the fatigue and stress. People were different.

If I went to Kharkiv—you go out and get shelled. You are expecting it. But if it’s a place where you sleep, it’s different. If I got an hour of sleep, it was something.

I left June 7. It’s still happening now.

TC: And how do the Ukrainians react?

Patterson: In May, June and July… for Kyiv these are the first three months-that the insulation is not there. When the sirens go off people go to the shelter. And the shelters are full.

My building has a shelter. It has a basement. I use it lightly. It acts a shelter for multiple buildings. It has one entrance so the risk of getting trapped is pretty high. There are always kids in there. The conversations are always kind of light. Just something to pass the time. But we were close enough to the explosions that they were close enough to literally shake the building. You might have a couple minutes of talking about one of the dogs or cat—something light—and then an explosion would happen. And you would hear the air defense go off. It’s hard to say how the children took this. The children were fucking terrified.

TC: So were people panicking? Yelling at each other? Crying? How could anyone deal with that kind of stress?

Patterson: What I took away from the whole experience is that when this happened—between midnight and five A.M.-- you have so many kids in Kyiv getting up and going to a shelter, not getting the sleep they need… They are exhausted. Having tired kids that are irritable and scared. It’s another layer of exhaustion.

TC: And how did you deal with the stress?

Patterson: I had a panic attack. In the subway. In the middle of the day in May. I sat down and put myself close to some police officers. They came over to me when they saw me. They gave me sedatives. It was my first panic attack. They came over and recognized this and asked if I was ok.

I was in a subway. Really, when the missile attacks come you have three scenarios. In the first, we get a notification through Telegram that Russian bombers have taken off and are flying in the direction of the launch zone. I know then I have two or three hours before I really need to worry. When this happens you take that time to maybe cook dinner, take a nap. I can set my alarm. But some families will just go to the shelter. They set up a camp site—they are pros at this. They have air mattresses, tables, they are set.

Then there is the scenario where you look at the air maps and you say: “Ok, it’s going to go off in an hour and it’s a drone attack.”

Then you have the ballistic missiles. When this happens you have two or three minutes or no time. You know when the air defense starts up. Or when the missile hits.

TC: So where do you run to?

Patterson: You ask yourself: is it safer to get to the bottom floor or safer to run and maybe have fragments land on you.

People get killed by the falling fragments. This comes from when air defense successfully hits a missile or drone overhead. Two women and a young child that made it to a shelter and the door was locked—and that particular night I had missiles flying over me. A night before two people killed at a gas station—fragments landed on them. The night before that others were killed by debris falling on them.

Once I left the front of my apartment there were three options. If there was no time at all, I would go to the shelter below me or shelter in place. If I thought I had some time, I’d go down the trail to the main avenue. There was an overpass, and I would run underneath that and make it to a pedestrian underground crossing.

If I had a lot of time, I’d run five minutes past that to the subway.

So I had three plans.

But in the beginning I would just lay in bed. There are explosions. Your body cringes—you just say fuck.

But then it happened so much that I had to find somewhere to run to.

TC: Okay, I kind of don’t understand this. I would expect the opposite—that after some time you would become resigned and stay in bed, but this is not how it worked with you?

Patterson: Maybe in the beginning I was just saying “if it’s my time, it’s my time.” But at some point my body became exhausted. I didn’t want to experience that feeling. That made me want to seek the shelter even before the alarm sounded.

I have a journal and I was reading it early today. I read some notes, and I talked about the anticipation of what is coming. I fear the sun setting because I know what’s going to happen. I dread what is going to happen.

I also remember taking a nap, leaning against a tree in the middle of the day.  This was the same day I had the panic attack. When I left I just wanted to sleep. I figured I would find a tree… I didn’t want to focus on breaking news. That was too timely. I didn’t want to focus on breaking news.  I wanted to focus on the people.  How war impacts people and environment. not sure what too personal means.  I wanted to personalize the stories from the war.  Even now I want my photographs to be windows into those who have experienced this war.

[Ed. Note—at this point Patterson allows a peek into his journal. The pages read:

May 16, 2023; Kyiv

“Distracted trauma.  Distracted pain. Replaced with glimpses of normalcy.  Smiles coming from parents faces while their children innocently play.  For a moment, an undetermined amount of time, there is normalcy.  Flowers blossom. Birds twitter.  Sparrows dance between the Soviet era buildings in the evening sky. Candle blossoms adorn the branches of the walnut trees. 

Tonight, the unnatural will happen. Fire shooting across the night sky, and unlike shooting stars, these lights are made of metal. They are made of man. They were made to destroy. To kill in the physical, and crush the psyche of those who live under the missiles that fly the night sky”. ]

You will also see what I am getting at in some of my work—in my photos. Not focusing on the tanks or rocket launchers, on current events, but on people. On the living or no longer living. My photos might focus on a kitchen sink that Russians took after they killed the people that lived there.

TC: We’ll get into this during the next interview, but can you tell me a bit more about the people

Patterson: I think one of the most unique conversations I had was with a Ukrainian soldier who was a lawyer. He put down his law books and became a soldier—you see it all the time. Normal people who have become soldiers.

Now these Ukrainian soldiers are using vids as a morale booster. Look at me flying the drone—I dropped bombs on Russians and killed them. Or I shot these Russians and killed them. It’s very masculine, macho.

This soldier was maybe forty-five years old. He was the most honest, humbling, authentic interview from a soldier that I’ve heard anywhere in Ukraine in this entire war. He spoke specifically about this one time in Buczev when a Russian soldier was meters from him crossing the road. He couldn’t bring himself to squeeze the trigger. He understood what it meant to be human, alive and living and could not make himself shoot a man like that.

Then the big storm [Ed. Note—often in Ukraine this is how soldier refer to battles.] happened and that Russian probably ended up killing his comrades. I asked him: “How do you live with yourself knowing he that this soldier probably killed your friends?” He said: “When the battle comes to me in a storm I’m able to fight. I’m not able to pick off someone in such an intimate setting.”

I appreciated that. When it comes to Ukrainian men… Well, I’m a sensitive person normally. I’m a sensitive person normally. My nickname was “the Sensitive Texas Bluebonnet.” But he took the risk of being judged by his comrades. He didn’t kill this Russian soldier when he had an opportunity to in a setting [that for him would be murder.]

That story gives me hope for the authenticity for all of these Ukrainian men. And for the kids growing up in this war—that they [will overcome being brutalized by what is happening].

To be continued…