Written by Gini Graham Scott, Ph.D.
This past week, the war in Ukraine crossed a milestone that would have seemed unthinkable when Russian tanks rolled across the border in February 2022. On June 11, 2026, the conflict entered its 1,569th day — officially outlasting the First World War, which ran 1,568 days from July 28, 1914, to November 11, 1918. What began as a conflict Vladimir Putin believed would be over in days has ground on for more than four years and three months, reshaping European geopolitics, exhausting both nations, and leaving peace as elusive as ever. With negotiations stalled and polls suggesting roughly half of Ukrainians believe the war will not end before next year, the country now stares down yet another sobering threshold: the duration of World War II.
Against that backdrop, a quietly remarkable book has taken on a meaning I could not have anticipated when I assembled it. When Ukraine Was at Peace, a collection of photographs taken in 1987 and 1989 — the years of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, when the Soviet Union was loosening its grip and something like ordinary life was flowering across its republics. My camera captured Ukraine not as a battlefield or a humanitarian tragedy, but simply as a place where people lived. Families gathered at home. Children played with their mothers in sunlit parks. Shoppers browsed open-air markets. Couples strolled city streets. Museum-goers paused before canvases. Men and women stretched out by the beach. Monuments stood against blue skies, unthreatened. I feel especially connected to what is happening in Ukraine, since my grandparents on my father’s side lived there for a time before emigrating to the U.S. in the early 1900s.
Published about a year ago, the book has aged into something more than a photo essay. It has become a document of mourning — and, for many readers, a reminder of what is at stake.
Ukraine in 1987 and 1989: A Country Between Empires
The Ukraine that I photographed nearly four decades ago existed in a peculiar historical interlude. The Soviet system still governed daily life, but Gorbachev’s reforms were introducing a new openness. Citizens could speak a little more freely. Western ideas seeped in. And in Ukraine specifically, there was a cultural stirring — a quiet reclaiming of Ukrainian language, literature, and identity that had long been suppressed under Soviet rule.
The photographs in When Ukraine Was at Peace capture that moment with an intimacy that official Soviet imagery never permitted. These are not propaganda images of heroic workers or beaming collective farmers. They are the texture of ordinary life: a grandmother arranging flowers in a Kyiv apartment, teenagers lounging on the shore of the Black Sea near Odessa, a vendor arranging tomatoes and cucumbers at a market stall, a young woman studying a painting in a gallery while afternoon light falls across the canvas. The buildings in the background — ornate tsarist-era facades, brutalist Soviet apartment blocks, golden Orthodox domes — are the same buildings that have since appeared in satellite images tagged with the coordinates of missile strikes.
Looking at these photographs in 2026, it is impossible not to be struck by a peculiar tenderness. Ukraine was not, in 1987, a free country. It was still under Soviet control, still decades away from the independence it would declare in 1991. And yet the people in my images look, unmistakably, like people at peace. They look unhurried. A father lifts a small child toward a monument. Two old men play chess on a park bench. A family shares a meal at a wooden table, the light warm and ordinary. These are scenes from a life that millions of Ukrainians would recognize — a life that four years of full-scale war have interrupted, and that too many will never return to.
A War Unlike Any Expected
When Putin launched his invasion, Western analysts gave Ukraine days, perhaps weeks. The Kremlin expected the government in Kyiv to collapse and the population to capitulate. Neither happened. Ukrainian forces repelled the initial assault on Kyiv. The conflict settled into the grinding, positional warfare that analysts have since compared — with grim aptness — to the Western Front of 1914–1918, though now the Ukraine’s expertise at drone warfare has brought the war home to Russia through explosions in its cities, oil refineries, buildings, and more, so the war has stalled, and Ukraine has been regaining territory and villages once lost to Russia.
The parallel to World War I is not merely metaphorical. Like the Great War, this conflict has been defined by trenches, artillery attrition, and the terrible arithmetic of territory measured in kilometers and lives. Ukrainian troops reportedly clawed back between 400 and 500 square kilometers in February and March of this year — modest gains for enormous sacrifice. Russian forces have failed to achieve significant operational breakthroughs despite spending an estimated $540 billion on the war effort. The front lines shift, but the war does not end.
A Ukrainian soldier interviewed this week, identifying himself only by his call sign, France — a nod to time spent in the French Foreign Legion — captured the exhaustion of the moment precisely. He had thought the war might last two or three years before politicians found some kind of consensus. He was wrong, along with almost everyone else.
Nostalgia as a Form of Resistance
When Ukraine Was at Peace arrives in this context not as escapism but as a form of cultural insistence. The people in my photographs are not abstractions. They are not ‘the Ukrainian people’ as a geopolitical category. They are individuals — specific, embodied, alive in particular moments. They carry groceries. They watch their children on swings. They stand before art and let it work on them. The book insists, quietly but forcefully, that this is what is being defended and what has been lost: not just territory, not just sovereignty, but the ordinary human texture of life.
My timing — publishing the book roughly a year ago, as the war was already past its third anniversary — proved prescient. The photographs from 1987 and 1989 are now almost forty years old, old enough to seem historical, close enough to feel personal. For Ukrainians of a certain age, the images are memories. For younger Ukrainians, they are a portrait of parents and grandparents in a world before the war. For international readers, they are a corrective to the flattening effect of news coverage, which necessarily renders Ukraine as a site of conflict rather than a place where people have always simply lived.
There is something particularly striking about the Gorbachev-era setting. Those years felt, to many who lived through them, like the beginning of possibility. The Cold War was thawing. Ukraine was rediscovering itself. Independence, when it came in 1991, would feel like both a fulfillment and a new beginning. The tragedy of the decades since — the corruption, the revolution, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and then the catastrophe of 2022 — makes the hopefulness visible in my photographs feel almost unbearably poignant.
Peace as a Place, Not Just a Condition
One of the quiet revelations of When Ukraine Was at Peace is how much it makes peace feel like a place — a specific landscape of interactions, routines, and spaces — rather than simply the absence of war. Peace is the market where the vendor knows her regulars. It is the museum where a teenager discovers a painting that will stay with her for years. It is the park bench, the beach, the family table, the monument where someone has left flowers.
As Ukraine’s war outlasts the First World War and edges toward the duration of the Second, this book stands as a record of what peace looked like in that particular country, in that particular moment. It is a gift of memory, and — in the hope that it still carries — a vision of what might yet be rebuilt.
When Ukraine Was at Peace is available on Amazon
The war, as of this writing, is still going on. Follow Gini’s Substack for her latest posts: https://substack.com/@ginigrahamscott
Gini Graham Scott, Ph.D. is the author of over 50 books with major publishers and has published 200 books through her company, Changemakers Publishing And Writing.com). She writes books, proposals, and film scripts for clients, and has written and produced 20 feature films and documentaries, including Conned: A True Story and Con Artists Unveiled¸ distributed by Gravitas Ventures. Her latest books include Ghost Story and How to Find and Work with a Good Ghostwriter published by Waterside Productions; and The Big Con and I Was Scammed, published by American Leadership Press. She additionally has designed and published over 100 games with ALB Games.