Project
Ukraine: Grey Zone

Project Director
Benas Gerdžiūnas, Journalist

Project URL
https://pilkojizona.lrt.lt/

Project Reviewer
Hayden Bassett, Virginia Museum of Natural History

Project Overview

Benas Gerdžiūnas

Ukraine: Grey Zone is an immersive three-part interactive story that gives the account of a cluster of mining communities that were divided by war in eastern Ukraine. Since Russia‘s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, the area has fallen under Russian occupation.  Many locals here backed the Russian-led separatists, while others fought for Ukraine on the frontlines. As soldiers shared houses with local families, whose children attended schools just meters from the trenches, the distinction between civilians and the military had faded.

I first began reporting in Ukraine in 2014, just after the first ceasefire deal that subsequently fell apart, which was then replaced by another one that proved to be equally a failure. The keyword, “grey zone,” is a term used in the military as well as in the ceasefire deals to describe a buffer zone along the frontline. But the term goes further. In the grey zone, the boundaries and the distinctions had blurred between what makes a soldier and a civilian, between who is pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian, and between where is safe and where is not. It also impacted the grasp of truth amid the constant bombardment of pro-Russian propaganda.

I recorded organic sounds of bombing impacts, shells flying overhead, or small arms. Together with audiovisual artist Luis Perez, I created an audio track that could be looped seamlessly and would integrate with the field recordings that pop in as users scroll along, but also wouldn’t sound arbitrary or jagged. We also walked a fine line of not making the sound too dramatic and subjective. Visually, we chose to demarcate the frontline as a red line appears sporadically throughout the story, providing a constant reminder of the trench line. The conversation on visuals started even before the reporting began — at first with Thomas Burns, a producer, before the project eventually moved over to the Lithuanian public broadcaster, LRT. It was published in 2020 following two trips, lasting around a month in total. I lived in a local apartment, largely integrating into the day-to-day life of the community.

Rokas Anisas, who was responsible for design and development, built a bespoke online platform. The images also had to be mostly center-aligned to allow easier cropping when viewed on mobile. The text had to be concise to appear as captions — subtitles almost — to the photos. We decided to slow down the scrolling speed to give more space for the visuals and sound.

With the images, I tried to make sure they drive the visual narrative but do not overdramatize and present a stereotypically bleak insight into the community there, which perseveres due to the strength of its people. I tried to stay away from the geopolitical focus, to show international, as well as Ukrainian and Russian audiences, how these regular people, who took out loans and had plans, found everything put on hold by the war. I hope we have succeeded in offering an intimate snapshot, one that went deeper and beyond the headlines. Following the project’s recognition at the World Press Photo awards in 2021, it succeeded in attracting new audiences, especially in Ukraine, and among researchers and within academia.

Project Review

Hayden Bassett

In an era where digital humanities often intersect with the most pressing global issues, Benas Gerdžiūnas’ Ukraine: Grey Zone emerges as a poignant and necessary exploration of the liminal spaces carved out by conflict. Ukraine: Grey Zone is a web-based, audio-visual publication that dissects the complexities of eastern Ukraine's contested territories in a series of parallel experiences. Published two years prior to Vladimir Putin’s February 24, 2022 invasion, the immersive storytelling profiles the lives of families, soldiers, and individuals living on the periphery of a deeply entrenched conflict. This unique form of journalism layers multimedia — maps, photographs, personal narratives, and audio — into a highly sensorial view of life among the uncertainties and stresses of disputed territory, a “grey zone.” This digital tapestry serves as a living archive, encapsulating the daily realities of a population caught between borders, governments, competing narratives, and contradictions in the post-2014 borderland communities of eastern Ukraine. 

One of the project's most striking features is its user interface, which blends intuitive navigation with rich content. Users scroll through a three-part story, uncovering experiences of resilience and suffering, while an overarching narrative of displacement and geopolitical maneuvering unfolds. The centered photography, high-contrast text, and scroll-based navigation is carefully engineered with its audience in mind, recognizing that most users will experience the website from their phone. After engaging with the website from both a computer and a smartphone, the latter proved to be the ideal experience—a major achievement. The immersive interface is also best experienced with headphones.

Among the unique blend of multimedia used in this journalistic experience, I found the use of audio to be a key innovation. As I navigated the parallel human stories of the conflict, I better understood the context of the text and photos through a soundscape that communicated a reality otherwise difficult to evoke. The audio, derived from Zona’s recordings in these locations, captures the backdrop of artillery and gunfire against the everyday sounds of conversations, whispers, roosters, cooking, recreation, laughter, and radio/television propaganda. The soundscape perfectly complements the synopsis of one elderly interviewee, “We’re such a grey zone here… They are bombing, but we are dancing.” While the role of audio in the platform is a major innovation, it also poses disadvantages for accessibility. The mixed-media experience will be inaccessible to deaf or hearing-impaired users, but small additions (e.g., voice narration combined with single click/keystroke navigation) would create engaging audio experiences for visually impaired users.

Put simply, the web-based audio-photo journalism of Ukraine: Grey Zone is effective as both a narrative and a platform. The on-location sounds, people-centered visuals, movement-based navigation, and mosaic of brief glimpses of life place the viewer in a confusing space, reinforcing a reality that is hard to understand from text and photos alone. As an innovation in storytelling and digital humanities, the immersive platform developed for this project is an ideal model for audio-visual journalism. It should likewise serve as a template for communicating ethnography and other forms people-centric fieldwork. As a genre-defining effort, the project’s greatest contribution is in carving out a middle space between photography and film that will appeal to both academic and public audiences.