“When War Comes, What Do You Pack?” On a New York Stage, Ukrainians Speak Their Truth and Make Us Listen

“Do you bring the most practical things or the most valuable?” Mendes continues. “A party dress because it’s more expensive? I mean… what kind of evacuation is it if you bring your evening dresses with you? You don’t know what to do when you evacuate like that. You don’t know what’s right.”

These words come from the diary of Olena Nikulina, a Ukrainian woman who found out she was pregnant while her husband, Maksym, was surrounded by Russian forces at the Azovstal steelworks. Maksym, a soldier in the Azov Brigade, has been in Russian captivity since May 2022. Their son, Kostya, is now almost three. Maksym has never met him.

Her entry—raw and unfiltered—is part of Diary of War, a project that includes testimonies of Ukrainians who lived through the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The diaries, first recorded as voice messages, now come alive on stage.

“With every reading, when I talk about Maksym, the numbers change,” Daria Kolomiec, the project’s creator, tells us. “A year in captivity, a year and five months. Last time, I went out and said: two years and nine months.”

The raw and unfiltered

Diary of War is the brainchild of Daria Kolomiec, a Kyiv-based cultural activist and producer recognized by Time Magazine as a Next Generation Leader. Over the past three years, she has spearheaded advocacy efforts in the US and raised over $90,000 since early 2024 to support Hospitallers and the Women Veteran Movement NGO.

In the first six months of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kolomiec collected 41 stories from Ukrainians via voice messages, shaping them into Diary of War, a podcast. Each episode begins at 5 a.m. EET on February 24—the moment Russian missiles and artillery rained down on sleeping Ukrainian cities—and follows each storyteller until the moment they recorded.

“That day radically changed how I see creativity, art, and the purpose of everything I do,” Kolomiec shares. “Now, all my work has one goal: to shout to the world about Ukraine.”

This year's February 24 reading in New York, directed by Musa Gurnis, served a dual purpose: to remind Americans of the ongoing war in Ukraine and to encourage direct support for Ukrainian frontline medics. The tickets were out, and the performance raised $32,532 for United Help Ukraine, which will direct all proceeds to the volunteer medical battalion Hospitallers.

The reading brought together names familiar to American theater and film audiences, including Laila Robins, Sarah Wharton, and Jason Bowen. Robins gives voice to a Ukrainian war photojournalist, Julia Kochetova, who has documented Russian war crimes. 

“The most important thing in life,” Kochetova says through Robins’s voice, “is to have a place where you don’t need a return ticket. To have a person you hug and time stops. To have a bed where you wake up alive.”

Kolomiec says she gets chills every time she hears those words.

“I felt very honored and blessed to be part of this tonight,” Robins says after the reading. “It’s inspiring. This is a very scary world. We need to be on top of it. We need to be awake.”

Bearing witness

One story in particular always stirs something deep in both performers and audience—because of what happened to its author.

“I loved my civilian life. I miss it so much! And I really loved traveling, going somewhere—to Sicily, drinking wine, or… Sorry, I keep pausing because I’m listening for whether or not something is flying at me.”

Tonight, on this stage, Sarah Wharton is the voice of Iryna Tsybukh, known by her call sign “Cheka.” A combat medic in Ukraine’s Hospitallers volunteer battalion, she evacuated soldiers from frontline hotspots. Past tense—because on May 29, 2024, Cheka was killed in action in the Kharkiv region.

Just four days later, on June 2, 2024, Kolomiec staged another Diary of War reading in New York—this one directed by Zuzanna Szadkowski and performed by American veterans.

“We had been planning this for three months,” says Kolomiec. “But June 2 was also the day of Iryna’s funeral in Kyiv—the memorial march I helped create the playlist for. My friends carried her coffin through the streets of Kyiv to those songs. And I was in New York, staging this reading.”

Cheka’s diary is always included. In every performance.

It changed every actor who participated. They spent three months rehearsing her words, learning her life. Then she was killed. They felt it, as if they’d known her. They became witnesses.

Daria Kolomiec

Ukrainian cultural activist and creator of Diary of War project

Cheka recorded her diary from Avdiivka, a city battered by Russia’s relentless shelling. As she is about to end her recording, saying “it's quiet now…” both she and the listener hear a distant sound of an explosion. “I am so sick of this war that I can't even begin to tell you!” she says, frustration in her voice.

And yet, Cheka then chooses to end her diary with an actual moment of quiet. She approaches a fellow medic, callsign “German,” who is strumming Can’t Help Falling in Love on a guitar. She records the song for her diary.

Kolomiec ends every reading with this recording.

“Each time, the audience is transported to Avdiivka,” she says. “And each time, it’s more painful to remember—Russians have erased Avdiivka from the face of the earth.”

Bringing the stories to life

“We spent a lot of time discussing place names with actor Jason Bowen, who read Denys Khrystov’s diary,” says Kolomiec. Khrystov, a former TV host, evacuated hundreds from the war zone, and his diary is filled with cities—most of which Russia has since reduced to rubble. “Pokrovsk, Avdiivka, Kramatorsk, Studenok… these names come up again and again.”

“For me, making sure these stories are heard—despite indifference and the world’s fading attention—is everything,” says Kolomiec. “When I first came to New York in the summer of 2022, I told anyone who’d listen about the testimonies I had collected. But for many, these stories felt distant—too far removed. Some saw me as just a traumatized Ukrainian fresh from war, wearing a ‘Fuck Russia’ cap and carrying a ‘Russia is a terrorist state’ flag.”

So she set out to close that gap—to turn listeners into participants, to make these voices their own. “I joined theater communities, met artists, studied at an acting school in New York. Slowly, the idea clicked: let actors read these diaries. I saw how deeply they immersed themselves in the material, how they felt the stories, how they tried to live them. That’s how the staged readings started.”

Now, preparing for a Diary of War reading, actors don’t just recite lines. They research Ukraine. They study Mariupol’s 2022 siege, Russia’s war crimes, and Ukrainian resilience. The audience feels it—the authenticity, the deep understanding. That’s what makes these stories come alive.

Kolomiec adapts the scripts for each performance. In one, American veterans read 14 diaries. Another was built entirely around women’s testimonies—Diary of War: Women. 

“For February 24, I curated seven different stories,” says Kolomiec. “I select them based on what’s happening in the world. When Russia bombed Ohmatdyt, Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital, I knew we had to include it. People needed to hear that story—directly from someone who was there.”

Her close friend, Olha Bulkina, a clown for children at Ohmatdyt, recorded her diary early in the invasion. After Russia’s missile struck the hospital on July 8, 2024, Kolomiec asked her friend to recount that day. “We included her story in the performance—and we keep telling it.”

Writing each script is difficult, but performing them is even harder. “I remember meeting each diarist, listening to their voice messages, piecing together their testimonies,” says Kolomiec. “I know how they escaped Russian occupation, how Olena learned she was pregnant, how someone staged puppet shows for kids in a subway shelter, how a deaf girl and her mom fled Chernihiv, first not realizing war had begun.”

Kolomiec doesn’t just hand actors a script—she gives them links to the diarists’ social media, articles about them, and, when possible, connects them directly. “That’s when these stories stop being just words on a page,” she says. “That’s when they become personal.”

One moment always hits the audience. It’s Nikulina’s question, mentioned at the beginning: What do you take with you when war strikes?

After every reading, someone comes up to Kolomiec and says, “This is the first time I’ve ever asked myself—what would I take with me?” That moment feels real, says Kolomiec. It gives people a chance, even just for a moment, to step into the experience and imagine it as their own.

And for Kolomiec, every story she’s recorded is her responsibility to carry. “When I stand before the audience, I ask myself: What would they say if they were here?”

The sound of resistance

Before Diary of War, Kolomiec was known for something entirely different: music. A DJ, producer, and radio presenter, her world was sound. But when Russia invaded, that world shattered. “Music was over for me,” she said at the time.

But as Russia’s aggression went on, something shifted.

“Now, music means something far greater to me than just a soundtrack,” she says. “Ninety percent of what I listen to now are Ukrainian artists with a clear civic stance—soldiers, volunteers, or those who actively speak out about the war and support the country.”

In late July 2022, during a five-week stay in New York, she performed a live DJ set at Lot Radio—playing only Ukrainian music. It was the first all-Ukrainian set in the station’s history. Many tracks came from vinyl she carried from Kyiv.

In 2024, to mark Ukraine’s 33rd Independence Day, she curated a playlist of 33 songs by Ukrainian musicians who serve—or served—in the Armed Forces. Some have been killed in action.

“These were creative people with successful careers who made a conscious choice to put their lives on hold,” she says. “That decision came from deep inner conviction—a reflection of the broader spirit of Ukrainians who have been fighting for freedom for many years.”

This way, music, too, has become testimony.

“American audiences connect more deeply with Ukrainian music when it’s introduced through personal stories,” Kolomiec says. “Something clicks when I play a song by STASIK and say she’s a combat medic and veteran—they hear the voice of someone who’s been through hell and is still standing.”

Anastasia Shevchenko, also known as STASIK, is both a musician and one of the voices featured in Diary of War. In her song Heroes Die, she adopts the persona of Charon—the Greek mythological ferryman who carries souls to the underworld—singing: 

Don’t say: “They never die”

Heroes die; they die for us.

“The playlist helps answer a question: Why does the world know so much about Russian artists but so little about Ukrainian ones?” says Kolomiec. 

Russian cultural dominance, she explains, has long relied on erasing others, including Ukraine. For decades, the world viewed Ukraine through a Russian lens. “Even academic institutions often subsumed Ukrainian history under ‘Russian Studies,’ relying on imperialist sources. So much of what Americans thought they knew about Ukraine was Russian propaganda.”

“Each of us—whether we’re engaged in activism now or are heroes defending the country—had a good life before Russia’s war began,” she adds. “If you dig deeper into the history of any of our families, you’ll always find stories of repression, suffering, or the loss of loved ones because of Russia.”

Kolomiec’s own family’s story is part of that legacy. Her great-grandmother was the only one of thirteen siblings to survive the Holodomor—a man-made famine orchestrated by the Soviet regime in 1932–33. 

Diary of War is one way to push back against that erasure. It documents what’s happening in Ukraine in real time, through the voices of those living it. For Kolomiec, it’s about making sure these stories are heard, remembered, and understood.

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