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As Ukrainian troops began to push the Russians back from the outskirts of the city of Kharkiv in May 2022, Gamlet Zinkivskyi, a street artist who knows how to shoot as well as paint, was eager to fight for his hometown.
So Mr. Zinkivskyi, who had frequented firing ranges before the war, joined a volunteer unit defending the city, in Ukraine’s east. But the battalion’s leader had other plans for his skills.
“Gamlet, just pick up your paintbrush, and go paint in the street,” Vsevolod Kozhemiako, the commander of the volunteer Khartiia battalion, recalled telling him. “Because the power of his art is much stronger than him taking a machine gun and assaulting or defending trenches. His art could empower the people defending the city.”
Although skeptical, Mr. Zinkivskyi obliged and began painting in Kharkiv’s bombed-out and deserted streets, wearing a bulletproof vest where he tucked painting tools.
One of his first works, on a plywood panel covering a smashed door at City Hall, featured Molotov cocktails — a nod to the homemade weapons that residents had prepared to defend Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.
“Hellish hospitality,” he wrote on the mural.
Soon, he said, volunteers and soldiers would stop by in the streets where he was working and tell him, “Gamlet, we love your work — keep going!”
“That’s when I understood how much people needed it,” he said during an interview in Kharkiv.
The city, just 25 miles from the Russian border, has been battered by Russian bombing since the war began, including in recent days when Russian missiles and bombs hit residential and shopping areas, killing at least six people and injuring about a hundred more.
The positive response to his work prompted Mr. Zinkivskyi, 34, to paint dozens more murals in cities across eastern Ukraine, capturing the harsh realities of wartime in his paintings, which depict everything from blood donors to the lines of people receiving food to the exhaustion gripping civilians.
In the eastern cities liberated from Russian occupation, destroyed buildings and bridges have become his new canvas, as he transforms remnants of devastation into symbols of resilience amid horrors.
“It’s my huge gallery,” Mr. Zinkivskyi said. “The best gallery possible.”
Born to a journalist mother and a father who worked as an architect and jeweler, Mr. Zinkivskyi was immersed in culture from a young age.
At university, he adopted the nickname Gamlet, the transliteration of Hamlet in Russian, because he often recited the play’s soliloquies to fellow students. Eventually, it became his official first name.
Expelled from his art academy for resisting the rigid classical style demanded by professors, Mr. Zinkivskyi struck out on his own and started painting without permission on buildings across Kharkiv.
There, he honed his signature black-and-white minimalist style, which often features solitary figures or objects set against empty spaces. He accompanies his paintings with captions that often read like poetry or philosophy.
With more than 100 of his murals appearing on building facades, gates and windowsills, Mr. Zinkivskyi’s work has become an integral part of the city.
“Kharkiv has several important cultural figures, and he’s definitely one of them,” said Maksym Rozenfeld, a local architect.
Before the war, Mr. Zinkivskyi’s art, some of which he sells to collectors to support his spartan lifestyle, reflected everyday themes like loneliness and the passage of time. After Russia’s invasion began in February 2022, his focus shifted to the profound changes the war brought to people’s daily lives.
To depict the mass exodus of Kharkiv’s population early in the war — around half a million residents fled — he painted sets of keys accompanied by the caption: “The keys miss their doors.”
Another mural shows a soldier’s gear — a helmet, flak jacket and rifle — which he called the “amulets of modernity.”
“His street art is more than just art. He’s documenting the reality around him,” said Anton Shtuka, a photographer and filmmaker who recently released a documentary on Mr. Zinkivskyi called “Warning! Life Goes On.”
“His work is like an imprint of time,” Mr. Shtuka said.
Standing by the Molotov cocktail mural on Kharkiv’s City Hall, Rimma Hurina, a 67-year-old retiree, said the painting “preserves the memory” of Kharkiv’s early days of resistance during the war. “It’s about the struggle for Kharkiv, the fight for freedom.”
Like most of Kharkiv’s residents, Mr. Zinkivskyi is a native Russian speaker. But he has made a point of writing all the captions on his new murals in Ukrainian, and rewriting those done in Russian before the war — reflecting a broader social shift that has seen many Ukrainians switch from Russian to Ukrainian.
Not all of his murals have met with approval. One painting that suggested to war-weary civilians that their fatigue pales in comparison to the sacrifices of soldiers set off a backlash on social media. Some residents have objected to his focus on the grim realities of war, calling his artwork depressing.
“Please paint something beautiful, like flowers or children,” Mr. Zinkivskyi recalled an elderly woman pleading one day, as he painted guns and knives on the gate of her residential block.
“I don’t want to paint smiling children or beautiful flowers. It’s war!” he said he responded.
After the eastern Ukrainian cities of Izium and Kupiansk were liberated from Russian occupation in the fall of 2022, Mr. Zinkivskyi rushed there, eager to see what had become of his prewar murals.
In Izium, he said, what struck him most was the reception he got from residents who had survived by hiding in basements for months, fearful of being killed by Russian soldiers. (A mass grave with over 400 bodies was later found near the city.) Now free, the residents asked him, he said, to paint on the streets, hoping his art would lift their morale.
With more than 80 percent of Izium’s buildings destroyed or damaged by the fighting, according to local authorities, he painted on ruins.
On a recent afternoon in Izium, Mr. Zinkivskyi, who wears multiple rings on his fingers and smokes hand-rolled cigarettes perched in a holder between his lips, refreshed a mural he made a year ago, depicting emergency backpacks that people keep ready.
Carefully, he retraced the white lines of the drawing, painted on a door riddled by shrapnel holes. It was the only part of a once-bustling social center still standing. The building’s roof had collapsed, and piles of bricks were scattered across the floor.
On a pillar of a bridge severely damaged by bombings, but which local residents still use, Mr. Zinkivskyi had painted the words “broken, but invincible.” Though the pillar eventually collapsed into the river, the message of resilience has stuck in the minds of the community.
In Izium, several residents said his work symbolized the city’s recovery. A 12-year-old girl stood motionless for nearly half an hour as she watched Mr. Zinkivskyi paint on a gate nestled between two destroyed buildings; she said he had brought beauty to a landscape of devastation.
Oleksandr Cheban, a 36-year-old businessman, snapped a selfie with Mr. Zinkivskyi after he recognized him painting on the street. “He’s showing people that we are still alive,” Mr. Cheban said. “You see, everything is broken, but we live.”
Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.
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