‘I can shine a light on the monsters:’ Iowan documenting Russia-Ukraine War

A Des Moines woman is recording and archiving footage to tell the unvarnished truth about the Russia-Ukraine War.

Russia’s war on Ukraine began in February 2022. However, Ann Vorhees of Des Moines started collecting video from it recently after a conversation she had with a neighbor gave her the idea.

“I said, ‘We shouldn’t leave Ukrainians to die.’ He said we should,” Vorhees said, recalling the conversation.

Trying to convince him didn’t work, she realized. But she thought that he and others might be more inclined to believe something if they saw it with their own eyes.

So Vorhees started The Ukrainian War POV, a collection of mostly videos, with a few articles, that she gathers regularly from Facebook, Reddit, and news sites that she trusts. To make sure other videos are real, she checks things like locations and times of battles, as well as armband colors or coat of arms emblems.

She screen-records some of them to keep a copy if they get taken down.

“It can be gone within minutes to hours,” she says of the footage.

Her collection isn’t for the faint of heart—”I think I’ve seen a thousand ways to blow up a body,” Vorhees said—but she said she’s become “kind of desensitized” after doing it for the last seven months.

Nonetheless, there are some that still get her: When she spoke to Starting Line, she had just finished uploading a video of the aftermath of a Russian missile strike on a children’s hospital in Kyiv. The video in question has the caption, “Children are screaming under the rubble.”

“There was nothing militarily targeted; nothing,” Vorhees said of the hospital. “That’s where I’m struggling.”

Other videos are slightly more lighthearted. In one, a Russian soldier watches as his supplies are blown up in a drone strike, kicking the still-on-fire debris aside; that post was from a Reddit account called UkraineWarVideoReport, an account Vorhees often shares on her blog.

There are grim category names, like Russian Abuse, alongside ones titled Funny Videos, mostly dark-humor videos of Ukrainian soldiers outsmarting Russian ones. Vorhees especially enjoys compiling a category called Ukrainian Soldiers Pets, where soldiers rescue lost and abandoned animals.

“It does help release that (tension),” Vorhees said of the lighter videos. “You see the humanity.”

For Vorhees, the collection of videos is also a way to reckon with her own past: She traces her genealogy back to Vladimir the Great, with ethnic ties to both Russia and Ukraine. Part of her process is that reckoning or recognizing her “genealogical consciousness,” which she describes as a “moral way of behaving inextricably linked with the past, present, and future.”

But she’s also motivated by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed for attempting to overthrow Adolf Hitler in 1945, who said in his “Letters and Papers from Prison,”

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless.
Not to speak is to speak.
Not to act is to act.”

“My question is: How do you fight evil, without becoming evil itself?” Vorhees asked.

She thinks telling the unvarnished truth is the way.

“I wanted to go to Ukraine and fight with them. But I can’t,” Vorhees said. “But I can shine a light on the monsters that lurk in the dark.”