Uliana Bazar: Slava Ukraini

by Charles McGuigan 03.2025

On one of the first nights of summer, Uliana Bazar decided to keep her bedroom window open in the apartment she and her husband own in Lviv. A gentle breeze flowed through the window, and she slept soundly until something shook her from her slumber. She rose from her bed and made her way over to the open window and looked down on the street below. Everything was preternaturally quiet down there. That’s when she realized there must have been an air raid siren that she had slept through.  She woke her husband, and the couple stared through the open window, and then looked up into the sky. They saw, directly over their apartment house, rockets whizzing by. And then there was one explosion. Then another. And still another. Uliana stood there frozen. In the morning she would discover that a number of buildings had been destroyed—a hotel, a restaurant, other businesses and an apartment building. That was about a year ago.

“They [the Russians] always send missiles around four in the morning,” Uliana tells me during a recent Zoom interview. “They attack at night when most people are asleep.” She doesn’t know how many Ukrainian civilians were killed early that morning, but she does know that a mother and her three children were gone in an incendiary flash during the barbaric attack.

“There was a family in the building nearby—a father, wife and three daughters,” she tells me. “And they were in the main hallway of the building because it had double walls so it is was the safest place to be.” Moments before the missile struck, the husband went back to their apartment to get some water. The rocket hit in the dead center of the building, the section with double walls. The husband survived. His family did not.

I first met Uliana Bazar back in 2022, about a month after Russia invaded Ukraine. She is one of the bravest and most courageous, strongest, and gentlest human beings I have ever encountered. She and her husband, Matt Propert, have traveled the world widely as photographers for National Geographic. Born in Ternopil, where she lived for the first twenty years of her life, Uliana moved to the United States in 2007 at the age of 21. She received a degree in photo-journalism, went to work with NatGeo, and became a United States citizen. In 2018, Uliana and her husband returned to Ukraine where the couple bought an apartment in Lviv. Five hours before the Russian invasion began in 2022, the pair left Ukraine and spent the next several months with friends in England.

“But then we moved back to Ukraine,” says Uliana.  “Honestly, being away when everything was happening was way harder than coming back and hearing the sirens. When you’re here it’s like you’re in it and you just deal mentally. It felt easier. It’s very difficult when you’re away and there’s sunshine and people are happy and everything is good, but in your mind you worry and your internal world is in war. Here, inside and outside, you experience war and you get used to it and it is easier.”

During this interview Uliana is back in the town of her birth, consoling a Polish friend who recently lost her mother. Just the night before this interview, there were two massive air raids in Ternopil. “It was the loudest air raid siren I ever experienced,” says Uliana. “And it was hard for my friend because she just came to Ukraine from Poland. For her it was really scary, she just couldn’t relax.”

But for Uliana it was simply part of living in a country under siege by an authoritarian empire. “I haven’t even once gone to a bomb shelter,” she says. “I never go. I know it sounds so stupid. In the beginning I would go to the park, if it was daytime, and I would just be in nature. But no bomb shelters for me. I don’t live in fear, and I don’t live in frustration and anger because it destroys me on the inside and nothing changes. The human psyche cannot withstand three years of complete suffering. My psyche already adapted. And I could see it yesterday when we had two air raids and I only was worried that my friend was scared and uncertain because for her it was the first time. But myself, I could go to sleep even. That’s how the brain adjusts. It’s not that the danger is not there, but I got used to it.”

When I ask if she has photographed the destruction and carnage unleashed by a malevolent dictator, Uliana shakes her head.

“I don’t want to document destruction,” she says. “There are plenty of people who document pain, and they are doing a good job. For me I want to focus on life. What makes people want to stay. People joyfully going to church or a restaurant. During World War II people were getting together and dancing and women were wearing red lipstick and they were celebrating life amidst the destruction in Poland and other countries in Europe. There’s still joy even in a war-torn country. There’s an intensity of pain, and an intensity of joy.”

Uliana tells me her take on President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  “I think that Ukraine got incredibly lucky that during this time Zelenskyy was president,” she says. “It was an unimaginable challenge for a human being to be put in this type of situation. I don’t think there is any other person more suited than him. He is truly a warrior, in spirit as well. He has handled so much with such capability. He just does what needs to be done.”

Though some claim he is a corrupt leader, Uliana vehemently disagrees. Much of the chatter about Zelenskyy’s corruption is manufactured propaganda. “Russia is winning the informational war because they put so many resources into flooding the internet,” she says. “You know, people get their information from X, from nstagram, or from influencers. Russia pays for these. I watch Russian news, Ukrainian news, American news, and I follow a lot of influencers, and I can see how that type of misinformation spreads and I see it is by design.”

Five years ago Russia spread lies about Zelenskyy being a drug addict.   “And now American influencers are using it,” according to Uliana. “They are not truths.” She points out that Elon Musk will no longer acknowledge that Russia invaded Ukraine, which everyone saw with their own eyes. “So basically what Musk and others are trying to do is rewrite history in real time,” Uliana say. “It is all propaganda. Musk controls X. Bezos controls The Washington Post. We live in an era in America where billionaires or oligarchs control media. Every single day they dismiss regular media, and real journalists. It’s really dangerous what’s happening.”

She talks about the current Secretary of State. “Marco Rubio is okay with Ukraine giving up territory to make peace,” she says. “They are making Ukraine the villain that doesn’t want peace. We do want peace, but we don’t want to be destroyed.  We don’t want to be slaughtered and lose our freedom. They are scared and so cowardly.  They know it’s true but they will not say it because they’re scared to lose their privileges under the current administration.”

Uliana is concerned that the world is drifting in the wrong direction. “If you look at everything they are saying.” she says. “If you look at what they post and what they re-post, Musk, all of them seem to be trying to create a new world order. They are rearranging the world order.”

She has a unique view as both an American citizen and a citizen of Ukraine. “Most of my adult life I lived in America,” says Uliana. “And I have this perspective from Ukraine and America as well. Both countries are my country. I also pay taxes in America because I work for an American company, National Geographic. Our family is in America and we visit often. Some people have dignity and know the truth, and some people are cowardly.”

Uliana earnestly believes, that with sufficient support, Ukraine could beat Russia. “If we had enough weapons I think we could win,” she says. “We have one of the strongest armies in Europe. We don’t have a choice. People are protecting their homes. What we receive is just enough to defend ourselves.”

She considers Russia’s seemingly unquenchable thirst for new territory. “They are constantly trying to invade other countries,” she says. “In 2008 it was Georgia. They don’t stop. The county has an imperialistic appetite. Their population outside of Moscow is in severe poverty, they don’t even have toilets or electricity, they don’t invest to create infrastructure, schools, hospitals. Every generation of Ukrainian goes through suffering of war or some kind of assault from Russia.”

Yet Russia does not seem to understand the resolve of the Ukrainian people, according to Uliana, because the Russian people have almost always been under the thumb of an authoritarian ruler, whether it was a czar or a dictator. “Ukrainians are freedom loving people,” she says. “Freedom is in our DNA and that’s something Russians cannot understand because they never had it. Ukraine will never give up.”

That’s even apparent today in lands the Russians have occupied by force in western Ukraine and Crimea. Courageous women have formed a group called Zla Mavka that does everything they can to undermine the ruthless invaders, who, among other things, have raped and murdered children and women, and tortured civilians. “I have women friends in Mariupol who are called the Angry Mavka,” Uliana says. “They resist and always will. Many people are waiting for these territories to become Ukraine again. They live under occupation. A lot of those towns are fully under occupation of Russia and people are waiting. They will oppose, but right now they can’t because they would be shot. We know Russia wants to eradicate the Ukrainian people.”

As we’re wrapping up the interview, Uliana mentions Don’t Look Up, the 2021 satiric, black comedy with Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio.

“You have a crazy billionaire who doesn’t care at all about Earth and you have this crazy, ignorant president,” she says. “And once you understand what that movie was ultimately about you cannot un-see that it’s almost like a prediction to what’s happening right now. You can use the asteroid as a metaphor for what’s happening with the other stuff.”

That “other stuff “is the rise of authoritarianism and global climate change. “Earth has it’s natural rhythms and humans disrupted it and we are making our home unlivable for ourselves,” she says. “And you have a person like Elon Musk who doesn’t operate on empathy.”

And then Uliana tells me that from the time of the Russian invasion onward, artists and illustrators in Ukraine and elsewhere have used both The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars as backdrops for what is going on in Ukraine. In Tolkien’s tale, Putin, of course, is Sauron, and Musk is Saruman. “And they showed Elon Musk as Darth Vader and Putin as the Evil Emperor (Palpatine),” she says.

Then, after a pause, Uliana Bazar says this: “The Evil Empire will always fall, because it’s not built of freedom and truth.”

It was a Republican president, incidentally, a man by the name of Ronald Reagan, who referred to  Russia as The Evil Empire.