Archive of Personal Testimonies: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Archive of Personal Testimonies: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Anna Eliseeva and project teams of The Helpdesk, KRONIKA, and Zukunft Memorial, including interviewers, editors, archivists, researchers, managers and engineers responsible for collecting, processing, preserving, and publishing the archive.

Archive of Personal Testimonies: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine is a digital archive created to preserve firsthand civilian accounts of the full-scale invasion. The project is based on interviews recorded by The Helpdesk between 2022 and 2024 with people who experienced occupation, shelling, forced displacement, captivity, and loss. It captures the everyday reality of war through oral accounts, as well as photographs, videos, and personal correspondence, documenting these experiences from the perspective of those directly affected.

The Helpdesk originally operated as both a media outlet and a support service. Alongside publishing eyewitness accounts, it ran a 24-hour consultation hotline. People contacted the project with questions about evacuation, humanitarian aid, legal risks, mobilization, and adapting to life in new countries. Through anonymous chats and personal correspondence, individuals shared their experiences of war, including occupation, shelling, loss of loved ones, separation from family, and the destruction of homes. Project staff provided psychological, practical, and legal support, assisted in connecting people with volunteers, and documented these experiences through interviews, audio recordings, transcripts, and visual materials.

Initially, these interviews were published on social media under conditions of censorship and risk, in a context where state-controlled media in Russia largely denied civilian casualties and limited public visibility of such accounts. Due to platform limitations and safety considerations, most testimonies appeared in shortened and fragmented form. Audio recordings were never published, and supporting materials were constrained by format. As a result, the full versions of these testimonies remained inaccessible and at risk of loss due to platform dependency and the instability of digital publishing environments.

In 2024, The Helpdesk ceased operating in its original editorial format and transformed into a fundraising initiative supporting civilians affected by the war. This shift increased the risk of fragmentation and disappearance of the collected materials and highlighted the need for a sustainable archival solution.

The archive addresses this problem by restoring and preserving the materials in their most complete form. It currently includes over 150 testimonies selected from a larger corpus of approximately 500 interviews collected during the war, and work is ongoing to process and add the remaining materials.

Each testimony is presented as a structured archival unit, including full audio recordings where available (over 100 hours in total), complete transcripts, and, where provided, photographs and video materials, along with detailed metadata such as recording date, keywords, interviewer, interviewee, and contextual information.

The project transforms fragmented social media publications into a stable archival system. It restores narrative continuity, preserves the voices and intonation of speakers as essential evidence, and standardizes metadata to support search, comparison, and analysis. Audio plays a central role in this archive, as it captures elements that cannot be conveyed through text alone: tone, pauses, emotional nuance, and the context of the conversation.
The archive was developed as a collaboration between The Helpdesk, KRONIKA, and Zukunft Memorial. The Helpdesk conducted the interviews and ensured ethical standards, consent, and contextual documentation. KRONIKA preserved the testimonies, designed and implemented the archival infrastructure, including metadata systems, processing workflows, and the digital platform. Zukunft Memorial contributed to funding, long-term preservation strategy, and engagement with research communities.

The archive is an independent digital resource with its own structure and search system. It is not dependent on social media platforms. Users can explore testimonies through thematic categories, search (including keywords search), and metadata fields. Each testimony is linked to its original publication and includes supplementary materials where available.

The archive is available in Russian (original language), Ukrainian, and English. A German-language version is scheduled to be completed by July 2026. The audio recordings are preserved in its original language only, but their transcripts are translated. This multilingual approach expands access for international researchers, journalists, and institutions working on war documentation, human rights, and memory studies.
The significance of the project lies in preserving a fragile type of source. Civilian testimonies of war are often recorded under unstable conditions and distributed through platforms that do not ensure long-term preservation. By securing these materials in a structured and accessible form, the archive preserves primary evidence that will be important for future research, documentation, and public understanding of the war.

The project also demonstrates an approach to preserving high-risk digital content. It shows how materials originally created for social media can be systematically collected, restored, and transformed into an archive suitable for long-term use. This approach can be applied in other contexts where documentation is produced under conditions of censorship, conflict, or instability.