There are wars that we think we see beginning because cameras start filming them. Ukraine is exactly the opposite. When the world brutally discovered, in February 2022, that Europe could once again experience a very high-intensity war, I had long been watching a story that had already begun to be written on the walls of the Abode of Chaos.

I didn't wait for the Russian armored columns to paint Ukraine. I had followed its people, its divisions, its revolutions, its oligarchs, its leaders, its relations with Moscow, Washington, and Brussels. This is precisely what makes this part of the Abode of Chaos so special today.

When visitors tell me:

"You saw that war."

I tell them I'm not a prophet. I had simply observed the tectonic plates before they caused the earthquake. Crimea and Donbas were already speaking.

I painted Viktor Yanukovych.

His face belongs to this Ukraine, constantly torn between several political, economic, and cultural orientations. Then came Maidan, the Revolution of Dignity, its political collapse, and its flight to Russia.

I painted Yulia Tymoshenko, a figure immediately recognizable by her hairstyle, whom the media would nickname the "gas princess" or the "gas Madonna." She belongs to the Orange Revolution, to the Ukrainian political wars, but also to this energy issue that will never cease to permeate relations between Kyiv, Moscow, and Europe.

I painted Vitali Klitschko.

The champion became a politician, a figure of Maidan, then mayor of Kyiv.

I painted Petro Poroshenko, president of post-Maidan Ukraine, at the time when Crimea was falling apart and the Donbas war was beginning.

Then Volodymyr Zelensky.

His wife.

His Western interlocutors.

The leaders who are coming to Kyiv.

NATO representatives.

And, on the other side, Putin, his ministers, his generals, the men he successively places at the head of the Russian military apparatus.

Once again, I am not building a gallery of heads of state. I am building a visual chronology of the balance of power.

This is why the Abode of Chaos now possesses a particular depth regarding Ukraine. Visitors can encounter figures who belong to several generations of the conflict. The wall reminds them that History did not begin the day their television news decided to broadcast from Kyiv.

To understand Crimea, you must first look at the map. The peninsula juts out into the Black Sea like a natural fortress.

It possesses land, ports, a military history, and an extraordinary strategic position. Sevastopol allows for the projection of naval power into the Black Sea, and then, through the Turkish straits, into the Mediterranean.

Catherine II and the Russian Empire obviously occupy a central place in this story. Russia annexed the Crimean Khanate in 1783, after centuries of Tatar and Ottoman history. The peninsula then became a major international prize. The French, British, Ottomans, and Russians clashed there during the Crimean War in the 19th century.

Crimea is therefore not simply a piece of territory that one colors in on a map. It is a position. And a position becomes geopolitical when it allows one to control something larger than itself.

The Black Sea. That's why Turkey necessarily belongs in the reasoning.

The Bosphorus.

The Dardanelles.

And above all the Montreux Convention of 1936, which organizes the regime of the straits and gives Turkey a decisive role in the passage of warships.

It then becomes clear that the Black Sea is not a Russian lake. It is a closed space whose exit is politically controlled.

Russia knows this, as do Turkey, NATO and Ukraine.

The sea itself possesses an extraordinary characteristic: beneath its oxygenated surface layers lies a vast mass of deep, anoxic water, unsuitable for most forms of aerobic life. It is almost stratified like the History that surrounds it.

And it is around this sea that the map begins to speak again.

2014. Maidan. Yanukovych flees.

Russia takes control of Crimea and then annexes it, an annexation not recognized by most of the international community.

Then Donbass went to war.

Donetsk. Luhansk.

Russian-speaking populations. Separatists.

The Ukrainian government. Russian support.

Volunteers. Forces that are more or less officially present.

Deaths.

And gradually a front line.

That is why I reject the interpretation that everything started in 2022.

This does not mean that the large-scale Russian invasion of February 2022 would simply be a legally neutral continuation of what came before. It constitutes a major change in scale and a Russian decision to use massive force against Ukraine.

But a war has a genealogy. And that genealogy was already inscribed in the Abode of Chaos.

I also worked in Odessa. This city is itself an extraordinary condensation of the region's history.

Odessa encapsulates all of this: a Black Sea port, the history of the Russian Empire, Ukraine, a large Russian-speaking population, trade, Jewish memory, culture.

Then came May 2, 2014 and the House of Trade Unions.

Extremely violent clashes erupt between pro-Ukrainian and anti-Maidan activists. The fire at the Trade Unions House kills dozens of people.

I wanted to keep this scene because it immediately becomes a painful memory.

And memory wounds are geopolitical weapons.

Each side then tells the story of Odessa using its own vocabulary.

Crime.

Massacre.

Clashes.

Provocation.

Responsibility.

Memory itself becomes a battlefield. It is precisely there that the artist must be extremely careful.

I can paint fire.

The dead.

The House of Trade Unions.

I can show what this image will produce in the Russian and Ukrainian collective memory.

I must not transform a work of art into an impromptu legal judgment. Since then, a major legal element has been added: in 2025, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Ukrainian authorities had failed in several positive obligations regarding the prevention of violence, the organization of relief efforts, and the investigation. This ruling, however, does not exhaust all individual responsibilities in the clashes and the fire. On the contrary, it reinforces the need to distinguish between established facts, legally determined responsibilities, and the political narratives constructed around Odessa.

Then came the Minsk agreements.

Angela Merkel, François Hollande, Putin, Poroshenko.

The Europeans believe they can stop or contain the Donbass war through diplomacy.

Years later, statements by several former leaders that this period also gave Ukraine time to strengthen its military capabilities would be interpreted by Moscow as proof that the agreements were merely a smokescreen.

I painted this ambiguity.

Because it destroys something far more important than an agreement. It destroys trust in the very function of the agreement.

If one of the signatories believes that the other was only negotiating to buy time, the subsequent treaty becomes infinitely more difficult.

This is how a future war is sometimes prepared through the interpretation of a previous peace. And behind it all lies energy.

I painted Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2. Because a gas pipeline is geopolitics made tangible.

Thousands of kilometers of steel pipes can alter the relationship between two powers far more profoundly than any diplomatic speech.

Russia possesses the gas.

Germany has a gigantic industry.

Between the two lies the Baltic Sea.

Cheap Russian gas has been part of the energy architecture of German industry for years.

And around Nord Stream is a figure who alone sums up this relationship: former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who later became involved in structures linked to Russian energy interests.

I viewed this infrastructure as a continental sculpture. Energy connected what military history had opposed.

Then the war comes. The flows contract.

Nord Stream was sabotaged in September 2022. And suddenly the pipe that symbolized interdependence became the symbol of its destruction.

I know this issue personally. I grew up with both oil shocks in a family directly involved in the petrochemical industry. I later took over and restructured a petrochemical industrial business myself.

I know what an energy price means in an operating account. In some production processes, energy can represent a huge portion of the costs.

I am also familiar with Brent and WTI through my work on commodities and the Cyclope database. Therefore, I do not view the Russo-European energy divide as a purely diplomatic abstraction.

I see the factory, the furnace, the chemicals, the metal, the cost price, the jobs.

When energy prices change, the entire industrial chain trembles.

Germany is particularly exposed because its economic model relies heavily on manufacturing and exporting industries.

The war then accelerated a crisis which also had other causes: automotive transformation, Chinese competition, energy transition, demographic aging, nuclear choices.

I reject single causes. But it would be just as absurd to claim that the energy break with Russia has changed nothing.

Geopolitics ends up in the factory bill. That's exactly what I call the substance of power.

Then the war changes scale.

2022.

Zelensky suddenly became one of the most recognizable faces on the planet.

It's an extraordinary political trajectory.

Before becoming president, he was an actor and played a professor who became president after denouncing corruption in Servant of the People.

Then the name of the series became that of his party. Then the actor actually became president.

This collision between fiction and power intrigued me even before the war. Because it says something about our time.

Image can precede politics. Fiction can create the familiarity that then makes a candidacy possible.

Then the war transforms Zelensky once again.

The comedian-president becomes a wartime president.

Clothes change.

Communication is changing.

The images are changing.

Around him are the Western leaders: Ursula von der Leyen, the secretaries general of NATO, the presidents, the prime ministers, the defense ministers.

I painted them because the Ukrainian war is gradually ceasing to be solely a relationship between Kyiv and Moscow.

It becomes a much broader system of confrontation, in which Western states massively support Ukraine while Russia itself receives various forms of external support.

The Russo-Ukrainian war cannot, however, be analyzed without considering the major role of Western support for Ukraine: armaments, intelligence, training, funding, and industrial capacity. This dimension does not erase the essential legal distinction: Ukraine and Russia are the direct belligerents; NATO, as an Alliance, is not a party to the conflict. My aim here is to describe the architecture of the balance of power, not to alter the classification of the conflict.

Once again: naming a structure is not denying the sovereignty of the one fighting. It is looking at what lies behind it. And this structure is gradually expanding into northern Europe.

Finland and Sweden are formally joining NATO — Finland in 2023, Sweden in 2024. Norway, however, has been a member since 1949.

The Alliance presents this expansion as a historic strengthening.

I look at the balance sheet in a more complex way.

These countries already cooperated very closely with NATO. Nevertheless, the legal and strategic shift remains significant, particularly for Finland with its vast Russian border.

Finland has an extraordinarily complex historical relationship with Moscow.

The Winter War, then the Continuation War, the loss of territories.

Then followed decades during which Helsinki built an extremely cautious neighborhood policy while maintaining a considerable army and defense capability.

This architecture disappeared with accession to NATO.

Is this a gain in security?

Is this simultaneously the loss of a historical interface function?

The answer depends on the point of view. That is precisely what geopolitics is.

But behind NATO enlargement is an event that I consider even more important.

Russia and China are getting closer.

And there, I find Henry Kissinger.

I painted it several times.

Because he possessed an extremely rare quality: he thought of the international system as a balance and not as a moral distribution between friends and enemies.

All of his diplomacy towards Beijing in the 1970s had precisely understood the American interest in preventing a lasting strategic fusion between China and the Soviet Union.

Because, contrary to the simplified image of a homogeneous communist bloc, Mao and Moscow had experienced considerable disagreements.

The two powers shared a communist ideology, but not necessarily the same interests.

A huge border separated and connected them. Border clashes had even taken place.

China was looking at the vastness of Russia. Russia was looking at China's demographics.

Mistrust existed.

Then the world order changes.

Western sanctions against Russia. Russia's need for markets. China's need for energy.

Technological confrontation between Beijing and Washington.

Silk Roads.

Arctic.

And gradually, what was once a strategic concern for the United States is becoming a much more tangible reality:

The complementarity of Russia and China.

Russia possesses space, hydrocarbons, raw materials, military depth, and considerable expertise in certain aeronautical, space, and nuclear sectors. China possesses industrial mass, electronics, infrastructure, as well as immense financial and commercial capacity.

Production lines capable of scaling up at an extraordinary speed.

And more than 4,300 kilometers of shared land border make a policy of complete economic isolation of Russia much more difficult.

This, in my view, is one of the most important consequences of the war in Ukraine.

Europe looks at Finland and Sweden and says:

We have expanded NATO.

I look simultaneously at Beijing and Moscow and I ask:

What have we brought closer together on the other side?

The answer cannot be ignored. And this relationship has another dimension:

the Arctic.

The gradual melting of the ice further opens up the question of the Northern Sea Route.

Russia possesses an unparalleled fleet of icebreakers, including nuclear-powered ones.

China is watching this route with great interest.

Because a sea route is never just a route.

It takes time. And time is money.

Shanghai, Northern Europe, Suez, the Arctic: if a route one day makes it possible, in an economically reliable and large-scale way, to significantly reduce distances and transport times, a part of the world's commercial geography could be reshaped.

And this is where the containers at The Abode of Chaos come in.

Thirty-six.

I sometimes call them my weapons of mass destruction. Obviously not because they explode. Because the container has silently destroyed entire economic geographies.

He normalized world trade.

Same size. Same gantry. Same boat. Same truck. Same train.

The merchandise enters a box in China and can arrive in Europe without being actually handled in between.

The shipping container has done more for globalization than many treaties.

So when I look at the Arctic route, I don't just see melting ice.

I can see my containers.

I see China. I see Russia. I see the ports. I see the delays.

I see the shipping price.

Once again, the map speaks.

And that is where Crimea finally joins China.

What appeared to be a regional European war ended up changing the architecture of the world.

Energy. NATO. European industry.

Trade.

Arctic. Russia. China.

Dollars. Sanctions. Technologies.

Everything is connected.

That is why the Abode of Chaos could not represent Ukraine with a single portrait of Zelensky or a single portrait of Putin.

The rhizome was needed: Yanukovych, Tymoshenko, Klitschko, Poroshenko, Zelensky, Putin, the generals, Merkel, Hollande, the American leaders, the NATO officials, Nord Stream, the Donbas, Crimea, Odessa, then China.

Only by looking at all these elements together can we understand what war really produces.

It doesn't just shift a border. It shifts alliances, trade routes, energy prices, industries, military doctrines, and sometimes the center of gravity of the world.

That is precisely why I do not consider Crimea as a mere piece of Ukraine or as a mere Russian issue.

It is a revealer.

A piece of land surrounded by water that suddenly forces you to look at the whole map.

The Black Sea, Turkey, Europe, Russia, NATO and, seemingly much further away, China.

The Abode of Chaos recorded this story in fragments over the years.

The book now allows us to understand that these fragments belonged to the same drawing.