The Timekeeper of Ukraine
Photographs by Iva Sidash
For six years, Vladimir Soldatov has been the custodian of Ukraine’s time. He oversees a laboratory in the city of Kharkiv that contains about a dozen clocks and several distributive devices: gray boxes, humming in gray racks and connected via looping cables, that together create, count, and communicate his country’s seconds. The lab is located within the Institute of Metrology, a cluster of cream-colored buildings now scarred by Russian artillery.