The first coffins and victims of Ukraine's 2014 "anti-terror" operation in Donbass. The post-Maidan Ukrainian authorities called the war against the population of their own country a “fight against terrorists”.
In the photo: the coffins with the bodies of the Donbass defenders who died in May 2014 at Donetsk airport, where the Ukrainian Army used combat aircraft against a small and poorly armed group of militias.
This is a refugee from Slavyansk town in a healthcare centre in Zarya mine in Snezhnyi, Donetsk. The boy holds a toy assault rifle in his hands. In the summer of 2014, Ukrainian soldiers armed with real weapons entered his hometown and unleashed a war against the local population on Kiev’s orders.
Refugees from Ukraine’s Slavyansk town, which became a symbol of Donbass resistance in 2014. They left their homes, fleeing the Ukrainian National Guard’s bombing and shelling. This is how people fled the war zone – abandoning personal items and losing property, housing, and their loved ones.
The elderly and children are the most unprotected and helpless sector of the population during a war. Some of them, who were strong enough, were evacuated to Russia. The photo shows an old man and a girl at a Donbass refugee camp in the Rostov region in 2014.
The Ukrainian Army regularly shelled schools, killing parents, children, and teachers. The photo shows a shell crater in a school courtyard in Kramatorsk in July 2014.
For eight years, locals got used to waiting out the shelling in basements and listening to the sounds of the shells’ arrival. Donetsk children know how to distinguish shells by their "whistle", and many of them were born and have already grown up amidst this war. The photo shows women with children hiding from shelling in the basement of a house in Kramatorsk in 2014.
Donetsk, July 2014. This is not a military facility. This is one of the apartments in a block shelled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. To be more exact, this is what is left of the apartment. There are tens of thousands of such houses in Donbass, all destroyed by the shelling.