Lost Worlds

Photo Essay - Eastern Ukraine 2015 - 2016

Last week I found my photos which I thought I’d lost from my first year in eastern Ukraine.

Ruschia has obliterated most of the areas I worked in - a 400 sq.km box adjacent to the Donets river which was partly occupied by Ruschia from April 2014 onwards.

Whole villages, communities, towns hamlets and the people who lived there while I patrolled every day no longer exist, and never will again.

I never imagined then that I was documenting a world that would disappear completely.

Let’s start with the area by the bridge of Stanitsia Luhanska. Only official crossing point between Ruschia occupied Luhansk and rest of Ukraine. Worked there daily between 2015-2018 helping to facilitate passage of 10,000 civilians a day between occupied and free Ukraine. When I arrived there in early 2015 bridge was intact, until the Ruschists blew it up.

Spent a month around Christmas 2015 inside Ruschia occupied Luhansk on special projects. Getting there was a trek across snow and mine-filled fields in armoured cars.

Loved getting to know all of the communities and villages in areas now that have been under Ruschia’s genocidal occupation since March 2022. Lost worlds.

One day around July 2015 at Stanitsia Luhanska bridge a Ukrainian soldier handed me a tiny cat. She had been struck by shrapnel the previous night after a Ruschian attack. I brought her back to a vet in Severodonetsk (a city now under occupation where between 4 March 2022 and 20 July 2022 Ruschia would kill 10,000+ out of the pre-war population of 100,000 including my kind gentle neighbour. This is an account of his death my landlady who thankfully escaped gave me of his demise:

Stanitsia, my cat, now lives at an undisclosed location in Western Europe.

Disinfolklore is dedicated to the memory of those whose lives Ruschia continues to take.