During the week of March 23-30, 2025, Russia carried out another wave of massive attacks on peaceful cities in Ukraine. Russian troops used guided aerial bombs, attack drones, ballistic and cruise missiles, causing numerous civilian casualties and significant damage to infrastructure.

The shelling of the Mykolaiv Regional State Administration building on March 29, 2022, was one of the largest crimes committed by the Russian occupation forces against the city's civilian population during the active phase of hostilities in southern Ukraine. This strike resulted in the largest number of casualties among Mykolaiv residents during the entire period of the full-scale war.

The full-scale war that began on February 24, 2022, is another episode of Russian aggression that has been going on for centuries with impunity.In response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the occupation of parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, Russia received sanctions from the EU. However, this was not enough to stop the Kremlin authorities from occupying the whole of Ukraine. The Ukrainian people thwarted the Kremlin's aggressive plans - a small military operation that was supposed to last three days escalated into the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II, which has been going on for more than three years.

The international organization World Press Photo has announced 42 regional winners of its annual documentary photography competition. This year's competition received 59,320 photos from 3,778 photographers from 141 countries. Among the winners are two Russian photographers, one photographer from Belarus, and two German documentary photographers who have taken pictures of the Russian-Ukrainian war. One of them is a portrait of a Ukrainian child. The other is a wounded occupier from the “DPR” in a field hospital near Bakhmut.

What is security in a country where there is a war? It is with this question that the documentary project of Anna Tsaruk, one of the finalists of our annual grant support, begins. After years of living abroad, she returns to Ukraine with a camera to see her homeland as it is now — not only through the prism of loss, but also through everyday life, dignity and resilience of people. Her project “I hope your family is safe” is a visual exploration of the pain, love, care and desire for freedom that coexist in everyday Ukrainian reality.

Ivan Samoilov is a Kharkiv-based documentary photographer and a new member of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers. Ivan is now 23, and he started documenting the consequences of the shelling three years ago, at the age of 20. In a conversation with us, Ivan talks about his path in photography, the moral boundaries of work during “arrivals,” and the projects he is working on now and dreams of realizing in the future.