Syria: In the Shadows of Victory

See the essay published in The New York Times

Bathing in Oil at a Climate Summit? It Leaves a Stain.

Two years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the hourly artillery duels, airstrikes and pitched fighting in the country’s east and south have turned the more than 600-mile front line into a scarred frontier. Parts of it may be uninhabitable for years, if not decades. Villages and towns are destroyed. Fields are mined. Roads are barely recognizable.

But clinging to the wreckage of their homes, and hometowns, are residents who refuse to leave. Buoyed by volunteers who deliver aid and their own battle-hardened survival instincts, they carry on with their lives in an unending test of endurance. The reasons they stay are many: to care for disabled family members, to look after pets or livestock or, plainly, their love of home.

But in enclaves where the thuds of artillery serve as white noise, war is never far away.

When Home Is Now the Front Line

As well as picking up migrants at mosques, markets and their workplaces, Russian authorities have also begun recruiting migrant workers straight from jail, offering them freedom in exchange for fighting in the war.

Kyrgyz national Beknazar Borugul Uulu was recruited straight from a Siberian prison by the mercenary group Wagner to fight for Russia in Bakhmut. Last summer, he won his freedom and returned to his family in Kyrgyzstan with seven medals in his bag. But just days later he was back in jail — arrested this time by Kyrgyzstan, for fighting in another country’s army. At the family home — overlooking the jagged cliffs of the Kyrgyz highlands — Borugul’s wife, pregnant with their third child, now hopes that Moscow’s influence in the former Soviet republic will help in her husband‘s case.

Russia is rounding up Central Asian migrants to replace the killed and wounded in Ukraine

The exodus, fulled by fears of violence and repressions, started after Azerbaijan staged a bloody, lightning offensive to retake the territory. Armenians have decried it as ethnic cleansing.

Refugees arrived to the Armenian town of Goris, bringing with them whatever they could carry, after a gruelling journey trapped for several days in the long queue of cars that formed along the Lachin corridor, the single route out to Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh.

Exodus in the Caucasus

In Kivsharivka, a small town in the Kharkiv region, the winter cold seeped in through walls damaged by shelling earlier in the war. It spread as damp and frost through apartments accustomed to central heating. “I do not play in my room now because the pillows here got mouldy,” says 6-year-old Vira Ovcharenko. As temperatures fell far below zero and snow covered the ground, Nina Hartseva, 89, stayed wrapped up in her coat day and night, keeping a gas stove burning in the kitchen, her only source of warmth.

Across Ukraine, municipal workers battled to restore power stations targeted over and over by Russian missiles. When they succeeded, families could huddle around electric heaters for warmth. But many turned to the forest too, heading into woodland riddled with landmines to chop firewood to burn in stoves. “What would we do without the forest?” Anatoliy Demiannyk says.

Fighting the cold in Ukraine

The meltdown in 1986 blanketed the region with a hundred times more radiation than that released by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Chernobyl was one of the first areas Russian tanks rolled through last year as they swept out of Belarus in hopes of seizing Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, about 75 miles to the south. And it was one of the first places they were driven out, forced to withdraw at the end of last March.

Visiting the zone today, past calamity and current tragedy intersect in strange and fascinating ways. Before the war, the ghostly city of Pripyat, once home to tens of thousands of atomic workers before it was abandoned, had become a dark tourist attraction for those drawn to post-apocalyptic desolation. Now, with cities across Ukraine obliterated, the ruins of Chernobyl feel less otherworldly than grimly familiar.

The Past and Present cross Paths as War comes to Chernobyl

Some claim they had to work with the Russians in order to survive the occupation. “You either do as they say or they can kill you,” a teacher who adopted the Russian curriculum says. Other residents demand punishment for all collaborators. One, a man who was tortured by Russian forces — after being denounced by a spiteful neighbour, he believes — says he wants her to be held accountable for the pain she caused. “When I’m overwhelmed by my emotions, I feel like I could kill her.”

See the essay published in The New Yorker

The Hunt for Russian Collaborators in Ukraine

Fuelled by hot and dry weather, the fires in Siberia grew to become bigger than all the other forest fires in the world combined. Smoke from the fires engulfed far-flung settlements, blotting out the sun, making the air difficult to breathe, and turning the skies an apocalyptic reddish hue. Yakutia’s residents, many of them farmers, stepped out to fight the unprecedented fires themselves, using makeshift kit and basic tools, tying handkerchiefs over their faces to protect against the smoke. At the same time, they raced to handle the year’s harvest, collecting what they could before wildfires consumed their crops.

As fires approached ever closer, villagers faced the decision of whether to stay, or leave homes behind and go. Albina Kovrova, 31, hung up the washing on one day. The next, with the fire raging just a few hundred metres away, she took her two children and left. Others stayed. The village’s cattle herder waited all day for her twenty cows and calves to come home. By nightfall, only four had returned, injured, covered in burns and soot. The others became confused in the smoke and didn’t find their way home. The family may struggle to feed those that did — the haystacks they’d harvested for the winter had all burnt too.

See the full story at National Geographic

Siberia’s wildfires submerge it in smoke

Franz Josef Land, a jumble of glacier-covered islands in the Arctic Ocean named after an Austro-Hungarian emperor, was until a few years ago mostly uninhabited, home to polar bears, walruses, sea birds and little else. But thanks to a warming climate, all that is changing, and quickly. With words by Andrew Kramer.

Russia now has the largest military presence above the Arctic Circle. A barracks building, sealed off from the elements like a space station, accommodates 150 or so soldiers. A new runway can handle fighter jets, two of which recently buzzed the North Pole.

The Russian Ministry of Defence recently took reporters on a tour of sites that included Trefoil Base, its northernmost military installation, as its army becomes the world’s first to act on the strategic implications of climate change for the Arctic region.

In the Russian Arctic, the first stirrings of a very cold war

Ahead of a new round of peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv, a dispatch from the one bright spot in the long-embattled grey zone separating Ukraine from the breakaway lands of the east. With words by Tom Vennink for De Volkskrant.

A weapon rests up against a muddy bunker wall. A soldier sits apart from his rifle. Per a new agreement, this tiny strip of the frontline has been designated a safe zone, and troops have been pulled back. But it’s a shaky peace. On the edges of the safe zone, mortar shells explode and the irregular heartbeat of war continues to echoe through the snow-covered hills. At the Stanytsia Luhanska crossing point, 70 kilometres away, a once bombed-out bridge has just been restored, another possible portent of peace.


In Ukraine, two kilometres of hope

It is rare for Western journalists to be allowed to report from inside the self-declared republic. The criteria used by its communications ministry to grant permits are unclear. But such permits do, apparently, exist. A report from the so-called People’s Republic, with words by Der Spiegel’s Christian Esch.

At Stanytsia Luhanska, the border crossing dividing the breakaway territory from areas controlled by Kyiv, pensioners struggle across a broken bridge over the Donets river. Suitcases, baby strollers and coffins are carefully carried over its bombed-out surface. It’s the only crossing for many miles, connecting the 1.5 million residents of the Luhansk People’s Republic to families, friends and business partners on the other side of the former front line. In Luhansk itself, the smaller of the two main cities of the Donbass coal mining region, shops are largely empty, and the main hotel, bullet holes still visible in its windows, sees few guests. The city suffered heavily from fighting in the summer of 2014.

A trip to the pro-Russian pseudo-state of Luhansk

A dispatch from the far eastern Russian region of Yakutia, with words by New York Times Moscow bureau chief Neil MacFarquhar.

The region, one of the coldest inhabited places on earth, is often known as the Kingdom of Winter and 90% of its surface is covered with permafrost — permanently frozen ground — sometimes as much as 10 feet deep. This ground is now thawing underfoot. The Arctic, including much of Siberia, is warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the world, with average temperatures in Yakutsk, the regional capital, rising more than 2.5 degrees Celsius in recent decades, from -10 to -7.5. As the permafrost thaws, land sinks and transforms the terrain into an obstacle course of hummocks and craters, or sinks further into swamps and lakes. Houses slip and fall, animals are forced to change centuries-old hunting and migration patterns, and floods increasingly wreak havoc on the land. Some villages are threatened with being completely flooded, and indigenous peoples are more at risk than ever. Even in the capital, Yakutsk, subsiding ground has damaged around 1,000 buildings.

Russian land of permafrost and mammoths is thawing

Ramzan Kadyrov, the mountainous republic’s Kremlin-installed leader, is rebuilding the city with great pomp and glamour. Billions of dollars are being pumped in from Moscow and as long as Kadyrov keeps a lid on the region’s separatist and extremist tendencies, he has free rein.

Behind the glittering facades of modern-day Grozny lies its leadership’s human rights record, which is far from pristine. Under Kadyrov’s rule, opposition movements have been silenced, activists have been killed, the media brought into line and any public dissent has been quashed. Numerous Chechens have been disappeared, according to reports by civil rights groups, and anti-gay purges have recently returned. Chechnya is now a state within a state, where strict laws based on local traditions and the current regime’s interpretation of Islam are at odds with the Russian mainstream. It is a deceptively calm place.

Chechnya: The emperor's new clothes

A dispatch from Kazan, the capital of the Russian republic of Tatarstan, where the Muslim Tatar population fears Moscow’s centralization drive is harming local culture. With words by Jesper Gormsen.

In the 1990s, the fluid and formative days after the fall of the Soviet Union, Tatar activists fought for local autonomy and even adopted their own constitution, which made teaching the Tatar language compulsory in schools. Now, after a lightning-fast legislative move by Moscow, Tatar language classes have been reduced from five hours a week to an optional two, and local parents plan to sue. The idea of Russia as a federation is losing ground, with everything increasingly measured in loyalty to the Kremlin. The Muslim Tatar community is on the sharp edge of this trend.

See the full story at Dagbladet Information

In Russia, a Muslim minority fears a loss of heritage

The prisoners brought the road, and then the road brought more prisoners. Thousands of inmates of Stalin’s gulag labour camps died building a road across the far-flung Russian region of Kolyma, where winter temperatures, on average, hold at –38° Celsius. The route became known as the 'Road of Bones'. It was built to connect an archipelago of forced labour camps to the port of Magadan, the remote region’s main link to the rest of the country, to which prisoners were brought by boat. The road would bring over a million prisoners to work in the area’s gold, tin and uranium mines, and for many the journey across Kolyma’s vast landscape of harsh beauty would be their last.

Today, an updated version of the route, the R504 Kolyma Highway, stretches from Yakutsk, the capital of the far eastern Yakutia region, heading 2000 kilometers east to the Magadan port. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the camps were closed. But workers, drawn by the promise of high wages, came to the desolate region, founding settlements in the area. The region is so remote that its new residents referred to the rest of Russia as ‘the mainland‘. Now, they are increasingly leaving the area, no longer wishing to live in one of the most inhospitable environments known to mankind. Their settlements, scattered along the length of the 'Road of Bones', are fading. Along with them fades the memory of the prisoners of the past. The scale and severity of the suffering of the camps becomes increasingly hard to fathom. In Putin’s Russia, a handful of people work to preserve that memory. But for many, it is overshadowed by a government-led campaign hailing Stalin’s victories in the Second World War. Meanwhile the remnants of the prison camps, the walls and beams and barbed wire, sink further and further into the snow.

The prisoners brought the road, and then the road brought more prisoners. Thousands of inmates of Stalin’s gulag labour camps died building a road across the far-flung Russian region of Kolyma, where winter temperatures, on average, hold at –38° Celsius. The route became known as the 'Road of Bones'.

Kolyma

Once a vast prison ground for political exiles, the banks of the Ket River in western Siberia are now home to a string of solitary settlements whose residents find freedom in the river’s stark isolation.

At a remote riverside weather station, two families had recently made their home, exchanging urban comforts for the liberty of a life in the wild, away from the world. Further upriver, Old Believers, dissenters from the Russian Orthodox Church, had put down their roots. Persecuted in both Tsarist and Soviet times, the community scattered across the country, settling in its most secluded corners. The Ket River’s isolation, for them, meant protection.

The river was not always so cut off. After a canal was built in the 19th century, the Ket linked two of Russia’s biggest river basins, the Ob and Yenisey, and the commercial and industrial hubs along their shores. For a time, the small and serpentine Ket was a crucial transport corridor. But when the Trans-Siberian railway launched, west-to-east traffic on the Ket River – the farmers and traders and Tsarist troops – began to dwindle. Fewer and fewer travelers needed the Ket.

For some, this offered the promise of personal freedom. Historically, though, Ket's isolated location made it perfect grounds for a prison, one that relied more on endless miles of emptiness than on walls or barbed wire. Hundreds of thousands were deported to the area by Joseph Stalin, himself once its prisoner in pre-revolutionary times. After the deportations were stopped, many chose to leave. Many others chose to stay.

At the logging settlement of Katayga, worshippers met for mass. In the absence of a priest, who did not make the six hour journey by river and road to Katayga that day, mass was led by Marina Prosukina. The religious duties she performed are normally reserved exclusively for men. But such strict rules could not withstand the remoteness of Ket. And so, along the river, another kind of freedom was formed.

Once a vast prison ground for political exiles, the banks of the Ket River in western Siberia are now home to a string of solitary settlements whose residents find freedom in the river’s stark isolation. At a remote riverside weather station, two families had recently made their home, exchanging urban comforts for the liberty of a life in the wild, away from the world.

The River Between

Isolated in the west Siberian plain is the village of Aidara, only reachable by navigating the winding Ket river. The next biggest settlement is about three hours away. The village’s roughly 150 inhabitants consist mainly of Russian Orthodox Old Believers.

Old Believers see themselves as the preservers of original Orthodox traditions. They separated from the main church in protest against religious reforms conducted in the 17th century. As they experienced persecution in Tsarist Russia, and were forced to conceal their religious practices under Soviet rule, Old Believers have tended to settle in more remote and isolated locations.

Today, several big families in Aidara keep their unique traditions alive, and some of their religious services can last all night. Otherwise, the community is kept busy with agricultural work, as it is almost entirely self-sufficient in terms of food. A helicopter delivers whatever else is needed, along with the mail, every two weeks. On mail days, the inhabitants gather at the landing spot, awaiting their moment of contact with the outside world.

See the essay published in National Geographic

Isolated in the west Siberian plain is the village of Aidara, only reachable by navigating the winding Ket river. The next biggest settlement is about three hours away. The village’s roughly 150 inhabitants consist mainly of Russian Orthodox Old Believers. Old Believers see themselves as the preservers of original Orthodox traditions. They separated from the main church in protest against religious reforms conducted in the 17th century.

Aidara

In a string of remote villages scattered across the Siberian taiga, residents wait all year for the arrival of the Saint Lukas medical train. Its dozen carriages, equipped with everything from X-ray and ultrasound machines, to a blood test lab and dental surgery, bring specialized medical care to Russia’s far-flung corners, where the country’s struggling healthcare system does not stretch.

Taking ten two-week-long trips a year, each along a different route, the 17 doctors and nurses of the Saint Lukas train see up to 150 patients a day, or around 15,000 patients per year. Even in the snowy conditions of a Siberian winter, people queue up from the early hours of the morning to secure their appointment with a doctor on the train. It is one of five such trains, funded by the Russian government.

In the tail end of the Saint Lukas, a carriage has been converted into a mobile church in honor of the priest, who worked as a doctor in the Second World War, after whom the train is named.

Diagnosis

Emile Ducke is a German documentary photographer. His work focuses on Eastern Europe. For the past three years, he has covered Russia’s devastating invasion of Ukraine, from the build-up to all-out war, its outbreak in Kyiv and the immediate aftermath of the occupation of Bucha, to the 

. He has done so as a regular contributor for 

, as well as for other international publications and on personal projects. Before 2022, he was based in Moscow, where he covered Russia’s tumultuous descent into ever more violent authoritarianism. Over five years, he worked across the country, documenting the realities of daily life far from the capital, from the 

. He captured the contradictions of life in 

 is being rewritten in Putin’s Russia, among other topics.

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'Occupation survivors' published in The New York Times

[Contains graphic images] Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine at dawn on February 24, 2022. Brought together here are images from the build-up to war, its outbreak in Kyiv, and the immediate aftermath of the occupation of Bucha and other northern areas.

Also pictured is daily life in the country’s eastern city of Kharkiv, where inhabitants continue to find themselves under constant Russian shelling, as well as the onset of the cold, as Russia transformed the winter into a weapon of war. Families across the country found themselves without heat or power for long stretches of time, forced to fight their own, intimate battles with the bitter cold.

As Ukraine recaptured lands and liberated towns in the east, communities recovered from months under Russian occupation. Victims speak of crimes committed by Russian troops. Charred landscapes bear witness to the horrors of war.

Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine at dawn on February 24, 2022. Brought together here are images from the build-up to war, its outbreak in Kyiv, and the immediate aftermath of the occupation of Bucha and other northern areas.[contains graphic images]

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