Evgeniy Maloletka

Winner of the fifth edition of the Krzysztof Miller Prize for the courage to look 2022

Evgeniy Maloletka

Winner of the fifth edition of the Krzysztof Miller Prize for the courage to look 2022
Oleksandr Konovalov, an ambulance paramedic, performs CPR on a girl injured by the shelling in a residential area as her dad sits, left, after arriving at the city hospital of Mariupol, eastern Ukraine, Sunday, Feb. 27, 2022. The girl did not survive.

MARIUPOL

The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling.

There’s 18-month-old Kirill, whose shrapnel wound to the head proved too much for his little toddler’s body. There’s 16-year-old Iliya, whose legs were blown up in an explosion during a soccer game at a school field. There’s the girl no older than 6 who wore the pajamas with cartoon unicorns, among the first of Mariupol’s children to die from a Russian shell.

They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave inside the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap of white fabric. Workers toss the bodies in as fast as they can, because the less time they spend in the open, the better their own chances of survival.

More bodies will come, from streets where they are everywhere and from the hospital basement where adults and children are laid out awaiting someone to pick them up. The youngest still has an umbilical stump attached.

Each airstrike and shell that relentlessly pounds Mariupol — about one a minute at times — drives home the curse of a geography that has put the city squarely in the path of Russia’s domination of Ukraine. This southern seaport of 430,000 has become a symbol of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s drive to crush democratic Ukraine — but also of a fierce resistance on the ground.

The surrounding roads are mined and the port blocked. Food is running out, and the Russians have stopped humanitarian attempts to bring it in. Electricity is mostly gone and water is sparse, with residents melting snow to drink. Some parents have even left their newborns at the hospital, perhaps hoping to give them a chance at life in the one place with decent electricity and water.

People burn scraps of furniture in makeshift grills to warm their hands in the freezing cold and cook what little food there still is. The grills themselves are built with the one thing in plentiful supply: bricks and shards of metal scattered in the streets from destroyed buildings.

A Ukrainian military radar and airfield were among the first targets of Russian artillery. Shelling and airstrikes could and did come at any moment, and people spent most of their time in shelters. Life was hardly normal, but it was livable.

By Feb. 27, that started to change, as an ambulance raced into a city hospital carrying a small motionless girl Evangelina, not yet 6. Her brown hair was pulled back off her pale face with a rubber band, and her pajama pants were bloodied by Russian shelling.

Her mother stood outside the ambulance, weeping.

As the doctors and nurses huddled around her, one gave her an injection. Another shocked her with a defibrillator. A doctor in blue scrubs, pumping oxygen into her, looked straight into the camera of journalists allowed inside and cursed.

“Show this to Putin,” he stormed with expletive-laced fury. “The eyes of this child and crying doctors.”

Mariupol city became a trap, where for more than 20 000 people have been killed.

Death were everywhere.

People lie on the floor of a hospital during shelling by Russian forces in Mariupol, Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022
Marina Yatsko, left, runs behind her boyfriend Fedor carrying her 18 month-old son Kirill who was fatally wounded in shelling, as they arrive at a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022.
Medical workers unsuccessfully try to save the life of Marina Yatsko's 18 month-old son Kirill, who was fatally wounded by shelling, at a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022
Marina Yatsko, left, and her boyfriend Fedor mourn over her 18 month-old son Kirill's lifeless body, killed in shelling, as he lie on a stretcher in a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022
The children of medical workers warm themselves in a blanket as they wait for their relatives in a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022
Ukrainian emergency employees and volunteers carry an injured pregnant woman from a maternity hospital that was damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022. The woman and her baby died after Russia bombed the maternity hospital where she was meant to give birth.
Dead bodies are put into a mass grave on the outskirts of Mariupol, Ukraine, Wednesday, March 9, 2022 as people cannot bury their dead because of the heavy shelling by Russian forces.
Serhiy Kralya, 41, looks at the camera after surgery at a hospital in Mariupol, eastern Ukraine on Friday, March 11, 2022. Kralya was injured during shelling by Russian forces
Russian's army tanks move through a street on the outskirts of Mariupol, Ukraine, Friday, March 11, 2022
An apartment building explodes after a Russian army tank fires in Mariupol, Ukraine, Friday, March 11, 2022. r..
People settle in a bomb shelter in Mariupol, Ukraine, Sunday, March 6, 2022.

Evgeniy Maloletka – is a Ukrainian freelance photographer and filmmaker based in Kiev, Ukraine, originally from the city of Berdyansk, the Zaporizhya region in the easternUkraine. In 2015, he was selected to participate in the Eddie Adams Workshop in New York. He spent most of his time in eastern Ukraine working on assignment for The Associated Press. His work was published in numerous prominent media: TIME, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Der Spiegel, Newsweek, The Independent, El Pais, The Guardian, The Telegraph and others.

Galleries of the finalists of the fifth edition
of the Krzysztof Miller Prize
for the courage to look 2022