The year 2024 was a year of heavy losses. The Russians broke through the Ukrainian defense line and after Avidjivka fell in early February, they began to penetrate deeper and deeper into the Donbass. Villages, towns and cities that the Czech photographer Stanislav Krupař knew intimately even before the war were turned into ruins by the Russian army. Orlivka, Karlivka, Očeretyne, New York, Selydove, Novohrodivka, Toreck, Časiv Jar, Kurachov, Myrnohrad. He documented battles, evacuations, treatment of the wounded, Russian attacks, training of new recruits, civilian life and funerals.
Photographer Stanislav Krupař was there this year, among other things, when the Russians attacked Kharkiv again at the beginning of May and throughout late spring terrorized this second largest city of Ukraine with airstrikes. KAB glide bombs, S300 and Iskander missiles killed people in Kharkov every day. In the Faktor Druk printing house, in the Epicentrum hypermarket, in the holiday cottages on the shore of the lake, which the people of Kharkiv call Baden-Baden. Vuhledar also fell, in which he had been countless times and where, probably as the only foreigner, a non-soldier spent the night in the basement with a handful of desperadoes who had survived there for tens of months holed up in the basements of their bombed-out block of flats, determined to wait for the Russian army there.
“I photographed the evacuation of disabled civilians from Vovčansk. Ukrainian artillery at Kostjantynyvka. Ukrainian snipers in Sumy. Ukrainian field hospital near Selydova. Dozens of funerals… Yes, those funerals were the worst. And that Kátin. Ukrainian sniper Kateryna Šynkarenko fell on February 22, 2024 during the retreating battles near Avdijivka,” recalls Stanislav Krupař.
“I knew her from Vuhledar and Bachmut, and finally I witnessed her last fight. Not directly, no one would ever take me that far to the front line. But I watched her death live on the military base, as it was transmitted on a huge monitor by the camera of the observation drone, and I heard her wailing voice on the radio. We buried Katya on April 16, 2024 in Ostoh in the Rovinj region. She was thirty and left behind a six-year-old son,” adds the photographer.
PHOTO: A place where a mistake means death. Bohemia captured the work of Ukrainian artillerymen on the front
War in Ukraine
