"Children of the War" in Riga

On February 11, the photo exhibition “Children of the War” will open in Riga - portraits and history of children injured during the Ukrainian conflict

These photos were taken in the fall of 2014 by the St. Petersburg photographer Vladimir Telegin during business trips to the Donbass and to the front -line cities of Ukraine as part of the Novaya Gazeta peacekeeping project “Children of the War” (the author of the project Maxim Gromov, the texts of Yana Shenkman).

40 pictures. Destroyed schools, bomb shelters, refugee camps ... Different children - from 5 to 16 years old. They managed to take one of them to Russia, someone to Ukraine, someone is still in the combat zone. The main emotion on faces is fear.

Almost all of them were under bombing and shelling. Some lived in cellars for weeks. Many were left without home, and someone without parents.

Most of them do not fully understand what exactly happened, who shoots at them and why. They are very scared. They scream at night, shy away from adults, at the sight of an airplane in the sky they immediately run to hide. Even the festive salute scares them. The consequences of stress are enuresis, loss of vision, tick, stuttering, panic. Instead of toys - shooting sleeves. Instead of cakes and Coca-Cola-bread and water.

Over the two and a half of the war years, the details have changed, but the essence remained the same: fear, death, complete neglect of human life. And most importantly - the children managed to get used to the fact that war is the norm.

Igor, 15 years old: “Grads hit, one fell to a neighbor in a garden, and we were thrown into a corridor with an explosive wave. The chest was sick, the head is cotton. After that, they shot with incendiary shells two times. Then they arrived tanks, beat for a long time from the guns. There is no fear, there is a state of hopelessness. Here is the shelling - wait for it to end. Maybe for you he will end today or tomorrow. Or maybe right now. You can’t do anything anyway. ”

Where and when

The exhibition will open at the Happy Art gallery (Dzirnavu 67 Galleria Riga 7.level) February 11 at 18.00.

At the opening, the project will be presented by photographer Vladimir Telegin, the special corner of the “new” Jan Shenkman and the Finnish journalist Oksana Chelysheva.