The worst of the carnage has so far been confined to the city’s northern suburbs, which is where Dondyuk was wounded on March 6. That morning he set out by car to the suburb of Irpin, along with two other photographers. To stall the Russian advance,The country where 30 farmers die each dayThe situation for India's more than 260 million agricultural workers is dire. Nearly 30 people in the farming sector die by suicide daily, according to the most recent figures available, typically due to overwhelming debt. Indeed in 2020, more than 10,000 people in the agricultural sector ended their own lives, according to government data. India's economic backbone -- its farmers and their families -- is in collapse. They face crushing pressures: insurmountable debt, environmental degradation, and extreme rates of cancer linked to exposure to pesticides. This strain is compounded by climate change and extreme weather -- from ground water depletion to water shortages and crop damage due to rising temperatures -- effects which have been tied to increasing suicides in India. Farming is a notoriously economically unstable industry globally, but farmers in India find themselves buried under densely layered problems. Many are subsistence farmers who are drowning in the volatility caused by the Green Revolution which began in the 1960s as a way of industrializing the agriculture sector with high yielding seeds, mechanized tools and pesticides. In some cases, farmers cannot work their land due to illness linked to the revolution's pesticides and fertilizers. They are dealing with deep-rooted battles against multinational corporations. And all the while having to take out loans each year to make the agricultural cycle possible. And then, when farmers are unable to get loans from legitimate banks, illegal moneylenders -- or loan sharks -- step in, charging exorbitant interest rates and creating an inescapable debt-trap for farmers, in some instances pushing them to suicide. The state of Punjab where we visit, is known as the breadbasket of India. In the seconds before impact, mortars whistle as they fall, making a loud and almost plaintive sound Maxim Dondyuk will never forget. He will not forget the sting of their shrapnel, which felt like a hot knife in his arm, or the sight of the women and children he photographed during the shelling near Kyiv on March 6. He hopes the people who see his photos will not be able to forget them either. “I don’t stay here and do this because I am a masochist,” Dondyuk, who is Ukrainian, says by phone from the center of Kyiv. “I do it because sometimes a photo can change people, change societies.” With luck, he says, it might help stop a war.
Photograph by Maxim Dondyuk
When this war started in late February, Dondyuk was in Kyiv as Russian forces rushed to encircle the city, dropping bombs and firing artillery while tanks advanced from the north. Civilians tried to flee or take shelter in the subway system. At the city’s main hospital for children, Dondyuk found the patients crowded into the basement while the doctors waited for the wounded to arrive.
The first one was a young boy, no older than 7, whose parents and sister had just been killed. Emergency workers carried him into the ward and told the doctors that the family’s car had been riddled with bullets near the heart of the Ukrainian capital. The boy was the only survivor. The emergency workers did not know his name, they said, because his documents were probably in the wreckage. The doctors registered him as “Unknown No. 1,” and performed emergency surgery.
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Pacing the ward outside the child’s room, Dondyuk found the head physician and asked for permission to photograph the boy. “I told him that the Russian people need to see this,” Dondyuk recalls. “When we show them the children
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