Chasiv Yar is a city that has been stormed and shelled for months by occupation forces. The invaders continue to intensively burn Chasiv Yar, embodying scorched earth tactics. For more than two and a half years, Russian troops have been trying at any cost to capture the city of Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region, which became the front line after the capture of Bakhmut.
Today, the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers publishes pictures of Konstantin and Vlada Liberov, Sergey Korovayny, Georgy Ivanchenko and Yakov Lyashenko. Documentarians recorded the war in the Time Yar and the life on the line of fire of its inhabitants in different periods from the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the Russians. Each of the photographers managed to preserve in their pictures a different state of the city: someone has only been wounded, someone has already caught it destroyed.
In June, British intelligence reported that Chasiv Yar was valuable to Russia because of its strategic location on a hill, as well as because of its use as a logistics hub for the Armed Forces. At times, Yar stands on hills, which, like defensive walls, protect it from the east and south. The highest point is 247 meters, and, for example, in neighboring Konstantinovka, Druzhkivka, Slavyansk and Kramatorsk there are average heights from 100 to 125 meters. At times, Yar became the “gateway” to this agglomeration due to the proximity to Konstantinovka (7 km to the west) and Kramatorsk (25 km to the northwest).
“Chasiv Yar is a Ukrainian city, and there is every chance that we will push the enemy away from there and destroy it in the direction as it was before,” Nazar Voloshin, a spokesman for OSOV “Khortytsya”, assured on the air of the national tele-marathon on July 14. Voloshin explained that “this day the enemy has also not abandoned attempts to storm and show its presence in the area of Chasovy Yar”, but stressed that “the defense forces are fighting back and holding.”
Recall that in recent days, media attention has been actively focused on Time Yar, because on the night of July 3, the DeepState project reported that the Russian army managed to capture the “Channel” neighborhood in the city. This area is separated from most of the city by the canal “Seversky Donets — Donbas”. Fighting for the neighborhood began in early April 2024, when the aggressor advanced west of Bakhmut.
There is no surviving building there now. Due to the actions of the Russian Federation, the city, in which 12,000 people once lived, has become practically deserted. As of the beginning of July 2024, there are 635 residents in Chasovy Yar.
For example, this week none of the locals showed any desire to leave the city. About this told head of the city military administration of Chasovy Yar Sergey Chaus. “People just don't leave the city. Evacuating people has become more dangerous than it was before, because the activity of drones is not decreasing. The line of hostilities is directly very close to the city. In these conditions, it is difficult to come to the city to pick up a person. In the city, in addition to people of retirement age, there are also young people, there are about a few dozen of them. In general, people are evacuated to Kramatorsk, most of them go to relatives,” Serhiy Chaus said.
Documentary shots from Time Yar of Photographers' Spouses Kostas and Vladi LiberovThe other day they flew through the net. Footage from this city now resembles the ruins of occupied and destroyed Bakhmut, Avdiyivka, Marinka.
“Chasiv Yar. Russia approached the city and turned it into ruins, like everything it touches. According to DeepState maps, on June 27, we knocked the enemy out of the city, and already now the Russians completely occupied the Canal neighborhood. And wiped off the face of the earth. Despite the fact that the military defending Chasiv Yar are ready to stand until the end, today there is a real threat that we will lose the city.” shareddisturbing thoughts of Kostya and Vlad regarding the situation in the city in early July 2024.
“It was a nice and cozy place. Low buildings. An ordinary Donbas city and even somewhat resembled Bakhmut. Chasik — that's what we called it,” — this is how photographer Yakov Lyashenko remembered Chasiv Yar.
In April 2023, he witnessed the medical evacuation of fighters from Bakhmut. Through mud and puddles, the BMP with wounded servicemen drove up to Chasovy Yar. What he saw there impressed him.
“It was an evacuation point: the wounded were brought from Bakhmut. There was one doctor. When the second soldier was unloaded, this woman began to shout “Sasha!”. It turned out to be her husband. She starts kissing him and crying. This moment impressed me very much and stuck in my memory. I then asked the pressofizer about his fate. Fortunately, this man survived, although he received a serious injury,” Yakov Lyashenko recalls.
“The streets of Chasovy Yar are stingy spring greenery of trees and the first flowers that mix with destroyed Soviet houses with holes from shelling,” - this is how Chasiv Yar met a photojournalist Georgy Ivanchenko in the spring of 2023. Preparing a report for Reporters, his car was damaged by shelling.
In Chasovy Yar, Georgy met 55-year-old Svetlana and her son, 28-year-old Igor, who remained to live at home, three kilometers from the front. All together they went down to the ground floor of the house, to the garage, from which the family almost did not leave because of the constant “comings and goings”. Svetlana still has a 34-year-old daughter, who was ill with lymphoma before the invasion, but due to a long stay in shelters, the oncology became complicated, now her daughter is being treated in Donetsk.
“I listen to her and think about this war and peace around the world. War is always bad. It's always victims and destruction. We promise to return to Svetlana with Igor with water, food, batteries and medicine. But, reaching the car, which was left in the garage, we see that there is no roof in it, and metal structures fell on the car. The garage was shelled. Fortunately, the car started, took us to a more or less safe area, where we saw that we also had a punctured fuel tank. The military helped to get us to the next town. We have not been able to return to Svetlana and Igor, as promised,” said Georgy Ivanchenko.
Photographer Serhiy Korovaynyi visited the city many times: “Very sad place, absolutely broken. There are very few civilians there. We visited the Points of Inviolability and met mostly only old people there.
One day we evacuated 80-year-old Mrs. Maria to Kiev. There was a dramatic scene that impressed me a lot. The woman said goodbye to her grandson, who decided to stay in the city. I carried her bags and thought to myself how much grief the Russians had brought to this land. She cries and he cries. Explosions are heard in the background.”
According to Sergey, among the main dangers in Chasovy Yar are the constant strikes of FPV drones. “Because any car, especially the press, is a target,” says the photographer.
Serhiy Korovaynyy has been in Chasovy Yar since 2017, because there previously the press received accreditation to work in the ATO/OOS zone. He managed to see this city still relatively peaceful. “It was a small quiet town, there were good evenings in the summer. The contrast between the Time Rift then and now are two different worlds, like life and death. Then there was a completely different front line, and no one thought that the war would come, despite the fact that it was already going on. It hurts me to talk about it. Many cities can become like Chasiv Yar, or have already become so.”
Yakov Liashenko— Ukrainian photographer from Kharkov. He began his professional career in 2012. After the beginning of a full-scale invasion, he worked as a fixer for famous photographers and in parallel documented the events of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Currently a freelance photojournalist at EPA Agency. Instagram.
Heorhii Ivanchenko— Ukrainian photographer, who since February 2022 works as a freelance reporter in the field of documentary and journalistic photography. From the first months of the invasion, he began filming for the Associated Press and the European Pressphoto Agency. Starting from Borodyanshchyna, where Georgy was born, he continued his journey through the front line: Mykolaiv, Kharkiv region, Kherson region; now his attention was concentrated on Donetsk region. The turning point in his photography was almost a month spent in Bakhmut. Throughout December and January, he documented the lives of the townspeople, carrying a backpack and sleeping bag, sharing life with locals in basements, volunteers, medics, military and firemen. In April, while working on material about Chasiv Yar in Donbas, his car was shot and destroyed by a Russian shell. Now the author continues his reflection on the numerous situations that have happened on his way and is working on the creation of his first project “Way of War” (working title). Instagram.
Konstantin and Vlada Liberov — spouses of photographers from Odessa. They began their journey 4 years ago, focusing initially on creative and emotional engagements. In a few years, they have become one of the most recognizable photographers in the field and have moved on to active teaching activities, have thousands of grateful students around the world. At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, they changed the vector of their work, focusing on feature documentaries: their photos from hot spots in Ukraine go viral on social networks, gaining hundreds of thousands of reposts, they are published by influential media such as BBC, Welt, Vogue, Forbes, and also take to their social networks the President of Ukraine and others high-ranking officials. Instagram.
Serhiy Korovaynyi— photojournalist and portrait photographer. Collaborates with international publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Guardian, Financaial Times and others. He makes his documentary projects, where he focuses on the themes of the Russian-Ukrainian war, ecology and various aspects of Ukrainian modernity. He was educated in the United States in the Master's Program in Visual Storytelling as a Fulbright Program Fellow. In 2018, he joined The Gate, a leading Ukrainian photo agency. Sergey's works have been exhibited at numerous personal and collective exhibitions in Ukraine, the USA and the EU. Instagram.
The material was created with the support of The Fritt Ord Foundation.
Chasiv Yar is a city that has been stormed and shelled for months by occupation forces. The invaders continue to intensively burn Chasiv Yar, embodying scorched earth tactics. For more than two and a half years, Russian troops have been trying at any cost to capture the city of Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region, which became the front line after the capture of Bakhmut.
Today, the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers publishes pictures of Konstantin and Vlada Liberov, Sergey Korovayny, Georgy Ivanchenko and Yakov Lyashenko. Documentarians recorded the war in the Time Yar and the life on the line of fire of its inhabitants in different periods from the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the Russians. Each of the photographers managed to preserve in their pictures a different state of the city: someone has only been wounded, someone has already caught it destroyed.
In June, British intelligence reported that Chasiv Yar was valuable to Russia because of its strategic location on a hill, as well as because of its use as a logistics hub for the Armed Forces. At times, Yar stands on hills, which, like defensive walls, protect it from the east and south. The highest point is 247 meters, and, for example, in neighboring Konstantinovka, Druzhkivka, Slavyansk and Kramatorsk there are average heights from 100 to 125 meters. At times, Yar became the “gateway” to this agglomeration due to the proximity to Konstantinovka (7 km to the west) and Kramatorsk (25 km to the northwest).
“Chasiv Yar is a Ukrainian city, and there is every chance that we will push the enemy away from there and destroy it in the direction as it was before,” Nazar Voloshin, a spokesman for OSOV “Khortytsya”, assured on the air of the national tele-marathon on July 14. Voloshin explained that “this day the enemy has also not abandoned attempts to storm and show its presence in the area of Chasovy Yar”, but stressed that “the defense forces are fighting back and holding.”
Recall that in recent days, media attention has been actively focused on Time Yar, because on the night of July 3, the DeepState project reported that the Russian army managed to capture the “Channel” neighborhood in the city. This area is separated from most of the city by the canal “Seversky Donets — Donbas”. Fighting for the neighborhood began in early April 2024, when the aggressor advanced west of Bakhmut.
There is no surviving building there now. Due to the actions of the Russian Federation, the city, in which 12,000 people once lived, has become practically deserted. As of the beginning of July 2024, there are 635 residents in Chasovy Yar.
For example, this week none of the locals showed any desire to leave the city. About this told head of the city military administration of Chasovy Yar Sergey Chaus. “People just don't leave the city. Evacuating people has become more dangerous than it was before, because the activity of drones is not decreasing. The line of hostilities is directly very close to the city. In these conditions, it is difficult to come to the city to pick up a person. In the city, in addition to people of retirement age, there are also young people, there are about a few dozen of them. In general, people are evacuated to Kramatorsk, most of them go to relatives,” Serhiy Chaus said.
Documentary shots from Time Yar of Photographers' Spouses Kostas and Vladi LiberovThe other day they flew through the net. Footage from this city now resembles the ruins of occupied and destroyed Bakhmut, Avdiyivka, Marinka.
“Chasiv Yar. Russia approached the city and turned it into ruins, like everything it touches. According to DeepState maps, on June 27, we knocked the enemy out of the city, and already now the Russians completely occupied the Canal neighborhood. And wiped off the face of the earth. Despite the fact that the military defending Chasiv Yar are ready to stand until the end, today there is a real threat that we will lose the city.” shareddisturbing thoughts of Kostya and Vlad regarding the situation in the city in early July 2024.
“It was a nice and cozy place. Low buildings. An ordinary Donbas city and even somewhat resembled Bakhmut. Chasik — that's what we called it,” — this is how photographer Yakov Lyashenko remembered Chasiv Yar.
In April 2023, he witnessed the medical evacuation of fighters from Bakhmut. Through mud and puddles, the BMP with wounded servicemen drove up to Chasovy Yar. What he saw there impressed him.
“It was an evacuation point: the wounded were brought from Bakhmut. There was one doctor. When the second soldier was unloaded, this woman began to shout “Sasha!”. It turned out to be her husband. She starts kissing him and crying. This moment impressed me very much and stuck in my memory. I then asked the pressofizer about his fate. Fortunately, this man survived, although he received a serious injury,” Yakov Lyashenko recalls.
“The streets of Chasovy Yar are stingy spring greenery of trees and the first flowers that mix with destroyed Soviet houses with holes from shelling,” - this is how Chasiv Yar met a photojournalist Georgy Ivanchenko in the spring of 2023. Preparing a report for Reporters, his car was damaged by shelling.
In Chasovy Yar, Georgy met 55-year-old Svetlana and her son, 28-year-old Igor, who remained to live at home, three kilometers from the front. All together they went down to the ground floor of the house, to the garage, from which the family almost did not leave because of the constant “comings and goings”. Svetlana still has a 34-year-old daughter, who was ill with lymphoma before the invasion, but due to a long stay in shelters, the oncology became complicated, now her daughter is being treated in Donetsk.
“I listen to her and think about this war and peace around the world. War is always bad. It's always victims and destruction. We promise to return to Svetlana with Igor with water, food, batteries and medicine. But, reaching the car, which was left in the garage, we see that there is no roof in it, and metal structures fell on the car. The garage was shelled. Fortunately, the car started, took us to a more or less safe area, where we saw that we also had a punctured fuel tank. The military helped to get us to the next town. We have not been able to return to Svetlana and Igor, as promised,” said Georgy Ivanchenko.
Photographer Serhiy Korovaynyi visited the city many times: “Very sad place, absolutely broken. There are very few civilians there. We visited the Points of Inviolability and met mostly only old people there.
One day we evacuated 80-year-old Mrs. Maria to Kiev. There was a dramatic scene that impressed me a lot. The woman said goodbye to her grandson, who decided to stay in the city. I carried her bags and thought to myself how much grief the Russians had brought to this land. She cries and he cries. Explosions are heard in the background.”
According to Sergey, among the main dangers in Chasovy Yar are the constant strikes of FPV drones. “Because any car, especially the press, is a target,” says the photographer.
Serhiy Korovaynyy has been in Chasovy Yar since 2017, because there previously the press received accreditation to work in the ATO/OOS zone. He managed to see this city still relatively peaceful. “It was a small quiet town, there were good evenings in the summer. The contrast between the Time Rift then and now are two different worlds, like life and death. Then there was a completely different front line, and no one thought that the war would come, despite the fact that it was already going on. It hurts me to talk about it. Many cities can become like Chasiv Yar, or have already become so.”
Yakov Liashenko— Ukrainian photographer from Kharkov. He began his professional career in 2012. After the beginning of a full-scale invasion, he worked as a fixer for famous photographers and in parallel documented the events of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Currently a freelance photojournalist at EPA Agency. Instagram.
Heorhii Ivanchenko— Ukrainian photographer, who since February 2022 works as a freelance reporter in the field of documentary and journalistic photography. From the first months of the invasion, he began filming for the Associated Press and the European Pressphoto Agency. Starting from Borodyanshchyna, where Georgy was born, he continued his journey through the front line: Mykolaiv, Kharkiv region, Kherson region; now his attention was concentrated on Donetsk region. The turning point in his photography was almost a month spent in Bakhmut. Throughout December and January, he documented the lives of the townspeople, carrying a backpack and sleeping bag, sharing life with locals in basements, volunteers, medics, military and firemen. In April, while working on material about Chasiv Yar in Donbas, his car was shot and destroyed by a Russian shell. Now the author continues his reflection on the numerous situations that have happened on his way and is working on the creation of his first project “Way of War” (working title). Instagram.
Konstantin and Vlada Liberov — spouses of photographers from Odessa. They began their journey 4 years ago, focusing initially on creative and emotional engagements. In a few years, they have become one of the most recognizable photographers in the field and have moved on to active teaching activities, have thousands of grateful students around the world. At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, they changed the vector of their work, focusing on feature documentaries: their photos from hot spots in Ukraine go viral on social networks, gaining hundreds of thousands of reposts, they are published by influential media such as BBC, Welt, Vogue, Forbes, and also take to their social networks the President of Ukraine and others high-ranking officials. Instagram.
Serhiy Korovaynyi— photojournalist and portrait photographer. Collaborates with international publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Guardian, Financaial Times and others. He makes his documentary projects, where he focuses on the themes of the Russian-Ukrainian war, ecology and various aspects of Ukrainian modernity. He was educated in the United States in the Master's Program in Visual Storytelling as a Fulbright Program Fellow. In 2018, he joined The Gate, a leading Ukrainian photo agency. Sergey's works have been exhibited at numerous personal and collective exhibitions in Ukraine, the USA and the EU. Instagram.
The material was created with the support of The Fritt Ord Foundation.
UAPP is an independent association of professional Ukrainian photographers, designed to protect their interests, support, develop and promote Ukrainian photography as an important element of national culture.
UAPP's activities span educational, social, research and cultural initiatives, as well as book publishing.
UAPP represents Ukrainian professional photography in the international photographic community and is an official member of the Federation of European Photographers (FEP) — an international organization representing more than 50,000 professional photographers in Europe and other countries around the world.
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