This interview, as told to Nadia Beard, reflects what's at stake in Georgia from the perspective of the young people whose future now hangs in the balance.

What’s happening now is the go-to conversation starter here. People are always asking: what do you think is going to happen? I’ve been taking photos for nearly a year, since the foreign agent law protests this spring. So far, I haven’t missed much school, except for the times when we weren’t able to get there because of masked cops blocking the streets. Though now my school has announced that, in solidarity with protests, they'll close, so no school for a week. 

When Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced that Georgia will stop pursuing European integration until 2028, it triggered young people into action and now there’s a huge wave of them  out on the streets. 

First, for a week in the spring, I was protesting with my friends, but I wanted to do more. I also grew up in a household of journalists, and I felt that just protesting — just being there — wasn’t enough. When you’re young, people your age are easier to photograph. They look at you differently. It’s more comfortable. I think that comes out in my images.  And feel I help protesters more by photographing who they are and showing the world what’s going on beyond the fireworks and gas.

I want to become a professional but I also know that I'm young and just starting. In general that’s OK because I think a lot of my images were better because I can go behind the scenes and people are less afraid of me because I don't put on this big serious, media face.

I love photographing the protests. It’s so tiring but also so fulfilling, to watch people and see how they are united. I was at a protest and I got tear-gassed and some people, wrapped in flags, came and helped us immediately. They were walking on the upper streets, talking on the phone, and they had milk for you, saline solution. They just pass by and ask if you need saline and put it in your eyes and then go on to the next person. I remember saying “I need water”, and before I knew it there were like five people at the ready with bottles of water for me.. It really showed me how many heroes there are.  People aren’t afraid. Even yesterday, when people got gassed, they ran away, and another wave came to replace them in the crowd. It’s almost as if they’re on shifts. It’s really cool to see how people are helping each other in any way possible. 

The other day I was taking a taxi to the protests and the taxi driver asked me “are you going to the protest?” and I said yes, and I was thinking, I wonder what he’ll say. And he asked “how much do I owe you to pay you back?” I asked him what he meant, and he said “you’re going to do such a good deed, how can I ever accept money for you doing that?” And I said no, please, and he started crying. He said how cruel it is, what these cops are doing to people and how it’s so emotional for him and that the future of the country is hanging by a thread right now. It was just so moving to see this grown man cry about his country. 

Young people are very angry and they are not thinking about anything else apart from the protests. There are no other priorities. The priority is to save our country. Protesters say we are protecting you and your kids’ future so you don’t wake up in Russia tomorrow.

The post I’m 14, photographing the violent protests in Georgia. The EU dream is slipping away appeared first on Coda Story.

When Russian troops invaded Ukraine in February 2022 the documentary filmmaker Oleksandr Techynskyi quickly moved his wife and two teenage daughters out of the country and took a job translating for a foreign TV crew covering the war. Where he once spent his days making lyrical films, he now spends endless hours crisscrossing the country in a car full of foreign journalists. With his own work on hold and his family in Germany, his days are now defined by the war and the road.

But almost as if he couldn’t help himself, he picked up a camera and began snapping photos from inside the car. At first, he tried taking photos of what he saw in a traditional journalistic style that he thought would attract foreign media outlets. But the straightforward shots of devastation left him cold.

Then he began taking a different approach. He imagined his new photos as stills from a movie. He was the protagonist in a car driving through a land of the living dead. “This is an apocalyptic noir that shows our present—heavy, leaden clouds and ruined homes,” he says, referring to his new images. “The car passes people resembling zombies with empty eyes.” Stopping amid these ruins inevitably leads to the death of the protagonist. “He himself will turn into a zombie, and he will also wander the mazes of war-torn cities,” says Techynskyi, who everyone calls Sasha.

The TV crew that employs Sasha works on rotations: two weeks on, then two weeks back in Europe to rest. But for Sasha there is no break. As soon as he’s done with one team, he picks up a fresh one at the Polish border. “I clearly remember only the endless road,” he says. “When I have an unexpected weekend, I come home. There is no one there. My wife and children have been evacuated. I wander around the house and can’t find a place. I can’t sleep. It is a black hole. Here the nausea is even stronger.” Rather than stay home, he asks for another assignment escorting a fresh crew of TV journalists back into the war. “I want to go back,” he says. “At least I feel alive there.”

I first met Sasha in 2017 when he was my translator on a reporting trip. It was only a handful of years ago, but the world was far different then. Ukraine’s democracy was young and the country was an intoxicating mix of independent idealists, wayward politicians, corrupt businessmen, and a new breed of artists and bohemian free spirits. Back then, Sasha split his time between the eastern city of Dnipro, where his wife and daughters lived, and Kyiv, where his art and friends thrived. He spent his days creating intimate, wide-ranging documentaries that won international awards. He documented everything from the Maidan Revolution to stories of baggage carriers sleeping by the side of the road and the lives of fishermen of the Ukraine River Delta.

Sasha’s films explore profound, sweeping concepts, but always with a quiet, poetic eye. The films are empathetic without being simplistic and always attuned to the absurdity of human existence—hallmarks of a true Ukrainian. There is one scene in particular from his documentary about the Maidan Revolution that encapsulates this. In the film, a group of young protesters pull down a tall stone statue of Lenin that once stood on a large pedestal in the middle of the street. The protesters find a sledgehammer and begin hacking away at the toppled figure. As a reporter in eastern Europe in the early 90s I’d witnessed many a Lenin statue dismantled, sometimes with a simple slow-moving crane that reached down and elegantly plucked it out of the ground. Other times with a violent crowd enthusiastically chanting; hoping to eradicate the past and move feverishly forward into that new unknown future.

On this particular night in Ukraine Sasha’s film captures an old Soviet man stumbling amid the crowd as if in a fever dream. “Please,” he said. “No. Please.” Sasha filmed him as he slowly lowered his body onto the bust of the newly toppled Lenin begging the crowd to stop. He leaned down and kissed Lenin’s head. The crowd, wild and full of ferocity, watched him bemused. But no one touched him. He was a man from their shared Soviet past crying as he watched the world as it once was crumbling around him. “Come away, father,” said one protester gently. “Kiss it and say goodbye,” said another. “In 1917, you overthrew us; now it’s your turn to be overthrown.” A young woman pleaded with him to leave and scolded the crowd for jeering him. “He’s old enough to be your father,” she said. Finally, two men escorted him away, staring down anyone in the crowd who might dare to touch him.

But that was before. Before the 2014 annexation of Crimea; before Russia’s full-on bombardment and systematic destruction of the country. That was when Ukrainians felt the future was entirely in their own hands. Overthrow the president, end corruption, cull through the bank accounts of the oligarchs. The catch words in those days were transparency, freedom, and democracy. And for the first time in years, these lofty goals seemed like an actual possibility. Of course, this new possibility was not pristine but it was beautiful all the same, the way real possibility always is. The way the future actually works.

When I first met Sasha, Ukraine was barely an afterthought to the west. It was just one of the last of the formerly Soviet countries to find its footing in the new capitalist word. Maidan was three years in the past, and a low-level war with Russia was playing out in the east. Just troublesome enough to keep Ukraine from having a serious chance at entering the European Union or NATO. The West was far from intent on getting into a proxy war with Russia. This could go on for years—and did. Eight years, in fact, of Russians picking off a number of young men every week. Enough to keep the flames of war burning, but not enough to stir the ire of the West.

It was around that time that Sasha and I traveled down to Dnipro to interview soldiers recently wounded in the fight against Russia. I knew that few, if any, in the West would be interested. I even suggested we not bother the men, that it felt false or worse. “No one will want this story,” I told Sasha in the hospital parking lot. This was before Ukraine became the darling of the West. Before Volodymyr Zelensky spoke by video at the Grammys, before Manhattan boutiques showcased Ukrainian flags in their shop windows, and before scores of Western journalists poured into the country, tracking down any quotes they could get from soldiers and fleeing villagers.

Sasha just shrugged. “It doesn’t matter that no one will read this. The men will like it,” he said. “They’re village boys. An American journalist standing at their bedside, and a woman. It’s something. They will say patriotic things and feel better.” So, we went inside the hospital and walked through rooms lined with beds full of newly wounded soldiers.

Sasha was right. The men were eager to talk, and every one of them spoke of the same thing: the glory of Ukraine, the bravery of their comrades. How much they loved their family and wanted to die for their country. Only one man was silent. The day before, both his legs were blown off by a Russian grenade. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling, the blood soaking through the white gauze bandages wrapped on his limbs that only hours earlier had been cut just above the knee. Sasha and I looked at each other. Sasha shook his head, I nodded and we both walked quietly past the bed.

When Vladimir Putin unleashed Russia’s full force invasion earlier this year, I immediately texted Sasha to see how he was. Over the next several months we kept an easy correspondence of texts and phone calls. At first, it was hard to know how bad things would get, and where or when the Russians might attack. During one of our first phone calls after the invasion he was in a dark humor, a bit stoic as if preparing himself for death. “I’ve had my adventures,” he told me. “If I die, I die.” Then he got quieter and said he now felt real joy when he saw a Russian soldier lying dead on the ground. “I am afraid of what I am becoming,” he said.

These days, I think of Sasha as I once knew him—as he still is, even now—forever lighthearted, laughing and talking animatedly, sharing wild thoughts. I remember our long drive back from Dnipro to Kyiv in the rain. The windshield wipers flip-flopped back and forth as he rattled on in his enthusiastic way. Trucks passing us in gusts of water and rain. He was on a jag about a new idea that had just occurred to him. “Maybe I am a feminist,” he declared. I remember being amused, but he was dead serious and wanted to discuss the possibility for the next hour. He couldn’t stop talking, and the wipers swished back and forth, as if trying to keep up with him.

Sasha was not supposed to be an artist; he was supposed to work in the diamond mines of Siberia with his father and brother. He was born in Ukraine during Soviet rule to a father who worked long, hard hours in the Ukrainian coal mines of Donbas. But when a mining accident broke both his father’s legs it was enough to provoke his father to make a change. Looking for a better life, he moved his wife and two sons to Siberia and took a job as a mining engineer. That’s where Sasha spent most of his youth. The family returned to Ukraine only after the fall of the Soviet Union. His father, though, was never entirely able to find a place for himself back in Ukraine. He lost his job, he lost his wife, he lost his family. The collapse of the Soviet Union took everything. “In the end, he found a way to save what he could save,” says Sasha. “He took my young brother and headed back to Siberia.”

And that is where his father has stayed for 22 years—all of Putin’s reign. There, Sasha’s father watches Russian TV and rarely uses the internet. “He’s totally out of understanding of what’s really going on.” When father and son talk on the phone, Sasha might try to explain what’s happening in Ukraine now, how whole cities have been decimated by Russian shelling. But his father is awash in Russian propaganda. “He doesn’t believe me,” Sasha says. “He is polite. But I can hear his skepticism.” Rather than being angry with his father, Sasha is patient, even generous. “His life was tough and now in a way he’s finally found some peace,” he says. “He doesn’t want to get out of his bubble.”

Sasha, meanwhile, spends every day immersed in war. We texted one night after he’d spent hours at the mass grave site in Izium where 440 bodies were found. He worked all day with the television crew as they filmed the bodies at the site. Some victims had their hands tied behind their backs. Some were children. Some were tortured or killed, by chance, in a bombing. In the midst of everything, Sasha pulled out his own camera and took a black-and-white photo of emergency workers clad in white suits and masks, quietly standing in line before the police tape surrounding the exhumation area. That night he posted the photo on Facebook, titling it “Lifeguards in the Pines.”

Gatherings such as these have become a kind of morbid homecoming for Sasha. They are where Ukrainian journalists run into each other, where they meet and catch up with friends. “You are on the road,” says Sasha, “and then in the end at the newly liberated town, the new mass grave, you are standing there and hugging your journalist friends that you haven’t seen for a long time.”

Sasha has become more at ease with himself and the war around him. As if he and others are simply becoming more accustomed to death. Recently, he told me about a friend, “a real peaceful guy, you know the type who likes to sit and catch fish from the bank of the river.” But now, Sasha tells me, this friend “can’t go to sleep without watching YouTube clips of the murder of Russians. This is a common thing. It makes sense—there is no other way for us.”

Sasha continues: “Russia wants us to be all the same. No love, no education, no future, no choices. We aren’t just fighting against brutality—we are fighting against slavery.” He lists the freedoms that Ukrainians are in danger of losing: freedom of speech, freedom to be gay, freedom to simply be a person. “Of course, we must win, or Russia will just continue to swallow all the other post-Soviet countries too. Kazakhstan, Armenia, Georgia,” he pauses. “Belarus is already swallowed.”

There is now talk of a fresh wave of military conscriptions. “One beautiful day, I will receive a conscription letter,” Sasha says with a laugh. If that day comes, he will need to report to the conscription center. “After that, everything can happen,” he says. “If I receive a conscription, of course I will go.” He pauses. “And take whatever will come.” The work he’s doing with the European TV crew also helps the war effort—news of Ukraine inspires EU countries to send more money and resources. But he is clear he won’t mind if he’s called up.
“Yes,” I say to him, “but it’s different to hold a gun than a camera?”
“Yeah, but you know,” he says, laughing, “to kill Russians, that would be a pleasure.”

Sasha’s daughters are 13 and 16. “The main thing for me now is to keep them as far as possible from the war,” he tells me. “I want them to be usual teenagers with usual teenager problems. Not teenagers heavily traumatized by the war.” He then mentions his fear that his daughters might lose some of their joyfulness. “I’m just a happy person,” he says. “I was this way from the beginning. My wife is like that too. No matter what happens, you can’t break those kinds of natural things inside of me.” He stops. “Small things make for happiness,” he says. Then I realize he means something profound. “Small things save lives.”

This story was originally published in Stranger’s Guide.

The post A Ukrainian filmmaker photographs a sinister landscape appeared first on Coda Story.

This story was made possible by the Pulitzer Center. It was originally published in Stranger’s Guide.

The post As the war drags on, Ukrainian refugees wonder: should we go home? appeared first on Coda Story.

The post The New Aztecs appeared first on Coda Story.

The history of Russian occupation in Georgia dates back more than 200 years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it won its independence but separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia refused to acknowledge the new Georgian state and went to war. In 2008 Russia sent the military into South Ossetia and Abkhazia to shore up control and today twenty percent of Georgia remains under Russian control. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s complex history with its eastern neighbor is deeply rooted in centuries of Russian colonialism and expansionism. In this photo essay, award-winning Polish photographer Justyna Mielnikiewicz documents the people of Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan at times of upheaval—in the throes of protest, dissent, and strife, and as they try to hold on to their identity in the face of modern Russian imperialism.

The post What makes a nation? appeared first on Coda Story.

For this photo essay, Magnum Photos President Thomas Dworzak traveled to Switzerland and documented the lives of Geneva residents along with the digital “footprints” they leave behind every day. Drawing on research by the Edgelands Institute that explored Geneva’s evolving systems of everyday surveillance, Dworzak sought to use photography to tell the story of how the digitalization of our daily lives affects — and diminishes — our security.

He accompanied Geneva citizens in their daily routines while documenting the digital traces of their activities throughout the day. Dworzak researched the places that store our digital data and photographed them as well — an investigation that proved difficult and revealing of the lack of transparency surrounding the handling and storage of personal data.

To conclude the project, Dworzak sent each of his subjects a postcard from places where their digital information is stored: a simple way to demonstrate the randomness of where our digitally collected information ends up.

Thomas writes: 

Do citizens of Geneva understand how surveillance takes place in their daily lives? The relationship between surveillance and power can be understood as a contemporary version of the “social contract,” originally conceptualized by the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 18th century seminal work on democracies.

As a photographer, I needed to set the place: Geneva. I wanted to play on the dark side of the quaint, cute and affluent image of one of the world’s wealthiest cities and the world of international relations in which the Genevans are so often entangled.

I needed to trace the connection between life in this comfortable European city and the hidden paths of information that form underneath a surveilled daily life. I spent time with a variety of regular Genevan people, all voluntary participants in our project. I photographed their daily routines, marking whenever they would leave a “digital footprint” when using their phones, credit cards, apps or computers. With the help of the Edgelands team, I then identified corresponding data centers around the world where their information was likely to have been stored. I created a set of postcards using open-source applications like Google Earth and Google Street View. These “postcards from your server” were then sent back to the respective volunteers from the countries where these data centers were located, highlighting the far-flung places that our private data goes to when they perform a simple task such as buying groceries or a bus ticket.

The post Digital footprints on the dark side of Geneva appeared first on Coda Story.

“For the simulation part, we want visitors to actually feel the experience,” said Idris Ayas, 29, who came to Istanbul to study law 10 years ago. “By touching the Tiger Chair, by visiting the forced cotton-picking farm, the forced abortion room and the concentration camp cells, visitors actually feel that these things are really happening in 2022.”

Steps away from Istanbul University, the Uyghur Genocide Museum is a student-led exhibition organized in the quiet courtyard of the East Turkistan Foundation. The Uyghur student group created the series of “simulation” rooms according to testimony from last summer’s Uyghur Tribunal in London and other first-hand accounts gathered by the group.

The students behind the Genocide Museum, nearly all of whom have relatives or parents detained in Xinjiang camps, are well aware of the challenges of creating such a space.

An exhibition is visual by nature, yet since 2017 Xinjiang is effectively a black box to the outside world with Uyghurs living abroad losing contact with family members and foreigners or journalists largely barred from traveling to the region. Today images from Xinjiang, and its network of re-education camps, are largely gathered from space via satellites.

“My father and mother tried to come to my graduation ceremony in 2017,” said Ayas. “But at the beginning of 2017, all the borders were closed. Their passports were confiscated. After September 2017, I lost contact with my family members.”

On several occasions, Omar said the group gave visitors checklists from “48 Ways to Get Sent to a Chinese Concentration Camp.”

“They would check off if they prayed, or grew a beard, if they’ve been out of the country, if they use WhatsApp. 99% of the people found that they have all the criteria that qualifies them to get into one of these concentration camps.”

The student group spent their summer vacation planning the project, opening the space last fall. So far they say feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with the majority of visitors made up of Turkish students and international tourists.

“We knew the Olympics were coming and we thought it was a good opportunity to educate people about our cause so they can start acting while the world is directing their attention to China,” Omar said.

“There is a lot of disinformation about Uyghurs, especially in Turkey,” said Ayas. “Others said, I know there is a genocide happening there, but after I touched the Tiger Chair, I felt how horrible this is.

“It’s a shocking truth for visitors to actually accept it.”

The exhibition is ongoing, open every day (call ahead for the simulation rooms to be opened) and has no end date. Starting in March, the students plan to update the exhibition and add new items to the museum.

“We named it the Uyghur Genocide Museum, but it’s not a museum,” Ayas said. “It’s not a history, it’s an ongoing genocide happening in our hometown.”

China's repression of journalists

China ordered a Uyghur journalist extradited to Xinjiang. His wife has taken to the Istanbul streets to stop it

Katia Patin

Threatened, harassed, punished: The Uyghur translators defying China to tell Xinjiang’s story

Frankie Vetch

Why targeting ethnic minority journalists is central to China’s crackdown on the press

Erica Hellerstein

The post Immersive simulation attempts to pierce apathy over the Uyghur genocide appeared first on Coda Story.

The town of Zolote is at the center of the peace accords agreed on by representatives from Ukraine, Russia and peace-keeping forces at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). A border town split since the war began in 2014, Zolote is one of the mining communities in a valley in the eastern Luhansk region. For years the two sides in the conflict — Russia-backed separatists and Ukrainian troops — shelled each other from entrenched positions sometimes a mere hundred yards apart in the valley.

In October Zelensky officially agreed to what’s called the Steinmeier formula which calls for both sides to move forces and hardware at least a mile and a half apart, to stop shooting and most controversially for the organization of local elections in the region. It was the first time in years that representatives from both sides put to paper and agreed on a formula for a ceasefire. However, despite what was agreed on, shelling has continued in the frontline, violating the fresh agreement and stalling the withdrawal of troops.

War transformed Ukraine’s entire eastern region known as Donbas. After a series of sham referendums in 2014, two regions in Donbas declared independence with the intent of joining Russia in the wake of its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Armed conflict erupted as the Ukrainian military fought back separatist and Russian military troops moving further into Ukraine. Five years of war have claimed over 13,000 lives and displaced over a million people from the region.

But for all of those who left, there are far more who stayed. Long lines at checkpoints and poor road conditions keep people who still live in towns like Zolote isolated from life elsewhere in Ukraine. People here are also in the crosshairs of another warzone: an information war contested in cyberspace and over the airwaves. TV and radio towers were some of the first assets seized by pro-Russian forces, ensuring that even those living on Ukrainian-held territory in Zolote and along the border zone today find themselves awash in separatist propaganda beamed out from the other side of the frontline. Via satellite, Ukrainians in the border region can also watch broadcasting from the capital Kyiv, where much of the news takes on strong editorial lines conforming to the political agenda of whichever oligarch controls the channel.

This second frontline was left out of the recent Steinmeier talks. And the battle to control the narrative of the war carries on, deepening the divides and distrust in a town already cut in two.

  Map graphic by Sofiya Voznaya

The post Ukraine’s war: inside a frontline town torn by five years of conflict appeared first on Coda Story.