Inna and her three children left Luhansk in 2014 when war broke out in eastern Ukraine. They found a new home in the western part of the country, in the Carpathian mountains.
I met Inna in 2017 during one of my travels in Ukraine. It was a chance meeting. I was hitchhiking from Uzhgorod to Chisinau, and I needed to stay in Rakhiv. My friend gave me her phone number, saying that she could let me spend the night. In the morning at breakfast, Inna said that she and her children were refugees from the Donbass. I was touched by this, and that since then I began to visit them often.
I got to know them, got closer and closer, and took a lot of pictures. I didn’t want to shoot another stereotyped story about refugees – there are many such projects. It was important for me to convey the atmosphere of their family. Through photography, I wanted to convey what I felt myself while visiting them. This is how almost 5 years of our friendship flew by. I still keep in touch with them, and at any opportunity I go to Rakhiv.
At first sight, this story reveals us the fate of Ukranian refugees. The mountains were able to hide this family from bullets and destruction and they have been safe for a long time. This could’ve been the end of the story. After all, the main thing happened and children are far away from the horrors of war. But the war is not the main thing of their life.
Ten years later, the war is back in their lives - and even in Rakhiv the air-raid alarms are sounding. Despite this, Inna Inna didn’t look back with fear and didn’t let the war become the main event in the life of her family. Her daughters and her son were able to have a normal childhood. The war changed their destinies, but a human being with inner peace is stronger than war.
