This photographic work was made between Kyiv and Donetsk in the spring of 2014, during a pivotal moment in Ukraine’s modern history. The country was still reeling from the aftermath of the Maidan uprising, while in the east, a new and very different conflict was beginning to take shape.

In Kyiv, the scars of the revolution were still raw. Burnt barricades, portraits of the dead, political graffiti, and makeshift camps still occupied the city center. The capital existed in a state of in-between: between grief and reconstruction, between democratic hope and the looming threat of war. The old regime had fallen, but the new order was fragile, and despite exhaustion, people remained vigilant.

Meanwhile, in Donetsk, the ground was shifting. In April, pro-Russian militants stormed administrative buildings, raised foreign flags, and declared the creation of the “Donetsk People’s Republic.” The Ukrainian state, weakened and disoriented, failed to respond. What began as street-level protest rapidly turned into armed occupation. On May 1st, 2014, the escalation was visible: the prosecutor’s office was stormed, separatists appeared with assault rifles, and armored vehicles began to appear in the streets. Donetsk, once a city of unrest, was transforming into a stronghold of armed control, where authority was no longer negotiated but seized.

This body of work seeks to capture that critical threshold between uprising and war. On one side, the democratic momentum of a generation fighting for a European future. On the other, the rise of a separatist movement backed by weapons flowing in from the shadows. Between these two poles, a fractured nation—its streets, its people, and its silences—telling a story of broken hopes, rising fear, and a violence that was no longer speculative, but imminent.

What runs through these images is that tension: a country that had just reclaimed its voice in the capital, now watching a part of itself slip away—slowly, and with guns.