Day 424
Fists of fate tear-jerkers
The New York Times published this four-and-a-half minute clip, which tells you everything you need to know and were afraid to ask about the current phase of fighting in eastern Ukraine.
The big news in Kyiv are new window dressings at the central department store c/o Sisters Feldman. It re-opens on May 1.
Ukrainian meteorologists, meanwhile, say water levels in the mighty Dnipro have dropped by five centimeters and predict un-flooding of low-lying areas adjacent to the river this week, that is, if it doesn’t rain.
I read about the bloody mess in Sudan over the weekend and thought about my friend Ed Barnes, who (between Sarajevo and the second Iraq war?) did a project about the lost boys of South Sudan.
Ed had heard a report that boys as young as toddlers up to teenagers were fleeing the civil war and travelling on foot southwards to safety in their hundreds. Quite how many wasn't known though we heard that there may be as many as thousands. A story of extraordinary proportions. Teaming up in London we flew on to Nairobi in the hope of learning something more from local news outlets though it wasn't until we reached the northern NGO base of the World Food Programme at Lokichoggio that we realised just what a mission impossible this was going to be.
Ed and I crossed paths in Belgrade (before the bombing) and finally hooked up in Kyiv/Munich in the early 2000s. He returned after the Orange Revolution and chatted up Tymoshenko about gas for tv. His friend Chien-Chi Chang from Taiwan came to Kyiv after the first invasion in 2014 to make snaps and several more times after the all-out invasion in 2022.
Chien-Chi’s album is here: 凝視頓巴斯：張乾琦的戰地攝影紀實.