PIERPAOLO
MITTICA
Italy
And then the winter came
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, starting a full-scale war. Having failed to take Kyiv and after the slowdown suffered in the various ground operations in the Donbass due to the strenuous resistance of the Western-backed Ukrainian army, Russia changed its war strategy as winter approached.
In fact, in recent months Russia has started to hit power plants to put the population in the dark and cold during the harsh Ukrainian winter. More than half of the country currently lives without electricity, water and heating. Particularly difficult is the situation in the capital Kyiv and its suburbs, which were destroyed in the first months of the war and are continuously targeted by missile and drone attacks on an almost daily basis. Now winter has arrived, where temperatures drop as low as minus 20 degrees Celsius. After almost a year, the situation in Ukraine is extremely dramatic and a particularly complicated and difficult winter for the Ukrainian population is in sight. In an act of extreme courage, all those people decided to not leave their houses and their country and to face the harsh Ukrainian winter in terrible conditions of living.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Pierpaolo Mittica is an Italian humanist and environmental photographer/filmmaker based in Italy. His photographs have been exhibited all over Europe, United States and China, and published in Italian and international newspapers and magazines, such as l’Espresso, Days Japan International, Asahi Shimbun, The Telegraph and Süddeutsche Zeitung. He is co-author with Alessandro Tesei and Michele Marcolin of the two documentary movies Living Toxic, Russia (Produced by Sydonia, 2014) and Behind the Urals (Produced by Mondo in Cammino, 2015), as well as co-director with Alessandro Tesei of the documentary movie The Zone, Road to Chernobyl (Produced by Subwaylab 2018).
