“Pisky and the Donetsk Airport. Then and Now”

A Kryvy Rih retail and entertainment center is hosting the exhibition, titled “Pisky and the Donetsk Airport. Then and Now.” Its initiator is Serhii Prokopenko, deputy commander of the 93rd Brigade’s fire support company. According to the organizers, the name itself is highly symbolic, as visitors can see from the pictures how these places looked before the war and how they are now. Rather than being a professional photographer’s works, these are high-energy photo emotions which their creators would like to share with visitors.

Prokopenko revealed the idea of the event: “The exhibition was conceived back when I was stationed in Pisky, to raise funds for the rebuilding of the village after the war. However, on my return to Kryvy Rih, I saw social division which resulted in a lot of people coming to hold separatist beliefs. I would like them to see these photos first, showing how dire was the harvest of sorrow that the village’s residents had to reap. There are no gory pictures in this series, as we did not intend to scare anyone... Many wealthy people lived in Pisky before the war. You can see their homes, once worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, that have turned into ruins. Many residents come to visit their home village now and are distraught, unable to understand how it came to this. Out of 3,500 villagers, only 20 people are fighting on the side of the separatists, the rest just followed them, which resulted in the situation that you can see in these photos. We created this exhibition to avoid this situation repeating in our region.” The event’s co-organizers are girl volunteers from the Kryvy Rih Female Hundred NGO, who confirmed the words of our hero. The Female Hundred’s member Aliona Pashchenko noted that the idea to hold this exhibition had not come out of the blue. “Many of the people around us seem to live in another, parallel reality. We have been finding it hard recently to explain to people what is happening in eastern regions. Every Ukrainian should care about it. When we call our frontline soldiers and ask them ‘How are you?’ they always respond that everything is fine and they will win! Our men try to calm us in this way. Still, the real situation... People need to see that all is not well and our boys need help.”

The exhibition will run until the end of the month.