Fabio Bucciarelli, Italy

Ukraine: The enemy inside

It’s like a second front in wartime Ukraine. On this front, the defenders are children and their enemy is cancer. Elina, not yet two years old, who together with her family, was forced to flee her home in Kharkiv. Bohdan, who is suffering from eye cancer, and has fled with his family from Melitopol. Although there are still working pediatric hospitals in Kyiv and Lviv, the hospitals in many other places in the Ukraine have been destroyed. Supply chains for medical equipment and medicines have been interrupted and there is a lack of medical staff.

Italian photographer Fabio Bucciarelli has made contact with affected families through his connection to an NGO. In his pictures, he shows the bravery and resilience of children suffering from bone or brain tumors, but also how defenseless they are. Most of them are old enough, seven or eleven or fourteen years old, to know that the world is no longer a safe place, even outside the hospital.

Photographer: Fabio Bucciarelli, Italy

Fabio Bucciarelli, born in 1980, has been documenting conflicts and their consequences on people’s lives for almost fifteen years, for example, in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Africa and Latin America. In 2022, he also started reporting as a correspondent for Italian television from Ukraine.

Bucciarelli’s numerous awards include the Robert Capa Gold Medal as well as two World Press Photo and Sony World Photography Awards. His works are regularly published in the New York Times, but also in other renowned media in Europe, the USA, and the Middle East. Bucciarelli also works for different NGOs, including the UN Refugee Agency. For another photo series about children in Ukraine, Bucciarelli was already awarded an honorable mention in the UNICEF Photo of the Year in 2022.