Today is a happy day in the life of Mikhail Ray and Anne as they celebrate two years as husband and wife. Much of this marriage has been spent at war and under Russian occupation. They go out to celebrate the anniversary in Kherson’s Freedom Square, the place where thousands of civilians gather to receive humanitarian aid. They go hand in hand and walk two hands above the ground, happy for their love, for the end of the occupation and for being able to walk without fear of being arrested. Mikhail takes his phone out of his pocket and shows the work he has done on his house over the past nine months of occupation. He could have cost you dearly. Many of his neighbors and friends decided to leave the city in the first days of the conflict. He stayed and has documented the day-to-day of the occupation with a diary of his photocollages and reflections that will soon become a book.
“When the war started, the first thing I did was contact my Russian friends to tell them that they were bombing us and that their troops had entered Kherson. In general there was no reaction of any kind, although a few denied it. They didn’t believe me. They acted like real zombies brainwashed by the Kremlin,” artist Mikhail Ray recalls the critical days in late February when Russia launched its invasion and raised the tricolor flag on Freedom Square. The Russians had him on the black list for his interventions in television programs and messages on social networks, so he opted “to go out as little as possible. The pro-Russian neighbors could give you away and then you would disappear. There have been many such cases », he recalls.
Other portraits by Mikhail Ray. /
The long hours of confinement resulted in the ‘Kherson Diaries’ series, which includes four shocking photographs that show “Russian faces with symbols of war such as the Z or V sewn to cover their eyes and mouths. They have shown me that they do not want to listen and that they are afraid to speak because in Russia there is no freedom of expression. They are portraits of zombie Russian patriots.” Those images have been exhibited in Berlin and kyiv, and have become icons of the fight against the occupation. It is a hyper-realistic work that, whoever sees it for the first time, wonders if someone has really sewn these staple-based symbols on the faces of the protagonists.
forced evacuation
The ‘Diary of the occupation’ covers from the first days of uncertainty, goes through the long months of isolation without internet connection and concludes with the final moments of the Russian presence when, just one month after the annexation referendum, they announced the evacuation of 10,000 civilians a day to the other bank of the Dnieper for a week. “The first question I had was ‘why 60,000?’ I think that a maximum of 5,000 left if we add pensioners and collaborators. They sowed panic, scared people with bombings and street fights, but even for that the citizens did not choose to go to the Russian Federation or Crimea. We all knew that evacuation was a one-way ticket.” Ray has been clear from day one that “this is not a war between Russia and Ukraine. It is a war of values, of generations, a war between the past and the future.
Mikhail is a familiar face in the city and is greeted as he passes by in Freedom Square, but today he only has eyes for his wife. The group that tries to liven up the long lines of people waiting for humanitarian aid plays one of his favorite songs. They hug. They close their eyes and dream of a future in Ukraine, not in the Russian Federation. They kiss.
New torture chambers found in Kherson
Every day that passes since the liberation of Kherson, new episodes of torture during the nine months of occupation come to light. The Ukrainian Prosecutor’s Office reported the discovery of bullets and electrocution machines in the torture chambers.
The liberation of the city has moved the clashes to the East, where “fierce combats” are taking place, according to Volodimir Zelensky. From Zaporizhia, where Russia and Ukraine accused each other of the bombings against the nuclear plant that occurred over the weekend, to Donbas, the Eastern front is intensifying in these first days of winter.
In Kherson, the evacuation of elderly people and victims of Russian attacks has already started, an operation that will extend to neighboring Mikolaiv.
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