I didn't think of doing this all my life, the way I think now, but I thought, "If there is a profession that I want to do, it's maybe the work of photography."īut it sounded famous, you know. And we had a lot of protests near the city council because there were no elections for a new mayor.Īnd then I was only taking photographs as a hobby.
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But this is just the experience of learning how to become a journalist and a photographer in the real world, right?Īnastasia Vlasova: Yes, we don't have real courses of photojournalism at all in Ukraine.īut back to Maidan: tensions were getting high. Local pro-Russian separatists blocked an army column en route to Slaviansk and did not let them pass.Īlan Chin: Right. Ukrainian soldiers sit on their armored vehicles near Kramatorsk, Ukraine on April 16, 2014. And now, when you're pouring me champagne, you're asking me?" Before pouring me champagne my boss asked me, "Are you already 18, so can you drink now?" And I was, like, "What? You assigned me to go to Maidan, spend the night with those people. I was really scared and cold.īut, after my birthday I went to corporate party. And he assigned me to go to Maidan and spend the night with the protestors, owners of small businesses. I was not yet 18. He's now a deputy of the new government party (Samopomich – “Self-Reliance”) in parliament. And my boss, Egor Sobolev, gave me an assignment. I started to work at a website called, which translates to "Consciously" in English. But I was at the Maidan of the small business people, when taxes got higher and they had a protest. I was a kid then, so I had nothing to do with that. Did Ukrainians feel that there was big trouble coming?Īnastasia Vlasova: In 2004 we had this Orange Revolution. Note: “Maidan” (Independence Square in Kiev) refers to both the physical location and the protest movement that began in November 2013Īlan Chin: Up until the Maidan movement began, to the outside world it looked like Ukraine was unlikely to have a major conflict.
The following is an edited version of that conversation. As the battle raged on around the town of Debaltseve, they spoke of the current crisis, and what it has been like for a young journalist to learn on the job during a year of revolution, war and ongoing turmoil. They spoke on the phone last month, just after Vlasova had returned to Kiev from another trip to the front lines and hours before a ceasefire was expected to take effect. Despite domestic and international efforts to deescalate the crisis, fighting between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists continues.Īlan Chin met 22-year old photographer Anastasia Vlasova in December, and the two worked together in the contested pro-Russian separatist region of the self-styled Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) in the east of the country. The war in Ukraine has claimed more than 6,000 lives, and displaced nearly two million people. Residents of the besieged town of Debaltseve sit in a bus as they wait for evacuation, Donetsk area, Ukraine.
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