Anastasia Vlasova was one of the first photographers who came to Kherson right after its deoccupation on 11 November 2022. Born and raised in Kherson, she used to refer to her hometown as "a small city where nothing ever happens" and then admits, "until last year, obviously."
On 30 September 2022, after months of intense fighting, Russia annexed Kherson and the occupied parts of Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Donetsk, and Luhansk oblasts. Anastasia was in Crimea in 2014 when Russia announced the peninsula as its territory, and at that time, it all seemed like "an absurd and bad dream." As a reporter, she documented many stories of people who lost their homes or still had relatives in the occupied territories. After eight years of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the same has happened to her hometown and her family. Anastasia Vlasova not only documented the deoccupied city but also took part with other Ukrainian photographers in the exhibition "Together—Unbreakable" at Kherson railway station, which was mounted on 16 January 2023, accompanied by the sound of shelling.
Anastasia Vlasova is a documentary photographer, visual storyteller, and media producer, Magnum Foundation Fellow. She is collaborating with Ukrainian media like Hromadske, Suspilne, The Reporters, as well as The Washington Post, The Guardian, Spiegel. Anastasiia has been documenting the Russo-Ukrainian war since its start in 2014.
A woman with a child walks by the water delivery in Kherson, Ukraine, on 26 November 2022. The Russian occupation forces destroyed the infrastructure facilities before retreating from the city.
Larysa, 67, holds her coat with her blood stain in front of her house in Kherson on 26 November 2022. Larysa was at home on 24 November when the shelling in her neighborhood started. "I didn't think it was my blood, and I thought a man who walked behind me with a bucket of water spilled some on me. But it was wet and warm. When I came home and used a flashlight, I saw—blood!" She called an ambulance, but the doctors couldn't remove all the shrapnel from her body, only part of it.
An artillery shelling debris as seen in the residential area in Kherson, Ukraine, on 26 November 2022.
A resident covered his broken window with a plastic shield due to shelling in the neighborhood on 24 November 2022 in Kherson, Ukraine. The picture was taken on 26 November.
Oleksandr, 42, with his wife Iryna (R) and his sister-in-law Angela (L), as seen cooking mushrooms they collected from the trees in their neighborhood in a makeshift kitchen in Kherson, Ukraine on 24 November 2022. Oleksandr was slicing mushrooms before putting them in the pan as the shelling started in Kherson's residential area early in the morning. Due to electricity absences, people are forced to cook meals on an open fire outside.
Tetyana and Serhiy Pulenets, both teachers, collected water from the Dnipro river due to the absence of running water in Kherson, Ukraine, on 22 November 2022. The Russian occupation forces destroyed the infrastructure facilities before retreating from the city.
Volodymyr, 60, a resident, looks at the artillery shelling debris which landed in a football field in a residential area in Kherson, Ukraine, on 22 November 2022.
