January 14, 2023, is a day I’ll never forget. I arrived in Dnipro not long after the Russian missile hit the apartment block. The scene was chaos—emergency crews digging through concrete and mangled metal with their bare hands, searching for survivors. A section of the building was just… gone. Entire homes were crushed in seconds. Through my lens, I saw heartbreak everywhere—faces covered in dust and tears, first responders pushing themselves past exhaustion. I kept shooting, trying to capture the scale of it, the raw emotion, the human cost.

There was this one moment that stopped me cold—a kitchen, still intact, bright yellow walls somehow untouched while everything around it had been obliterated. It was surreal. That image hit me harder than anything. It told a whole story in one frame: normal life, frozen in time, ripped apart without warning. That photo ended up everywhere. But behind it are 46 people who didn’t make it, and dozens more who will never live the same again.