With her photos of ballerinas, Ukrainian photographer Nika Ritshel resists the horrors of war. She has over 300,000 followers on Instagram.
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00:00Nearly three years after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war is omnipresent here.
00:09Photographer Nika Richel has to live with this reality too on a daily basis.
00:18She fights back through her art.
00:21My photos deal with life, with young and beautiful people.
00:31The photos can be funny or sad, but they always deal with life.
00:38In a studio in Kiev, Nika photographs ballerinas.
00:43Even before the war, she had discovered them as a subject.
00:47She made her first portrait of a ballerina in 2018, and she was hooked,
00:51exploring the motif even as the war raged outside.
00:57These photos show that we're still alive.
01:02In May 2023, we were going through massive rocket bombardments every day at every time.
01:09We'd be working in this very studio and seeing these fireworks from missiles outside the windows.
01:16We kept on working because nobody can defeat us.
01:25Nika had no thought of fleeing the country when the war broke out.
01:29Instead, she started her Blue and Yellow series with costumes in the Ukrainian national colours.
01:35Nika makes a living from photography, but not from this series.
01:40All the photos from this series are for a good cause.
01:47I tell prospective buyers that 100% of the purchase price goes to a non-profit association.
01:54But I don't decide which one. The model on the photo does.
02:02Now, with Kiev relatively well protected from missile bombardments,
02:07the people of Ukraine's capital are fairly safe.
02:10Even so, they can never really breathe easily.
02:13Some Russian attacks do get through even here.
02:22Often we can't sleep at night because it's just too loud.
02:27We read the telegram channels to see if a drone or missiles are coming in,
02:32and we generally expect that anything could happen any time.
02:36It's a constant feeling of fear for our own lives and for those of our friends and families.
02:45Three years of war have been three years of death and destruction,
02:49mostly in the embattled regions of eastern Ukraine.
02:52Reliable figures for military and civilian deaths may not even exist,
02:56but they reach into the hundreds of thousands.
03:04This is a tragedy for every one of us, but you can't spend every day in mourning.
03:10This invasion has lasted for three years now,
03:14but you can't lie around on the sofa and cry for three years.
03:19This place is a reminder to us all of the cost of this war.
03:26So, Nika keeps working on her photos in the studio.
03:30In War II, life goes on, as does the hope that it will all end well.
03:42I really want to believe that in the end we'll be living in an independent Ukraine,
03:47that we will all be free, that these won't just be empty words,
03:52but that we'll be free from our neighbours and the shadow they cast over us.
04:00Nika works to give herself and others hope through her photos.
04:04Hope for a peaceful future in an independent Ukraine.