Chervona Kalina is a humanitarian documentary and portrait project посвящённый Ukrainian women whose lives were radically transformed by the full-scale war launched by Russia against Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
Created in the first months of mass displacement, the project brings visibility to women who were forced to leave their homes, separate from family members, and rebuild everyday life in unfamiliar countries, often while caring for children and carrying the emotional weight of war, uncertainty, and rupture.
Through portraits and essays, Chervona Kalina focuses on lived experience rather than statistics alone. It reflects on resilience, vulnerability, and the quiet strength with which women continue to endure, protect, and sustain life amid forced migration.
Context
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered one of the largest and fastest-growing refugee crises in Europe since the Second World War. Millions of people were displaced across borders and within Ukraine, while countless families were separated by war, danger, and the impossibility of safe return.
Among those most deeply affected were women who fled with children, often without partners, stability, or any certainty about the future. Their stories carry not only trauma and loss, but also determination, dignity, and the difficult work of adaptation.
Chervona Kalina emerged from this reality.
Artistic Position
I created this project as both a photographer and a woman directly living through war and displacement.
On 4 March 2022, I left Ukraine with my three children, including my seven-month-old son, and arrived in Germany as a refugee. This experience shaped the project from within. I was not observing from a distance: I was moving through the same rupture, instability, and emotional terrain as the women I photographed.
Because of this, Chervona Kalina is not only a documentary project. It is also an act of witnessing from within a shared condition — an attempt to preserve the presence, burden, dignity, and inner force of Ukrainian women living through war and forced transition.
Intention
The project seeks to draw international attention to the realities faced by refugee women and to the broader human consequences of war for families, children, and host societies across Europe.
At the same time, it resists reducing women to victimhood alone. Each portrait and story holds both pain and agency — revealing not only what war destroys, but also what remains: courage, care, endurance, and the beauty of spirit under pressure.
