UNICEF Photo of the Year

Five-year-old Alina is practicing riding her bike, followed by her friends. A moment of lightheartedness on some meadow in the northwest of Ukraine, banishing the dark clouds of misery, for a while at least. The night before, a drone strike set fire to an oil depot nearby. This time it was just an oil depot, not a residential building, not a hospital, not a school.

The war in Ukraine, which broke out in February 2022, does not overshadow every day and every place in this large country, so that it could utterly destroy the simple joys, needs, and resilience of its children. This can be seen in this stunning picture by Polish photographer Patryk Jaracz.

However, he also repeatedly documents the mental and physical injuries suffered by Ukrainian children: a 13-year-old boy who was hit by five bullets while fleeing in a car and had to witness the death of his father.

Many families in cities of Donbas have been continuously living underground in basements to shelter from shelling which often also burned their homes.

Children who get panic attacks every time they hear an airplane. It is still difficult to assess the long-term impact of the war experiences of millions of Ukrainian children.

Especially as there is no end in sight to the attacks, the flight from danger, and the suffering. It breaks his heart, says Jaracz, to see people suffering like this.

They have no helmets, gloves, or safety glasses when crawling a hundred meters or more into the mountains of Chinarak. There are also no measuring devices for toxic gases. The supporting beams in the tunnels are makeshift, the air is heavy, the ground treacherous. And some of the boys who mine coal in the mountains north of Kabul for the equivalent of a few euros a day are only ten years old.

There has always been child labor in Afghanistan. However, since the victory of the Taliban and the resulting decline in international aid, and because of failed harvests and droughts, more and more families have been forced to make even their underage sons work for a living.

That’s why there are so many children among the adults here, shoveling coal into sacks, heaving it onto the backs of donkeys and driving them along narrow paths through a deforested landscape, down into the valley.

As the German photographer Oliver Weiken shows in his pictures, it is tiring work that leaves little energy, even to go to school. Around 20 percent of all boys and girls in Afghanistan work as street vendors, water carriers, shoe shiners, garbage collectors, helpers at markets or in mines such as those in Chinarak. In hardly any other country in the world are children’s rights, as defined by the United Nations, so far removed from being realized.

80-year-old Galina, who lives alone in a wooden house. In the late 1960s, she worked as a local guide for gold prospectors in Yakutia. When a Baptist church came to Lyengra in 92', Galina became a Christian and teaches her great-granddaughter the Bible here.

They were once alone with their reindeer herds in the tundra and forests of Yakutia, in north-eastern Siberia. Back then, Moscow was not important to the indigenous Evenki people. Then came the geologists and prospectors in search of gold, diamonds, and other abundant mineral resources. And finally came the lumberjacks. The lives of the Evenki people have changed considerably since then.

Many nomads have settled down, industrial plants cut across the migratory paths of the reindeer, missionaries compete against the traditional shamanism. All of this also changes childhoods in Yakutia.

The younger Evenki generation wonder about their future. Some like to spend time in the boreal forest where their families herd reindeer, but they cannot imagine spending their lives there.