A portrait of a Ukrainian girl at Paszkowka Palace on May 13, 2022. The hotel was converted into refugee housing outside of Krakow, Poland. She and her family have been living there since fleeing their home in Eastern Ukraine earlier that month..

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Too Young To Fight

Svet Jacqueline | Ukraine

Too Young To Fight focuses on the lives of Ukrainian children since Russia invaded Ukraine. Over 1000 children have been killed in Ukraine since February 24, 2022. Others have sustained injuries from shelling and are spending holidays in hospitals getting fitted for prosthetics. Thousands are accepting a new life of living underground dreaming of a day when they can go back to school– or just to dance class. The rest, those who account for the over five million refugees who were forced to flee since the war started, are trying to assimilate in places that will never feel like home.

 

The beautiful thing about children is the joy they find in the most unlikely circumstances. They run, play, and laugh in the face of the evil that has become their reality. As they grow older, some will be drafted into the war as young adults. Some will help raise the siblings that their parents died to protect and some will never return to their cities again. This work emulsifies the innocence that war destroys through the eyes and stories of children as they find a more permanent identity.

 

My work explores the trauma caused by displacement and dismemberment of family and home. As a child born in Kirov, Russia- orphaned at birth, I am drawn to telling the stories of youths whose childhoods are divergent or unstable due to geopolitical circumstances out of their control.

www.svetjacqueline.com

svetjacqueline@gmail.com

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