“The reason I started doing this job, photojournalism, was to do justice to people’s stories so that their truth can be communicated to those who can’t be there and see what I see.”

OUR Alkis Konstantinides managed to masterfully tell the truth about the pain and death experienced by the Ukrainian people, in one click. His photo is signed “Yana and Victor”which he painted last year in Kharkiv won an award in a global and very demanding competition “World Press Photo 2023”in category “Europe Singles”giving him another honorable mention. The photo stood out among 60,448 photos submitted by 3,752 photographers from around the world. “It’s the feeling of achieving a goal,” Mr. Konstantinidis succinctly remarks to Kathimerini.

Photojournalist found at Kharkiv, as part of a Reuters mission, at a difficult and dangerous time when Russian troops moved outside Ukraine’s second largest city and practically surrounded it. “Kharkov was attacked from many points. Its radius [ρωσικού] artillery covered the whole city. IN April 11, 2022, someone contacted him and agency correspondent James McKenzie and informed them of another missile attack. He says he will never forget this day. “The moment I arrived in one of these quarters, the old Soviet quarters with a playground or a park in the middle, I saw a woman who opened the front door of an apartment building and walked out in fear towards the park. It was the woman in the photo, Yana,” he describes. “As soon as we got closer, we saw her crying because of her father”. Her father he died in the attack, going out for bread. Alkis Konstantinidis captured a woman mourning the lifeless land of a 79-year-old man supported by her partner and mother.

“We didn’t want to disturb her at this moment, a personal and tragic moment, but because it was such an intimate, intense and heavy photograph, we wanted to find her, and we did. We found her two days later and talked to her. She spoke to us, I wanted her to speak. It turned out that he was one of the strongest and most resilient people I have ever met“, he notes.

Yana managed to deify the life of her father, who passed away so cruelly, in an hour and a half of the interview. “She told us the whole story of her father. He told us that he was a driver in a big company, about her years when they went on vacation, how much he loved his daughter and how much he protected her, what diminutive names he gave them.