Waiting Beneath a Broken Sky

• Prize
  Gold in Press/War / Conflict
• Photographer
  Jakub Laichter, Germany
• Date of Photograph
  2022-2026

War is mud mixed with blood. It’s friends you make and then lose. It’s brief moments of terror followed by hours of waiting. For me, war is waiting. Soldiers waiting to see their loved ones and mothers waiting for their sons. Waiting for the spring, for western ammunition, but above all, waiting for it to end. I was 18 and naive about war when I first came to the frontline in Ukraine. Now, at 24, I still find that much of war resists explanation, but I return again and again to the same suspended state of waiting because there is no meaning to derive from war beyond the hope that it will end.