The photo of a pregnant woman who dies during the war in Ukraine won the 2023 World Press Photo competition

The photo that showed the cruelty of the Russian attack on the Mariupol mother and child hospital and which became a reflection of the war in Ukraine was chosen for the prize of the competition World Press Photo 2023which highlights the best images of the year.

The author of the picture was the Ukrainian photographer and film director Yevgeny Maloletkawhich he was able to portray as the rescuers a pregnant woman was carried away on a stretcher, about to give birth, from the remains of the hospital attacked by Vladimir Putin’s troops on March 9, 2022.

The woman in the photo was called Ira Kalinin, who after the attack managed to give birth, but her child – christened Miron (which comes from the word peace) – was stillborn. She too died half an hour later with a shattered pelvis.

“This is the image I wanted to forget, but couldn’t,” said Maloletka, who also photographed injured or dying children following the bombs, and to their desperate parents. “Each of them scored the jury, and they will become a collection of andindelible scenes of an ongoing war“, He added.

In the photo, Kalinina can be seen staring into space, one leg covered in blood, clutching her belly, as five men carry her through destroyed buildings.

The Ukrainian photographer and journalist, who said he arrived there an hour before the invasion of Mariupol, is one of the few photographers who was able to document those moments.

“For 20 days we lived with medical workers in the hospital basement and in shelters with ordinary citizens, trying to show the fear that Ukrainians live with,” Maloletka said.

Published by the Associated Press (AP), the photo portraying a personal tragedy is evidence of this the destruction caused by the Russian attack on civilian targets, which is considered a war crime by international justice. In this case, the attack has caused three killed and 17 wounded. At the time, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed the deaths of the mother and her son.

For his part, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the hospital had been taken over by paramilitaries and that patients and the medical team had been evacuated. Furthermore, from Russia there was talk of a montage made by the Ukrainians to show situations that had not occurred. In fact, it was even said that the pregnant woman in the photo was an actress.

According to the jury of the World Press Photo, organized by the homonymous Foundation based in Amsterdam, the snapshot “transmits the suffering of civilians in war”.

The “Graphic Report of the Year” went to a difficult story in Afghanistan

Among other awards conferred by the institution, the ‘Graphic Report of the Year’ went to the Danish Mads Nisen for ‘The Price of Peace in Afghanistan’.

In the winning image, the boy Khalil Ahmad shows the scar left by the surgery to remove the kidney sold to support his family. The 15-year-old boy’s parents couldn’t buy food for their eleven children, so in a desperate attempt to save the family, they decided to sell the left kidney of their eldest sonfor $3,500.

This explains the hard daily life of the population since the Taliban took power in August 2021. As a result of this situation, the chronic pain and lack of strength prevent the child from leading a normal life since the operation. Unemployment and hunger have increased the illegal trafficking of organs in the country, as mentioned in the presentation of this category.

“It reflects the failures of the American adventure in Afghanistan and how they affected people. It is an extraordinary work that reveals life under the Taliban,” said the jury.

Meanwhile, the long-term project went to the Armenian photojournalist anush babajanyanillustrating the impact of water management in Central Asia after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and due to the climate crisis.

For decades, the water of the Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers has been peacefully managed by Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. “However, drought, disagreements and bad politics cloud this cooperation,” they explain to the World Press Photo.

For the jury, the photojournalist creates a powerful visual story “that delves into a complex and little-addressed reality, and the author has fled from clichés in the face of the difficulties common to these countries”. The photos were published in VII Photo/National Geographic Society.

In the Open Format category, the prize went to the Egyptian Mohamed Mahdiwho collaborated with the inhabitants of the Al Max district, in Alexandria, to preserve the memory of a fishing village, threatened by the contamination of the Mahmoudiyah canal, along which they built their homes.

The Egyptian government has reallocated a third of this population and the photographer has encouraged them to create an archive to safeguard the collective memory, which the jury judged “an excellent work that offers the opportunity to interact with this story”.

The four winners were chosen from more than 60,000 still and multimedia images submitted by 3,752 entrants from 127 countries.