Pain - Volodymyr Pielikh
Created by Ukrainian artist Volodymyr Pielikh, this piece documents Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy who went to northern Ukraine to see with his own eyes what the Russians left behind in the war. “Zelenskyy’s expression in this photo shattered me because not only was I seeing exactly how I felt emotionally with this war, I was seeing it on our president’s face and I knew I had to draw him to shed a light on the horrors that are happening in Ukraine currently,” Pielikh says.
“This art piece makes me feel compassion for the Ukrainian nation. I wanted people to be able to see and feel what Ukrainian people are going through by looking into the eyes of this one man. In the first few days of the war, Ukraine was met with an ambush in the dead of the night… Russia managed to take over significant parts of Ukrainian territory, including almost the entire Kyiv region. They controlled it for almost two months before the Ukrainian army was able to successfully remove the Russian soldiers from the region.”
Pielikh’s artwork takes inspiration from when Zelenskyy visited a small town, Bucha. “His facial expression in the picture fully shows what any human being would feel seeing the consequence of the Russian massacre.”