click to enlarge
- Courtesy of Dmitri Beliakov
- Soldiers of the 46th battalion of the army of Ukraine try to extinguish fire due to mortar shelling by separatists, Mariinka, Donetsk region, Ukraine, August 23, 2016.
For 25 years,
Dmitri Beliakov covered armed conflicts and photographed countless soldiers, refugees, casualties and atrocities. His searing battlefield images, often shot in the reflections of windows and through holes in mortar-scarred buildings, have appeared in some of the world’s most prestigious publications, including the
New York Times, the
Washington Post,
Forbes,
Der Spiegel and the
Sunday Times of London. Yet Beliakov bristles at the label “war photographer.”
“I’m an anti-war photographer,” he said. “I hate war because I’ve seen what war does.”
click to enlarge
- Courtesy of Dmitri Beliakov
- Dmitri Beliakov
For the Russian-born photojournalist, the capacity of fanatics to inflict suffering on innocent civilians was forever burned into his memory beginning on September 1, 2004. That morning, Beliakov had just dropped off his son at school for the first time when he heard from a source within the Russian military. Counterterrorism units were deploying to Russia’s North Caucasus region to a school hostage crisis in the town of Beslan. Beliakov immediately joined them.
By the end of the three-day siege, Chechen terrorists had killed 334 people, including 186 children, in what’s considered the deadliest school massacre in history. Beliakov’s dramatic images of the siege — including one of a 6-year-old girl blown through a window by an explosion — circulated worldwide. (He learned later that the girl, Aida Sidakova, had survived and was reunited with her mother.) Beliakov earned a 2004 Overseas Press Club of America award for his images, and he was later featured in the 2006 Emmy Award-nominated CBS News documentary
Beslan: Three Days in September.
After Beslan, Beliakov gained unprecedented access to Russia’s military campaigns. Between 2014 and 2019, he covered the fighting in Ukraine, photographing the economic and humanitarian costs of the annexation of Crimea and war in the Donbas region. Unlike most photojournalists, Beliakov documented the conflict from multiple sides, sometimes from the perspectives of civilians and refugees, other times from those of pro-Kremlin separatists and Ukrainian soldiers.
click to enlarge
- Courtesy of Dmitri Beliakov
- Trench War: Ukrainian Soldier engaged in battle with separatists, Shirokino, Volnovakhsky district, Donetsk region, Ukraine, 24 June 2015
To mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Norwich University presents an exhibit of Beliakov’s work at its Kreitzberg Library in Northfield. For the opening on Tuesday, February 28, Beliakov, who resettled in Vermont last fall with his wife and three children, will participate in a panel discussion titled
“On the Margins of Europe: A War Before the War.”
Joining him will be Rachel Denber, deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch; Nathan Hodge, senior editor at CNN London; and Maj. Sergey Filippov, commander of the Kyiv volunteer battalion, who will participate remotely from Ukraine.
“Norwich University is very honored to host Dmitri, as he brings to our community an incredible understanding of war and peace in its many facets,” said W. Travis Morris, director of Norwich University's
John and Mary Frances Patton Peace and War Center, where Beliakov now works as a senior fellow. “He has seen all sides of conflict in a part of the world that is now the center of international media attention.”
Beliakov, 53, grew up, coincidentally, in Yaroslavl, a sister city of Burlington about 160 miles northeast of Moscow, in what was then the Soviet Union. Like all teens, he was conscripted into the Soviet Army. However, because then-president Mikhail Gorbachev was “looking for some populist excuses and tricks to increase his popularity,” Beliakov said, he was discharged after only a year and a half of military service. By December 1991, the Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Beliakov, then 21, traveled to the West for the first time.
In the early 1990s, Beliakov worked as a researcher and translator in the Moscow bureau of the British tabloids
Daily Express and
Sunday Express. But he saw Russia-based photojournalists earning huge sums working for Western media outlets and decided to try it himself.
“That was the golden age,” Beliakov recalled, “when you could just make a single phone call from Moscow to Washington or Hamburg or Paris and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a story from Russia,’ and they would immediately give you an advance.”
click to enlarge
- Courtesy of Dmitri Beliakov
- Patrol of territory of former Donetsk airport by soldiers of Moscow-backed brigade Vostok, Donetsk, DPR(Donetsk People Republic), September 4, 2015
Beliakov’s early efforts were belittled by his colleague, an established photojournalist who told Beliakov that he lacked any photographic abilities. Beliakov didn’t think seriously about photojournalism again until 1997 when he met Georgiy Rozov, a nationally renowned photographer from the Soviet era. Rozov encouraged Beliakov to give it another go.
“He said to me, ‘Never mind what that dickhead said to you. Try it!’” recalled Beliakov. “‘And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.’”
Beliakov’s photojournalism career began in earnest in 1999 during the Second Chechen War. Spending his own money and “taking bold risks,” Beliakov said, he traveled Russia’s Dagestan Republic to document the fighting between Russian forces and Wahhabi troops who’d invaded Chechnya.
Beliakov’s big break came in December 1999 when he landed a photo assignment with legendary American war correspondent Marie Colvin, who at the time worked for London’s
Sunday Times. Colvin had secured an exclusive interview with Amir Ibn al-Khattab, one of Russia’s most wanted terrorists who ran mercenaries in Chechnya.
In those years, Beliakov explained, most reporters only covered the Chechen side of the conflict because warlords gave them extensive access and protection.
“With the Russians, it was different,” he said. The Ministry of Defense forced him to travel with military handlers who dictated what Beliakov could photograph and threatened to strip him of his press credentials for any “anti-Russian propaganda.”
click to enlarge
- Courtesy of Dmitri Beliakov
- A horse-drawn cart in Antonovka, Rivne region, Ukraine, October 7, 2016
Weren’t the Russians suspicious of his motives, given that he'd traveled with Chechen fighters?
“Not at that time. But we lived in a different country then,” Beliakov explained. “The president was [Boris] Yeltsin, and by the time [Vladimir] Putin emerged, we saw a lot of changes.”
By 2003, Beliakov had forged deep connections within Russia’s special forces.
“I would drink and sleep with these guys, eat the same food, use the same toilets,” he said. “There’s one rule in this life: Everything is about relationships. If you have relationships, you can get anywhere.”
Ultimately, those relationships gave Beliakov access to the Beslan school crisis. But its devastating imagery took a serious toll on him.
“After Beslan, I locked myself in a hotel room for two days and just drank,” he said. Even now, the battle-hardened Beliakov, who’s since documented countless scenes of death and suffering, said only the crash site of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which the Russian military shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, compared for its visceral intensity.
click to enlarge
- Courtesy of Dmitri Beliakov
- Victim of a booby-trap seen in operation block of hospital № 21, located dangerously close to the frontline, Donetsk, DPR (Donetsk People Republic), August 31, 2015
“These were some of the most memorable and crucial images of my entire career,” Beliakov said about Beslan. “This is how I really understood, for the first time, that what you’re doing is not just for your own ego and not for satisfying your photo desk.”
Beliakov hasn’t just photographed wars. His other subjects have ranged from Russian ballerinas to lifers in Russia’s penal colonies to psychiatric hospitals in Armenia — the last of which Beliakov was shooting on February 24, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine.
Within weeks, the Russian parliament passed draconian laws subjecting anyone who criticized the invasion, or even called it a war, to 15 years of hard labor.
“I realized I was not coming back [to Russia],” Beliakov said. “My anti-Putin positions were well known. I never made it a secret.”
Not wanting his children to endure what he called a “Stalin-era propaganda campaign,” Beliakov immigrated with his family to the U.S. in October, with help from the Andrei Sakharov Foundation. Lisa Chalidze, an assistant professor at Castleton University and Andrei Sakharov Foundation board member, is the widow of Soviet-era dissident Valery Chalidze, who was a colleague of fellow dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Sakharov; she encouraged Beliakov to come to Vermont. Ironically, Beliakov hasn’t photographed any of the current invasion; because he still carries a Russian passport, the Ukrainians won’t allow him entry.
On the battlefield, Beliakov said, he never once shied away from capturing the difficult image.
“If you’re roaming the ruins of Aleppo or Grozny, you inevitably come back with some decent, usable pictures. But it isn’t about dead bodies or the texture of ruins,” Beliakov said. “Basically, you’re trying to say something else.”
click to enlarge
- Courtesy of Dmitri Beliakov
- Alla Segeda, lone inhabitant of the cellar of a 90-apartment house, stuck in the "Sunny" neighborhood – the "grey zone" between Ukraine and DPR. All residents had left the house, having fled the war. Alla survives alone. Krasnogorivka, Donetsk region, Ukraine, January 26, 2017
In war, he explained, ordinary people get left behind or forgotten. As a photojournalist, his job is to bear witness to their plight.
“Thousands of people would have been alive if that idiot [Putin] didn’t invade the Crimea and the Donbas. Tens of thousands of people could be living a happy life. And I met countless unhappy, devastated families whose lives have been turned into ruins,” he said. “If I’m there, my job is to find appropriate examples and tell about these people. Because they don’t want to be invisible.”