“Love Letters to Donbas” is a deeply personal memoir of Donbas, told through photographs, memory, and loss.

Growing up in Khartsyzsk, an industrial town in Eastern Ukraine, Serhii Korovayny spent childhood days climbing coal mine spoil tips to watch the endless steppe and steel plant chimneys stretch into the horizon. In 2014, when Russia’s proxy forces seized the region, the familiar smell of grass and estragon was replaced by the smell of gunpowder and home became a place of fear, suspicion, and shrinking freedom.

Over the next decade, Serhii returns repeatedly to Donbas as both a local and a photojournalist, witnessing how Ukrainian-controlled towns briefly rebuilt their lives, only to be shattered by Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Now, writing from Kyiv in 2025, Serhii scrolls through old images and realizes how even memory begins to collapse: streets blur, routes overlap, and what once felt permanent slips into darkness.

Mixing his earlier photographs from 2010–2014 with images from the war-torn cities of Mariupol, Bakhmut, Pokrovsk and beyond, “Love Letters to Donbas” becomes an act of resistance, preserving places as they were, before destruction, before occupation, before forgetting.

“I cannot stop the advance of the Russian army. What I can do is take pictures. This is my way to preserve memory. Let this book be a naive attempt to resist destruction and oblivion, my love letter to a home region that Russia steals from me.”

The FotoEvidence Association, in partnership with the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPP), launched FotoEvidence Ukraine, an initiative dedicated to supporting Ukrainian photographers and preserving Ukrainian culture. Through the creation of photobooks, this project documents the Russian invasion of Ukraine since 2014, ensuring these visual records reach libraries, safeguarding history for future generations.

 “Love Letter to Donbas” is a product of the FotoEvidence Ukraine initiative. Developed in collaboration with Serhii Korovayny, this photobook responds to the profound challenges posed by the Russian invasion. Its publication has been made possible with the support of the Open Society Foundations and the International Renaissance Foundation.