Photojournalist Maks Levin found dead
Saturday, 2 april 2022, 12:51
Famous photojournalist Maksym Levin, who was covering the war for the Ukrainian digital broadcasting station Hromadske, has been found dead.
Source: "Livyi bereh", where the journalist previously worked; hromadske
Details: Police found Levin on April 1 after a lengthy search near the village of Guta Mezhyhirska in the Kyiv region.
He had died of a shrapnel wound to the head.
Levin was 40 years old. He had dreamed of becoming a photographer from the age of 15 and during his school years he attended a photography club. He graduated as a computer systems engineer "to please his father" and then went on to take up his dream profession.
He worked as a staff member or as a freelancer for various publications and agencies, from the magazine "Pension" to the Ukrainian agency UNIAN and the international Associated Press, Reuters. He gave 10 years to Lb.ua.
In 2020 he moved to Hromadske as a videographer.
He worked in political hotspots: during the Revolution of Dignity and in the war since 2014. In particular, he was in the Ilovaisk pocket, which he got out of together with Ukrainian voluntary soldiers.
By the decree of Petro Poroshenko in 2015 he was awarded the Order "For Merits" of the III degree.
He was married and had four sons.
Levin was a co-founder of the AFTERILOVAISK journalism project and the "Fathers' Club" social project.
AFTERILOVAISK is a collection of multimedia stories about living and dead Ukrainians in Ilovaisk. In August 2014, Levin and his colleague Markiian Lysenko left the encirclement along the same "green corridor", after which they felt an urgent need to tell Ukraine and the world about this hell.
"Fathers’ Club" – an association that inspires dads to be heroes for their children. More precisely, to take an active part in their lives, which, according to the founders, should solve a large number of social problems.
Below are some photos by Maks Levin, most of which are of the war.
Previously: Contact with Levin was cut off on March 13. He went to photograph the fighting in his own car. According to a friend, he left the car near the village of Huta Mezhyhirska in the Vyshhorod district of Kyiv region and went towards the village of Moshchun.
A message was received from the journalist's phone at 11:23 a.m., after which he no longer got in touch and did not appear online.
Why this is important: The aggressors are kidnapping and killing civilians, as well as repressing activists and politicians in the occupied territories, journalists.
According to the Institute of Mass Media, since the beginning of the full-scale war until March 31, five journalists have died in the line of duty, nine have been injured, two have gone missing, and at least two have been held captive.
The Russians held a Hromadske journalist, Victoria Roshchyna, captive in occupied Berdiansk for about six days. In Mariupol, the invaders abducted several representatives of a local media holding.
51-year-old American journalist Brent Reno, who worked for Time magazine, was killed by Russian bullets in Irpin, in the Kyiv region. A British Fox News correspondent and a Swiss journalist, whose car was also stolen by the aggressors, have also come under fire.
