On the night of April 26, 1986, reactor number four exploded. Forty years later, a thousand people still work the site, a Russian drone has cracked the sarcophagus, and a ninety-year-old man paints over his Ukrainian flag to hide it from soldiers. The Zone has outlived empires.

"Every day we clear them we fight and push them, but each night they build them back." The war for Port-Au-Prince is fought block by block, barricade by barricade, by a police force the world has largely forgotten.

Sloviansk, Eastern Ukraine. Despite the return of spring sunlight, the city feels empty. Military vehicles line up outside the last restaurants still open. Russian artillery rumbles a few kilometres away, the grim omen of a front drawing closer. Gutted buildings line streets now covered in anti-drone nets.

A hundred kilometres from the front, a group of Colombians, Chileans, and Peruvians learn to fly drones. They came for the money, stayed for the cause — and they've become some of Ukraine's most effective fighters.

On the winter solstice, soldiers of Azov's Whisky Battalion — a unit made up largely of foreign volunteers from the US, UK, Poland, and beyond — gathered in freezing fog on the banks of a Ukrainian river for the Mysteriya: a ceremony honoring their fallen. Shields bearing the names of seven Azov fighters killed in the past year were laid on the ground, torches were lit, and rounds fired into the sky.

In the drone-hunted border villages of Sumy, Ukraine’s White Angels race to evacuate the elderly and infirm before Russia’s advance swallows them whole. Each mission is a gamble against drones, artillery, and the seconds civilians hesitate to leave their homes.

In his latest photo essay, journalist and photographer Christopher Skelly steps inside Kyiv’s most perilous moments, capturing the men and women who hold the city together as missiles and drones fall from the night sky. His images reveal not only the scale of destruction, but the unwavering resolve of those who run toward the danger.

By Robert Spangle

On Ukraine’s eastern front, drones have erased the boundary between front and rear. The New No-Man’s-Land follows the DaVinci Wolves medics as they risk everything to rescue the wounded from the “Grey Zone” — a place under constant Russian surveillance where survival depends on escaping, not fighting.

By Louis Lemaire-Sicre

As night falls over the abandoned villages of eastern Ukraine, a Ukrainian drone team readies their “Vampire,” a modified hexacopter capable of long-range strikes and resupply missions. Russian troops have given it a name drawn from Slavic folklore — Baba-Yaha, the dread crone. In the open steppe, where light disappears and artillery is constant, this legend has returned in the shape of a machine.

By Robert Spangle

Drawn from prison cells and thrown into Ukraine’s bloodiest battles, the men of Squall fight at the most dangerous points on the Eastern Front — assaulting trenches, holding ground under fire, and seeking redemption in war.

By Louis Lemaire-Sicre

The car speeds headlong past the last checkpoint. The plains of Donbas stretch out silently. The blur of yellow sunflower fields reflects the blazing sun. Columns of smoke quiver in the dry air, faint scars poorly stitched into a flat sky. The road is deserted. The front is close, and danger outruns the front.

On the April 23 2025 the General Command of the Internal Security Forces (ISF) in North and East Syria has announced the successful conclusion of a six-day, wide-scale security operation in al-Hol Camp.

By Robert Spangle

Bouncing in the back of a Land Cruiser speeding towards the trench lines of Ukraines Eastern front Martin is the first soldier I've met in 3 years here without a nickname. It’s his first day on the front, and he is headed to the first line of trenches. At 5’ 4’’ with rimless glasses fogging in the cold, I expect it wont be long before he is given one. 

By Hollie McKay

Darfur, Sudan, remains engulfed in one of the world's most devastating and neglected humanitarian crises. The conflict, rooted in ethnic and political divides, has spiraled into brutal violence where Arab militias, backed and armed by foreign countries like the UAE, have targeted African communities with unimaginable cruelty. Entire villages are decimated, leaving scorched landscapes and mass graves.

Photos from a recent trip to Haiti: Capturing Gang Violence and Daily Life Amid Crisis

By Dylan Roberts