Since March 13, photojournalist Max Levin could no longer be reached. He went to film the warfare in the northern part of the Kyiv region by his own car, which he had left near the village of Huta-Mezhyhirska and set off for the village of Moschun. At 11:23, the last message was delivered from his phone, then warfare intensified in the area where Max was working. His body was found with a gunshot wound near the village of Huta-Mezhyhirska on April 1, after the Kyiv region had been liberated from Russian occupiers.
Max Levin was working as a photo correspondent and documentarian for the numerous Ukrainian and foreign media. He cooperated with such agencies as Reuters, BBC, TRT World, Associated Press, Hromadske. His photographs had been published in the Wall Street Journal, TIME, Breaking News Poland, EU AGENDA, World news, The Moscow Time, Correspondent.net, ELLE, TV-24, Radio Bulgaria, Ukraine Crisis Media center, Vatican News, and RFE/RL.
In 2013-2014, Max Levin covered the Revolution of Dignity.
Apart from journalistic works, he had created dozens of photo and video projects for humanitarian organizations, i.e., WHO, UN, UNICEF, OSCE, UN Women.
“For all these years we have been thinking of the war as something that has to be repented about and be fenced off by putting candles in a church”, Max Levin said in 2019. “We haven’t fully experienced it. People can’t understand what war is, if they dissociate themselves from it and don’t want to listen to it.”
Levin had been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014. Specifically, he was among those who documented the battles for Ilovaisk and succeeded in getting out alive from the Ilovaisk encirclement. Most of his documentary projects were connected to the war in Ukraine.
In 2014, together with his colleague Markiian Lyseiko, Levin established AFTERILOVAISK – a project aimed at preserving the memory and rethinking the tragic events of August 2014 by the military, their families, and Ukrainian society in general.
“Each Ukrainian photographer has a dream of taking the photo that would stop the war”, Max Levin used to say.
On April 3, 2022, Max Levin was awarded posthumously the Third-Class Order for Courage for his personal courage and devotion in covering the Russian aggression by the decree of the President of Ukraine.
In June 2022, Reporters Without Borders released the results of their investigation into the death of Maks Levin. The information and evidence indicate that the Russian military executed the Ukrainian journalist.
