A photo taken by a Ukrainian photojournalist showing a woman wounded in a Russian missile strike is among the winners of the 2026 World Press Photo contest.
The photo, titled “Russian Attack on Kyiv”, shows 65-year-old Valeria Syniuk sitting covered in blood near her badly damaged home following strikes on the Ukrainian capital on April 24 last year.
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According to the photograph description on the World Press Photo website, Syniuk had been asleep when a Russian missile destroyed the building opposite hers in what was one of the deadliest attacks on Kyiv since Moscow’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The image, which is among seven winners in the Europe category, was taken by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Evgeniy Maloletka, a Ukrainian war photographer, journalist and filmmaker.
Maloletka has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014 – years before Russia’s full-scale invasion, at a time when the conflict was confined mostly to Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and was fought between Ukrainian forces and Russian-backed separatists.
ISW Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 29, 2026
Maloletka has received numerous awards from countries around the world throughout his career, including several for his work on the 2022 siege of the city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine.
The Ukrainian journalist co-created the Academy Award-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, which covered the Russian military’s brutal siege of the city.
Maloletka also won the 2023 iteration of the World Press Photo of the Year with another image depicting the toll on civilians of the war in Ukraine.
That image, taken less than two weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion, showed wounded 32-year-old Iryna Kalinina being carried from a maternity hospital that was damaged during Russian attacks on Mariupol.
Both Kalinina and her unborn child died from their wounds shortly after the photo was taken.
Another of the seven winners in this year’s Europe category also depicted the war in Ukraine, with US photographer David Guttenfelder’s “Drone Wars” showing a Ukrainian soldier preparing FPV drones for use in attack missions on Russian troop positions.
World Press Photo, a non-profit organization, was founded in the Netherlands in 1955 and says it “champions the power of photojournalism and documentary photography to deepen understanding of the world’s complexities, promote dialogue, and inspire action.”
The 42 winning photos of its 2026 contest were chosen from a pool of almost 60,000 submissions from more than 3,700 photographers by an independent jury “based on visual excellence, storytelling approach, and commitment to diversity,” according to World Press Photo.
The overall winner of the coveted Photo of the Year award is set to be announced by the organization on April 23.
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