A Russian refugee holds up a sign condemning the Russian invasion. “She fled to Yerevan, Armenia, where it was possible to have this demonstration,” says photographer Fin DePencier. “She told me ‘This is the protest that was supposed to happen in Moscow’.”
Fin dePencier is a Canadian journalist, photographer, and documentarian based in Yerevan, Armenia. His work is regularly featured in Armenian outlet Zartonk Media, which produced his first documentary about the use of white phosphorus in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. DePencier is also an author at Palladium Magazine and C2C Journal, where he has published dispatches for over the last two years in Lebanon, Kazakhstan, and most recently Ukraine.
In the early hours of February 24th 2022, dePencier was on a train just outside Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkiv, when the Russian invasion began. DePencier spent the first two weeks of the war in Ukraine and created a short documentary for CTV's W5 program about his experience. He is now producing a documentary about the battle for Kharkiv directed by Dutch journalist Daphne Wesdorp.