It only took three words to turn her world upside down. The message read: “Maks is missing.”
Inna Varenytsia is an experienced photographer who has been covering the war in Ukraine since it began in 2014, so she has already come across more missing person cases than she can count.
But that message stopped her cold because Maks Levin is the father of her child, 2-year-old Levko.
ADVERTISEMENT
He is another celebrated war photographer and documentarian, who, just like Inna, had dedicated his entire life to his profession.
Maks, 40, was last heard from on March 13, just a day after Levko’s second birthday. He reportedly told friends and colleagues that he was going to photograph the fighting that was taking place in the Russian-occupied Vyshgorod district, just north of Kyiv. Shortly afterwards, his car was found near Guta village, just 100 miles away from Gorenka, where Fox News producer Oleksandra Kuvshynova and cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski were killed by Russian artillery earlier this month.
Since then, Inna has dedicated herself entirely to finding Maks. She told The Daily Beast she was doing everything she thinks he would have done had she gone missing: scouring missing person pages online, calling every contact she has who knows him, reaching out to rescue organizations and hospitals, and even trying to get in touch with Russian military officials—in case he has been captured and taken as a prisoner.
“Back in 2014 and 2015, it was possible for local commanders of fighting sides to agree and swap their prisoners, but this time everything is different,” Inna told The Daily Beast. “There are signs Maks might have been taken by the Russian 106th Guards Airborne division. The more we speak with people, the more times we hear the advice to reach out to the Russian Federal Security Service… that they would know [where he is],” Inna said. “But we are struggling to get in touch with them.”
So far, Inna’s efforts, along with the work of other colleagues and family members who are trying to find him, have not borne fruit.
“We think he left the car and walked towards the village. He always takes risks, sometimes I had to stop him because it was too dangerous,” Markiian Lyseiko, Maks’ best friend, who has been working with Inna to try and find the journalist, told The Daily Beast. “I think he believed that to photograph the war well, he had to be next to a soldier who was fighting.”
Inna was not surprised that Maks, who is a father to four children, was out covering the most dangerous parts of Kyiv’s outskirts that day. In fact, she had first met Maks in war-torn Donbas in 2016, when she was photographing the conflict for the Associated Press and he was reporting for Reuters.
Their personal relationship was complicated—they split when Inna was pregnant, then lived together again—but when it came to protecting their baby Levko, they were always on the same page. They shared a devotion to journalism, and this particular story, the war in Ukraine, was the story of their life.
Since 2014, Maks had continued to document hostilities in Donbas, even when it wasn’t being covered as frequently in the mainstream news. Inna herself is an unstoppable reporter, who had once gone to photograph soldiers in the trenches of Donbas while seven months pregnant, unbeknownst to her employer at the time.
Inna speaks about Maks with nothing but the utmost respect: “Maks has never been a part of his stories, he simply shows the raw truth, he allows his characters to open up to him,” she said, avoiding referring to him in the past tense.
Having interviewed countless families looking for their disappeared loved ones over the years, Inna is all too aware that the most likely opportunity for a prisoner swap is in the first few days after a person is taken. So naturally, her anxiety is growing every day Maks remains missing.
Too many journalists like Maks have gone missing over the course of the month-long war in Ukraine. Others have wound up dead, including 42-year-old Russian reporter Oksana Baulina, who was killed by shelling in Kyiv while reporting for the independent news site The Insider this week.
“I assigned her, she was eager to report from Kyiv, tell our readers about more than 20,000 Russian soldiers being surrounded and desperate,” The Insider’s editor, Timur Olevsky, told The Daily Beast. “It looks like Russian commanders have been ordered to fire at journalists—that the word PRESS is now a target, as if somebody does not want evidence to leak of their war crimes.”
Inna sobbed for a brief moment on Wednesday, while she was telling The Daily Beast about how the war has ruined her life.
“As soon as we heard that Russian forces had invaded the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, I put my father, my mother… on the train to Kyiv together with my baby, then I came back to say goodbye to our home. I remember I was screaming in pain,” Inna said. Her room faced a nearby forest, and she always liked the view. “Russian forces fired from that forest, they ruined our entire street of multistory buildings.”
When the war reached Kyiv, Maks had moved Inna’s parents and their little son Leo to a safer place in the western Ukrainian city of Kamianets-Podilskyi. “He spent two days with our baby on Feb. 25 and 26, then he returned to cover the fighting in Kyiv’s outskirts,” Inna said. “But I cannot even think of a safe place anymore, where one can peacefully sleep—as soon as you cross the Ukraine border, you are in danger.”
Despite the trauma of the war, Inna is not planning to give up her search for Maks or her resolve to keep fighting the invasion the best way she knows how—as a journalist.
“People fight for their homes with bare hands, they would fight with a fork if they have to. Everybody is a combatant in Ukraine today,” she told The Daily Beast. “I am sure that for as long as we have not seen his dead body, there is hope he is alive and captured by the Russian military… I still hope we’ll find Maks and he will answer many of our questions himself.”
