British photographer Christopher Nunn suffered a serious eye injury after being caught up in a mortar attack in the war-stricken city of Avdiyivka on the evening of Feb. 2. Ukrainian doctors are now fighting to save his injured eye.
Nunn suffered multiple facial wounds from shrapnel, including a severe injury to the left eye, and an injury to the right eyelid, according to Alexandr Tolubayev, the deputy chief of the hospital in the city of Dnipro to which Nunn was evacuated.
Writing on his Facebook page, Tolubayev also said Nunn had suffered wounds to his chest. The doctor said Nunn had sustained the injuries as he stood next to a window in a house in Avdiyivka during a mortar attack.
“One of his eyes was seriously injured, the eyelid of the other damaged,” the chief doctor of the hospital, Serhiy Ryzhenko, told Ukrainian television’s 112 TV Channel. He said doctors now are trying to save Nunn’s eye, although his medical state is not critical.
Nunn tweeted “I am alive” on the morning of Feb. 3.
After being injured, Nunn was transported to a mobile field hospital, and then to the ophthalmology department of the Mechnykova hospital in the city of Dnipro early in the morning of Feb. 3.
Nunn, from Yorkshire in the UK, works for newspapers and magazines in Europe and Britain.
“My time is currently divided between England and Ukraine,” he wrote recently on his personal website. His website features pictures from Ukraine taken since 2013.
Nunn’s work has appeared on the pages of The New Yorker, the Financial Times Weekend Magazine, Le Monde, Morgenbladet, The Telegraph, Esquire, and others.
The city of Avdiyivka, some 700 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, has been under severe shelling since Jan. 29 in an escalation of Russia’s war against Ukraine in the Donbas. Around 10 people – Ukrainian soldiers and locals – have been killed in Avdiyivka since the fighting flared up.
Besides Nunn, two other people were wounded in the shelling on Feb. 2 – a local citizen and an emergency services worker.
Apart from that, two people were killed – a local citizen and an ambulance driver. The ambulance was hit by a shell blast, killing the 24-year-old driver instantly.
