Odesa rescuers open the Wall of Unbreakable

The "Wall of Unbreakability" street art featuring the faces of rescuers who are eliminating the consequences of Russian attacks was unveiled in Odesa by the Main Directorate of the State Emergency Service.

The three-meter-wide, 1.8-meter-high wall combines street art and documentary photography and contains several hundred photos.

Half of them are the faces of rescuers, taken directly at the sites of enemy drones or missiles, while fighting fires and clearing rubble. The goal of the project is to show that behind every dry statistic of fires extinguished or people rescued are real people.

"Behind every dry number of eliminations and rescues, but behind every number we have a person who is also in pain, but who is moving forward. This wall is the border between destruction and salvation. It is in the very center of Odesa so that the whole city can see who comes first. These photos are not staged, but real life, real work. Four years of war means every day our units have been on the move, and I thank all the rescuers who have been working hard over the years and saving people," Denys Platonov, head of the Main Directorate of the State Emergency Service in Odesa Oblast, told Intent.

He also said that over the past four years, five rescuers have been killed and 15 others injured while on duty.

"We responded to a call - a fire in a private house after a hit. We started to work and then the Russians hit us a second time with a ballistic missile. No one warned us, or maybe they did, but there was such chaos that we might not have heard. At first I thought the gas pipeline had exploded and only then realized it was a second strike. Then two of our employees were killed, and I was wounded, and another employee was wounded," said Artem Avgustynovych, the unit commander, about one of his incidents.

Artem Avgustynovych joined the SES in 2020 and, after training in Vinnytsia, asked to serve in Odesa and has been serving in the city ever since.

Кирило Бойко