JACK LOSH | JOURNALIST

The prefab container is cool inside, its shelves packed with overpriced cans of Heineken, bags of tagliatelle, bottles of shampoo. A Kenyan cashier serves the customers – a Moroccan, a Rwandan and a Frenchman – just some of the nationalities living at this United Nations base, deployed deep in a rebel-held area of the Central African Republic (CAR). Taped to the door of this air-conditioned minimart is a poster, advertising a hotline to call if peacekeepers are suspected of raping or abusing civilians. NON! the poster reads. EXPLOITATION ET ABUS SEXUELS = CRIMES.

Full of expensive Western products, this small convenience store is only a hundred odd metres from a displaced persons camp that today houses some 55,000 people. For them, though, kept out by high walls and coils of concertina wire, the shop may as well be in Europe.

FULL STORY: Granta (November 2018)

It seemed that nothing could persuade Olga Rudenko to move; neither the collapse of communism, the outbreak of war, nor the shelling of her village.

She had lived in the Ukrainian hamlet since Leonid Brezhnev ruled from the Kremlin, riding out the collapse of the Soviet empire and the turmoil of its aftermath. Then, in 2014, after fighting erupted between government forces and Moscow-backed insurgents, she found herself just inside rebel-held territory, and on the front line.

Somehow, despite four years of artillery strikes, the falling shells missed her ramshackle smallholding. “We have a saying: ‘If you survive for three days, you become a guest of the war’,” she said when we met. That hospitality has now been withdrawn.

FULL STORY: The Times (October 2018)

It was not the hippo carcass that troubled the wildlife rangers the most. Nor were they especially surprised to uncover a cache of powerful assault rifles in this volatile region awash with uncontrolled arms.

The most unsettling find from their counter-poaching raid in Chinko, a vast wildlife reserve in the Central African Republic (CAR), was a handful of identity cards belonging to soldiers from Sudan's paramilitary forces – a discovery suggesting that Khartoum’s fighters are moonlighting as poachers hundreds of miles beyond its borders.

The Sudanese military and its auxiliaries are accused of committing war crimes that range from using scorched-earth tactics to attacking camps housing displaced civilians. The role of government-backed soldiers in the illicit wildlife trade, however, is less known. The evidence found deep in the Central African bush shines a light on the covert, cross-border poaching forays launched by Sudanese militiamen to profit from the demand for bush meat, ivory and traditional Chinese medicine.

FULL STORY: The National (October 2018)

Five days after she fell into a coma, Oksana Nezhalskaya came to. Dazed, she felt her body throb with pain. The room was hot. A doctor leaned in and told her she had been injured by an exploding landmine.

Nezhalskaya’s gaze shifted from the doctor’s eyes. She looked down her body, past her shrapnel-scarred arms. Only then did she notice that her right leg was missing.

Within four months, her left leg would be gone, too.

Since war broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the vast quantities of landmines and unexploded ordnance that litter large tracts of the countryside have killed more than 600 people. At least 1,000 have suffered serious, life-altering injuries like Nezhalskaya.

No one really knows the extent of contamination, but the Ukrainian defense ministry has said it estimates around 16,000 square kilometers are strewn with land-mines, trip wires and booby traps. While some experts say this figure is excessive, all agree defusing the region poses an immense long-term challenge.

“There is no doubt that Ukraine is one of the most mine-affected countries in the world,” says Yuri Shahramanyan, program manager for HALO Trust de-miners in the region.

Even if fighting were to stop tomorrow, it would take decades to make the region safe again.

FULL STORY: Politico (September 2018)

At his fortified villa in the devastated, contested diamond-mining town of Bria, rebel commander Ibrahim Alawad is puffing cigarettes between sips of thick black coffee, eager to talk revolution and religion, and tell me about his education at Cambridge University, a world away from this land torn apart by civil war.

The Central African Republic (CAR) lies in a bad neighbourhood. To the north are the insurgency-prone desert states of Chad and Sudan. Nasty conflicts also blight other bordering countries – Cameroon, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since independence in 1960, a string of despots have misruled this sparsely populated former French colony, a landlocked territory three times bigger than the UK.

Despite its plentiful diamonds, CAR’s state coffers have been stripped to leave an economy smaller than the Isle of Wight’s. Five years ago, this backwater came to the world’s attention when it descended into a brutal civil war. An alliance of several Muslim-led groups calling themselves the Séléka staged a violent coup, ousting CAR’s ageing, corrupt leader François Bozizé. In response, Christian communities formed rival militias known as the Anti-Balaka, which carried out ethnic cleansing of Muslim communities, effectively partitioning CAR. The death toll ran into the thousands.

A ceasefire and international military intervention helped bring a lull and relatively peaceful elections followed in early 2016, with a new president sworn in, Faustin-Archange Touadéra, a former mathematics lecturer from the country’s Christian majority. Some even dared to hope of a fresh start.

But today CAR is again in a state of anarchy. Violence spread throughout the country as the Séléka coalition split into factions, terrorising civilian communities with impunity. More than half the population of 4.5 million depend on aid. But unrest is paralysing efforts to reach the most vulnerable.

FULL STORY: The Telegraph Magazine (August 2018)

There are new guests at the ruined palace where Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa once held court. During his rule over the Central African Republic in the 1970s, Bokassa used a year’s worth of development aid to stage an extravagant coronation, and he personally oversaw the torture of prisoners. He fed some to his pet crocodiles and lions.

But the French government that helped install Bokassa in 1966 ousted him in 1979, deploying paratroopers to prevent any countercoup. Now, four decades later, it is Russian soldiers who mill around this crumbling estate in Berengo—and the shifting power dynamic is raising concerns in the West. President Vladimir Putin is pushing into Africa, forging new partnerships and rekindling Cold War–era alliances. “There will be a battle for Africa,” says Evgeny Korendyasov, head of Russian-African studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, “and it will grow.”

Russia’s economy is in long-term decline, and its reach has diminished since the Soviet era. So the Kremlin is using ­diplomatic, economic and military tools to prospect for political influence and new markets in Africa—signing multibillion-dollar arms deals, bidding for big construction projects, boosting space communications, exploiting hydrocarbon reserves and launching publicized military interventions, alongside more clandestine operations.

“The Russians want to implant themselves in the Central African Republic so they have an axis of influence through Sudan in the north and southwards into Angola,” says a senior United Nations security official in Bangui, CAR’s capital, who requested anonymity as he wasn’t authorized to speak with the media. “The French are hated as the old colonial power. American troops have left. It’s a free country for the taking.”

FULL STORY: Newsweek (August 2018)

Deep in the heart of Africa, a dedicated group of rangers patrol the Chinko nature reserve. In baking equatorial heat, they are weighed down with body armour and camouflage fatigues. Beads of sweat run down their faces; mosquitos whine. The men keep watch over a vast patchwork of savanna and rainforest in the Central African Republic – a country mired in civil strife and one of the many frontlines of a poaching war that spans the continent and reaches across the globe.

Chinko’s rangers are the guardians of an ecosystem that is home to a rich variety of species. These include buffalos, chimpanzees, forest elephants, leopards, lions and the icon of this park, the giant eland – an imposing antelope.

With no permanent human settlement, the land around the Chinko river basin offers one of the largest intact wildernesses in central Africa. But these rangers face an array of dangers: poachers, rebel militants, cattle herders, diamond miners. All of these intruders are well-armed and determined to rip out the resources from this remote sanctuary.

FULL STORY: The Guardian (August 2018)

Five years ago, when Hassan was 11, militiamen killed his father not far from his home in Kaga Bandoro, a small, cattle-trading town in the Central African Republic, he says. Full of sadness and anger, the boy, a member of the country’s disenfranchised Muslim minority, didn’t believe the courts would deliver justice. The only thing he trusted, he says, was a Kalashnikov.

So, not long after his father’s death, Hassan (identified with a pseudonym for security concerns) joined the Séléka alliance of rebels, a coalition of local and foreign fighters in the civil war, he says. The largely Muslim group seized large swaths of the country in 2013, triggering reprisals from mostly Christian militias called the anti-balaka.

His first job: working as a bodyguard for a commander whose armed group was terrorizing towns across this Texas-sized country, sandwiched between Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Three months later, Hassan says, he was promoted to lieutenant and put in charge of about 50 people, including 10 other children. “At the beginning, I was scared,” he says. “But later, I lost this fear. I got used to holding a gun.”

The rebels also tasked him with recruiting more children, offering him sporadic and meager rewards. “I liked my work,” he says. “On special holidays, I would be given cigarettes and money.”

But as the war raged on, supplies dwindled, and the death toll mounted on both sides. Most nights, he and his platoon slept in the bush. While on guard duty, he says, he shot civilians if they didn’t listen to his commands and stop. “I saw a lot of blood,” he says. “I would be happy after attacking a town. But this feeling went away, and I became scared when I realized that my enemy would come back.”

Today, that bloodshed continues. After a tentative lull in early 2016, the civil war began raging again later that year. The rebel alliance has fragmented into rival factions that fight over mineral resources and trade routes across the Central African Republic. Militias are bolstering their ranks with more kids, as a United Nations–led task force struggles to help thousands of former child soldiers reintegrate into society…

FULL STORY: Newsweek (June 2018)

DRUZHKIVKA, Ukraine — Volodymyr Semistyaga was wading through documents in the archives of Luhansk University when the stomp of boots interrupted his reading. A group of pro-Russian separatists knocked him down, pulled a sack over his head and dragged him from the building.

It was June 2014 and fighting between Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed insurgent groups in eastern Ukraine was intensifying. Separatists had claimed independence in the so-called People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk. Increasingly, people were going missing as neighbors turned on one another.

Semistyaga — one of several university professors to face arrest when rebels purged the faculty — was taken to a dank basement in central Luhansk, where he encountered two other prisoners: teenage girls, dressed only in underwear. A soldier nicknamed Bison ran the detention facility, alongside a nurse called Katya. The pair brandished two large blades and threatened to skin the captives’ hands and arms, then scalp them.

The violence began after Semistyaga was transferred to a nearby cell two hours later. “I heard the girls screaming as the guards raped them,” he said. “This happened every night for the next three weeks, on and off from dusk till dawn.

The forgotten conflict on Europe’s doorstep — which began four years ago this month — has killed more than 10,000 and displaced 2 million more. Ukraine’s army continues to fight Russian-backed separatists over an unmoving no-man’s land, with no real end in sight.

Shelling and explosions are the most conspicuous signs of the ongoing war. But the testimonies of Semistyaga and many others point to unseen violence inflicted on those caught up in the conflict. Civilians in Ukraine’s lawless eastern regions have been subjected to sexual violence at the hands of Russian-led forces and Ukrainian government troops as both sides attempt to stamp out dissent.

Abuse is prevalent but corruption, impunity and sub-standard legislation are denying justice to survivors. U.N. human rights monitors say the proliferation of these incidents in eastern Ukraine could amount to war crimes, and highlight “prevailing impunity for human rights violations and abuses.”

“This is partly due to the fact that the conflict is ongoing and that a part of Ukraine’s territory remains under the control of armed groups,” says the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in a report. “The impunity also reflects a systemic decades-old challenge to ensure accountability, as well as the failure to bring those responsible from one’s own ranks to account.”

FULL STORY: Politico (April 2018)

KAGA-BANDORO, Central African Republic — On a dirt track beneath a fierce sun, three U.N. peacekeepers guard the dividing line.

On one side of a small bridge lies the rebel stronghold, where gunmen freely roam. On the other is a designated “arms-free zone” on Kaga-Bandoro’s outskirts — a sliver of territory where the “blue helmets” keep the peace and thousands of displaced people shelter around a desolate airstrip.

Years of rebellion, mismanagement and sectarian violence have divided this dusty cattle-trading town and roiled the rest of the Central African Republic, leaving the country’s Western-backed government toothless and unable to exert much authority beyond the capital, Bangui. In the absence of an effective government, more than a dozen armed groups and a multitude of local militias have usurped control of about 80 percent of the impoverished former French colony. Hundreds of thousands have been uprooted from their homes, and more than half of the population is in need of humanitarian aid.

Kaga-Bandoro has, for years, shunned central authority. But even in this anarchic space, rebels here and elsewhere throughout the country are providing some show of statehood. The ruling militants run customs, charge taxes, give out fines and operate their own gendarmes.

FULL STORY: The Washington Post (March 2018)

The teacher promised he was not like the others. On the first day of term, he told pupils that he was a caring family man and would not pressurise them to have sex with him.

“He wrote his number on the board and said we could call him any time if we needed help,” said Néville, 14, who is trying to concentrate on getting an education in the Central African Republic (CAR) while living through a brutal civil war.

Néville’s classmate, a schoolgirl aged 13, later called their middle-aged teacher about a homework assignment but was distressed when he demanded sex. When she refused, the teacher withheld her marks and banned her from class.

A year on, against the backdrop of intensifying armed conflict, Néville has joined forces with other students to battle against a sex-for-grades scandal that blights CAR’s education system. Schoolchildren have a nickname for such a predatory practice: sexually transmitted grades.

FULL STORY: The Times (March 2016)

As wind whips through an open cockpit, the bush plane banks eastward above the red earth of central Africa. Columns of black smoke tower on the horizon—the calling card of armed cattle herders. The dry season is their time to escape the arid Sahel in search of pasture for their enormous droves—burning forest and poaching wildlife along the way. But they are not the only intruders. A bullet hole in the plane’s wing from a guerrilla’s potshot is a reminder that the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) still operates in these badlands, where war is again intensifying. The pilot, Cédric Ganière, peers into the hot, darkening haze. “There is nothing romantic about this,” he says. “They are destroying a country that isn’t theirs. The fox is in the middle of the chickens. It is just kill, kill, kill.”

This is the front line in the battle to save Chinko—one of the largest intact wildernesses in the heart of Africa. The reserve, deep in a remote corner of the war-torn Central African Republic (CAR), lies near borders with Congo and South Sudan. Sitting on an ancient volcanic plateau, the area supports an extraordinary mix of species thanks to a fusion of Congolian rainforest and wooded savannah, nourished by underground wells that feed an expansive network of waterways. This patchwork has created a vital paradise, home to hundreds of bird species and imperiled populations of megafauna—lion and leopard, chimpanzee and antelope, hippo and buffalo, wild dog and golden cat. Devoid of human habitation, it is one of the last holdouts for the country’s endangered elephant population.

But this enchanted Eden is under siege. A protracted civil war is escalating in the region—a brutal and forgotten conflict that has prompted warnings of genocide from the UN. Militarized poacher units have plundered the park to feed the lucrative, insatiable demand for bushmeat, ivory, animal skin, and traditional medicine. Miners illegally dredge riverbeds for diamonds and gold. And the slash-and-burn tactics of nomadic herders, who kill game to supplement their meager rations and salary, threaten a fragile ecosystem.

Within this maelstrom, a group of conservationists is fighting to protect Chinko. Leading this resistance is David Simpson, a charismatic 30-year-old and the park’s manager. His hunger for adventure led him to quit his factory job in the United Kingdom and move to the wilds of central Africa to work for a big-game hunting firm before transforming the area into a unique sanctuary.

Covering an area almost twice the size of Yellowstone, Chinko has since become a mini-state within a failed nation-state. The biggest employer outside the capital of Bangui, Chinko hires hundreds of locals (including reformed poachers) as rangers, builders, farmers, mechanics, and medics. But the park’s survival hangs on the fate of a chronically unstable region. Renewed conflict could wipe out everything Simpson and his cadre are dedicated to protecting.

FULL STORY: VICE Magazine (April 2018)

KIEV — At sunset, on the outskirts of Kiev, Anton lights a cigarette and looks out from his balcony, hundreds of miles from war, from home, from love.

Life for this middle-aged, soft-spoken doctor had become unbearable in his hometown of Donetsk, a frontline city held by Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine. His decision to leave, however, was not taken lightly — it meant abandoning his long-term partner.

Nor would fleeing the warzone lead him to safe ground.

Anton is among 1.6 million Ukrainians uprooted by war to other parts of the country. As the conflict grinds through its fourth vicious winter, the state is failing these disenfranchised citizens, who face poverty, prejudice and perplexing levels of bureaucracy.

Anton is also a gay man living in a former Soviet nation where homophobia flourishes. Internally displaced people (IDPs) already face stigma here; it is intensified when their sexuality or gender identity doesn’t match the mainstream.

FULL STORY: Politico (December 2017)

MYRNA DOLYNA, Ukraine — In an overgrown minefield, Yulia Boiko kneels down and starts gardening. Years of war have caused weeds to grow high in the abandoned croplands of eastern Ukraine. Clad in flak jacket and face mask, she uses shears to snip back sun-scorched scrub, removing vegetation one careful inch at a time to avoid hidden tripwires.

A small patch of earth is eventually exposed. Boiko stands up, then scans the ground with her metal detector to ensure it is clear. She repeats the painstaking process — one pace farther into a 600-acre field where wheat and sunflowers once grew.

FULL STORY: Washington Post  (November 2017)

The wolf saved Gayde Rizaeva from the rapists but could not protect her from the horror she was about to witness.

In July 2014, Rizaeva, a mother in her early 30s, was delivering supplies to Ukrainian forces in the country’s restive east when she and three companions were captured by pro-Russian separatists. The militants seized the group—a journalist, a priest, Rizaeva and their driver—and took them to a nearby base, where they locked them up in a makeshift jail. Rizaeva—four months pregnant—says Chechen soldiers arrived and began beating the captives with their boots, fists and rifle butts. She says she was hit so hard that she miscarried.

As the men tossed her across the room, they noticed a tattoo of a wolf on her back. The animal is revered in Chechnya, and the men stopped attacking her. “They asked me if I was from Chechnya,” says Rizaeva, a Crimean Tartar who had fled during Russia’s annexation of her homeland in 2014. “I said no, but they respected me for having this she-wolf and being a Muslim woman.”

They decided to spare her from further abuse, but Rizaeva says she was forced to watch her captors strip two male prisoners, beat them and then rape them with batons. “I kept fainting,” she recalls. “But every time I came to, the attack was continuing.”

Since it began more than three years ago, the war in eastern Ukraine has killed more than 10,000 people. Today, government forces continue to clash with Russian-backed separatists along a static front line, and Chechen troops loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov—the country’s strongman leader and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin—have fought alongside the latter.

The war has triggered sexual violence on both sides—and in almost all cases, no one is punishing the perpetrators. Survivors are gradually coming forward, offering evidence of abuse, forced prostitution, sexual slavery, mutilation and rape in secret detention centers on the front lines. Human rights monitors have recorded hundreds of cases of sexual violence and suspect many more go unreported due to fear of reprisals, cultural stigma, trauma and a weak justice system, among other reasons.

FULL STORY: Newsweek (November 2017)

Politico: Ukraine’s fishermen (October 2017)

The Independent: Putin’s Peacekeepers (September 2017)

Politico: Trauma in Ukraine (September 2017)

Witness: Solitude (September 2017)

BBC World Service: I was tortured (July 2017)

The Washington Post: Hundreds missing (June 2017)

The Sunday Times Magazine: POWs (June 2017)

The Washington Post:: Soviet TV (June 2017)

Witness: Rising risks in journalism (June 2017)

Newsweek: Hearts and Binds (April 2017)

The Guardian: Frontline dentists (Feb 2017)

The Washington Post: Right Sector (Feb 2017)

The Independent: Trauma (Jan 2017)

The Telegraph: Winter in Donbas (Dec 2016)

Coda Story: War of words. viral videos (Dec 2016) 

The Telegraph: Organ harvesting (Nov 2016)

Guardian Weekend: Rebel world cup (Oct 2016)

Foreign Policy: Donbas warlords (Oct 2016)

Slate + Roads and Kingdoms: Carpathians (Oct 2016)

The Telegraph: Motorola (Oct 2016)

Washington Post: Black market (Oct 2016)

Washington Post: New purge (Oct 2016)

The Telegraph: Back to school (Sept 2016)

The Times: LNR purge (Sept 2016)

The Times: Zaitseve (Aug 2016)

Washington Post: Independence Day (Aug 2016)

Washington Post: Opera singer killed (July 2016)

The Independent: Alt World Cup (June 2016)

Washington Post: Environmental disaster June 2016)

VICE News: Avdiivka (April 2016)

The Times: Prom Zone (April 2016)

NPR: Landmines (April 2016)

The Guardian: Landmines (April 2016)

VICE News: Savchenko jailed (March 2016)

VICE News: Palaces of Propaganda (March 2016)

VICE News: Smugglers (Feb 2016)

PRI: Night Wolves radio interview (Feb 2015)

VICE News: Paranoia and Purges (Feb 2016)

The Guardian Weekend Magazine: The Night Wolves (Jan 2016)

The Guardian Documentary: The Night Wolves (Jan 2016)

The Times: 'Putin reinforces rebels' (Dec 2015)

Indy on Sunday: Soviet nostalgia (Dec 2015)

VICE News: ISIS goes shopping? (Dec 2015)

Indy on Sunday: UN lifeline runs out (Nov 2015)

VICE News: Ukraine’s Forgotten War (Nov 2015)

The Times: Defections (Nov 2015)

VICE News: Crimea goes dark (Nov 2015)

The Times: Underfed, under attack (Nov 2015)

The Times: Clashes at airport (Nov 2015)

The Times : Fighting erupts along front (Nov 2015)

The Guardian: Rebels grow restless (Nov 2015)

VICE News: Ammo dump dispatch (Oct 2015)

The Guardian: Ammo dump explosion (Oct 2015)

VICE News: Fraud & Chewie's arrest mar elections (Oct 2015) 

Indy on Sunday: Corruption fears cloud elections (Oct 2015)

The Guardian: Ukraine rebels expel MSF (Oct 2015)

The Independent: Maidan poster girl to clean up Odessa (Oct 2015)

The Independent: Ukraine: the battle for the truth (August 2015)

Indy on Sunday: Red tape of war (August 2015)

VICE News: Independence Day (August 2015)

The Independent: Both sides hiding weapons (August 2015) 

VICE News: Ukraine's mystery battle (August 2015)

The Guardian: Rebels overhaul education (August 2015)

VICE News: The Chechen battling Russia (August 2015)

The Times: From Our Correspondent (August 2015)

The Guardian: United by separatist derby (August 2015)

The Times: Militia ‘breaching ceasefire’ (August 2015)

VICE News: The Holdouts (July 2015)

The Independent: MH17 (2) (July 2015)

The Independent: MH17 (1) (July 2015)

VICE News: The Cossacks (July 2015)

The Times: Rebels beg Russia for more guns (July 2015)

VICE News: Textbooks and assault rifles (July 2015)

Mail Online: Haunted by MH17 victim (July 2015)

The Times: Rebels rewrite history books (July 2015)

VICE News: Blokpost (July 2015)