Children during an arts and crafts session at the orphanage. Kotovsk, December 9, 2016. Driving fast, Maxim Timotin jolts us along the pitted and potholed road to his old orphanage. The route is deserted except for a horse and cart, plodding through snow drifts toward the Moldovan border. Bitter frosts tear fresh scars into the tarmac each winter, but scars are often left neglected in rural Ukraine.
This home wasn’t that bad, Maxim says. The worst abuse was over by the time he was 11. “When I was very small, life there wasn’t so good. There were as many bad teachers as good ones. But I grew up and it became easier and easier for me,” he explains. “Until the fourth grade a teacher could beat us. But after that she stopped because we could hit her back.”
Timotin is skinny, pale and unkempt, but talks with a brash assertiveness that belies his 22 years. Born in 1994 in Odessa region, Ukraine’s south-western corner, the Soviet Union had collapsed just three years earlier. Gangsters fought gun battles in the streets as their oligarch bosses raced to strip apart and swallow state enterprises relinquished by communist Ukraine. To Timotin’s small-town parents, the future must have looked bleak and uncertain.
