Leeza, 10, offers a smile as she waits in freezing temperatures to board a bus that will evacuate her and others from the besieged city of Mikolaiv, Ukraine.

A week after Russia invaded Ukraine, photojournalist Maranie Rae Staab traveled to Moldova on the Ukrainian border and to the southern Ukrainian cities of Odessa and Mykolaiv. Her intention with this virtual exhibition is to share the experiences of those she has met and to give us an intimate perspective of what is happening on the ground. While the largest number of refugees fled to Poland, the largest number per capita arrived at the border in Moldova.

Fluent Virtual exhibition until May 31, 2022

The small, poor but generous country of less than 3 million people received more than 421,000 people in mid-April. Maranie Rae Staab is a freelance photographer, videographer and journalist. Her work focuses on issues of human rights and social justice, social movements, displacement and the impacts of conflict on individuals and society.

Her work has taken her around the world, many times, and at ArtRage we had the pleasure of meeting her in 2019 during her final semester in the Multimedia, Photography and Design (MPD) program at Newhouse School of Syracuse University Public Communications. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)