Man calls photographers fascists and spray paints their Donbass war pictures in Moscow

A man spray painted pictures from the war in Ukraine's Donbass at Moscow's Sakharov Center, reported the center on its Facebook page.

The exhibition contained the photographs of Alexander Vasyukovich and Sergei Loiko - winners of the Pryamoy Vid competition.

The Sakharov Center said that it does not intend to restore the damaged work, attributing its decision to the inability of the exhibition's organizers to guarantee the safety of both the photographs on display and the visitors.

The attacker, who accused the photographers of being fascists, managed to escape, though the police tried to detain him.

He later identified himself as church artist Anton Belikov and put up a video of himself spray painting the photographs on social network VKontakte. He maintained that he would voluntary turn himself in for police questioning if necessary.

"War is, first and foremost, sorrow, suffering, and death. Photograph[s] give you a chance to see this. But there are people who are so poisoned by hatred in society that a public conversation about the tragedy of war is impossible," read the Sakharov Center's Facebook post.

On September 25, 2016, a Jock Sturges's exhibition titled Bez Smuscheniya in Moscow's Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography after Duma deputy Elena Mizulina and Russia's children's rights commissioner Anna Kuznetsova demanded that Sturges's photographs be evaluated for signs of child pornography. The next day, only journalists were granted access to the exhibition. However, an authorized person managed to enter alongside the journalists and pour urine over the photographs.