Viktor Mikhalev: The Ukrainian smith, who turns guns and ammunition into 'flowers of war'

Viktor Mikhalev has been transforming weapons and ammunition into works of art since the war began. He got the idea for the project after a friend gave him some broken machine guns and he's been making ‘flowers of war’ ever since

|Mar 09, 2023, 13:35:22 IST

A blacksmith in the Russian-controlled eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk is practically beating swords into ploughshares, and turning one man's trash into treasures. Viktor Mikhalev takes weapons and ammunition and produces what he calls the flowers of war.

Mikhalev, who trained as a welder, lives and works in a house whose fence and door are decorated with forged flowers and grapes. In his workshop are piles of half-burnt machine guns and shells from the war's front line. Friends and acquaintances bring them as raw material for his art.

Donetsk, the centre of Ukraine's industrial heartland of the Donbas, has been engulfed by fighting ever since the Moscow-backed separatist rebellion erupted in April 2014, weeks after Russia's illegal annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula.

The Kremlin has made capturing the entire region a key goal of its invasion that began a year ago, and it illegally annexed Donetsk along with three other regions in eastern and southern Ukraine in September, declaring them part of Russia.[caption id="attachment_12263102" align="alignnone" width="640"]

Viktor Mikhalev works in a workshop in his house in Donetsk. AP[/caption]Fierce fighting has focused on the city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, and the city of Donetsk itself also has been frequently hit by shelling.

The smell of iron and paint permeates Mikhalev's workshop, also decorated from floor to ceiling with dozens of religious icons. He makes the art as a keepsake, a souvenir of the war in eastern Ukraine.