I am pleased to open an exhibition featuring this year’s winners of the Annual Andrei Stenin International Photo Contest. Due to the coronavirus epidemic, the exhibition is launched online this year. I hope that more people will enjoy these photos because it is accessible in the internet.

I believe that one of the main advantages of this competition is the widest coverage of topics: from the incredible beauty of our planet and bright joyful celebrations to the black abyss of human despair; from world sports achievements to calm daily country life. The works of the contest captured moments of real life, recorded our thoughts, emotions and experiences. A true story is behind each photo, sometimes it is funny, sometimes it is sad and sometimes it is tragic. These photos talk about life on Earth better than hundreds of words, about how its inhabitants struggle with difficulties and ailments, excel themselves and overcome difficult life circumstances, fight epidemics, natural disasters, environmental disasters, and resolve complex conflicts.

This contest reminds us that reporters sometimes have to pay with their lives for telling the truth about the tragic events of modern history.

This competition is named after Andrei Stenin, a photojournalist of the International News Agency "Rossiya Segodnya", who died in 2014 while covering events in Donbass which is one of the hot spots of our time. The works presented here are a tribute to the memory of Andrei Stenin from his colleagues, photojournalists from different countries.

You can visit the exhibition here.