Since then, Micalizzi has been documenting conflicts in places like Iraq, Libya, Syria and Gaza. Most recently, he was in Ukraine, where he was the only non-partisan photographer embedded with the Russians in the Donbas. This is a man who vividly recalls the smell of the 30 stacked corpses he had to crawl between in a makeshift morgue in order to get to safety on one occasion.

“It’s the kind of smell you never forget,” he says, matter-of-factly. But the scariest thing about the Donbas? The topography. “Very flat. No cover.”