The Year's Best From RFE/RL's Photographers
Workers pull apart a house in Khandyga, Russia, on February 2. The shifting ground caused by the uneven thawing of permafrost each summer causes buildings like this Soviet-era apartment house to sag and collapse. Find out more about people who work in Russia’s Sakha Republic through winter temperatures that regularly drop below -50 degrees Celsius in our feature story, The Coldest People on Earth. (Amos Chapple, RFE/RL)
A protester attends a march organized by opposition politician Mikheil Saakashvili's Movement of New Forces party in Kyiv, Ukraine, on February 4. Thousands marched through the Ukrainian capital to call for President Petro Poroshenko's resignation. On February 12, Ukrainian security forces detained Saakashvili in Kyiv and deported him. (Serhii Nuzhnenko, RFE/RL)
Young Pioneers pose during a parade in Minsk, Belarus, on February 8. More than 500 members of the youth group came from all over the country to take part in the parade at the Uruchcha Palace of Sports. (Uladz Hrydzin, RFE/RL)
Students demonstrate in Tbilisi to demand improvements in the Georgian labor code on February 14. A day after a young worker died on a construction site, protesters turned out to show their solidarity with workers who have been injured or killed at work. (Mzia Saganelidze, RFE/RL)
A Kazakh eagle hunter, known as a "berkutchi," takes a part in national hunting competition in Uralsk, Kazakhstan, on February 25. For more on eagle hunters, visit our story. (Pyotr Trotsenko, RFE/RL)
Dzinara Alimbekava, a gold medalist in the women's relay biathlon at the 2018 Winter Olympics, returns home to Belarus from Pyeongchang on February 27. The national team of Belarus won two gold medals and one silver. (RFE/RL)
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai meets officials from Pakistan's Swat district in Islamabad on March 31. Malala returned to Pakistan on March 29 on her first trip to her home country since 2012, when she was evacuated to Britain for treatment after being shot in the head by Taliban militants. She was targeted for advocating for girls' education. (Niaz Ahmad Khan, RFE/RL)
The Prypyat river floods the Homel region in Belarus, April 4. (RFE/RL)
Children wait for the Holy Fire, a flame lit in Jerusalem and passed from candle to candle, to arrive at the Cathedral of St. Volodymyr in Kyiv on Easter night, April 7. (Serhii Nuzhnenko, RFE/RL)
People in Yerevan commemorate the anniversary of the World War I-era genocide of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire at a memorial on April 24. (Amos Chapple, RFE/RL)
People mourn over victims of the 1992-1993 conflict in Georgia’s breakaway region of Abkhazia as the victims' bodies were returned to Tbilisi on April 26. (Mzia Saganelidze, RFE/RL)
A Formula One Grand Prix competitor races in Baku, Azerbaijan, on April 29. (Aziz Karimov, RFE/RL)
Masked snipers with rifles keep watch from a government building overlooking Republic Square in Yerevan, Armenia, on May 8, as people celebrate the election of opposition leader Nikol Pashinian. RFE/RL photographer Amos Chapple recalls how he photographed the street protests that toppled Prime Minister Serzh Sarkisian and his government in an interactive story, Caught Up In A Revolution. (Amos Chapple, RFE/RL)
A memorial service at RFE/RL's Prague headquarters on May 3 honors two Afghan Service correspondents, Sabawoon Kakar and Abadullah Hananzai, and a trainee, Maharram Durrani. The three journalists were killed in a terrorist attack in Kabul on April 30. (Lucie Steinzova, RFE/RL)
Police arrest protesters in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on May 10. Dozens of people were detained at rallies calling for the release of political prisoners in the Central Asian state. (Assylkhan Mamashuly, RFE/RL)
Young Crimean Tatars pray on the slopes of the Chatyr-Dah mountains in Crimea on May 13, 2018. More than 1,000 people commemorated the victims of the deportation of Crimean Tatars from their homeland during the rule of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1944.(RFE/RL)
A girl watches a school graduation celebration on May 25 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. (Beksultan Abibakir, RFE/RL)
Liverpool fans burn flares before the Champions League football final between Liverpool and Real Madrid in Kyiv, Ukraine, on May 26. (Serhii Nuzhnenko, RFE/RL)
A shepherd in Georgia's Tusheti mountains on May 28. Photographer Amos Chapple documented the shepherds' tough life in his story, The Shepherds' Return. (Amos Chapple, RFE/RL)
A Ukrainian marine exercises at a frontline post in Vodiane, near Mariupol, in the war-torn Donetsk region on June 22. (Andriy Dubchak, RFE/RL)
A woman cries over the coffin of a victim of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia-Herzegovina on July 10 as 35 newly identified victims were reburied at the Potocari Memorial Center. Bosnian Serb forces who overran the town of Srebrenica in July 1995 killed some 8,000 Muslim men and boys. (Midhat Poturovic, RFE/RL)
Demonstrators hold signs calling for the release of Ukrainian film director Oleh Sentsov and fellow prisoner Olesandr Kolchenko in Kyiv's Independence Square on July 13. Kolchenko and Sentsov were arrested in Crimea in 2014 after Russia seized the Ukrainian region. A Russian court in 2015 convicted them of extremism charges, which the men and their supporters consider politically motivated. (Serhii Nuzhnenko, RFE/RL)
A starry night in the mountains near Kyrgyzstan's Kol-Suu Lake in Naryn Province on July 18. (Bektur Stamkulov, RFE/RL)
A station of the Tashkent Metro in Uzbekistan, August 9. A longtime ban on photographing the underground stations was lifted this year. See more of Uzbekistan's Secret Underground in our feature story. (Amos Chapple, RFE/RL)
The ruins of a library in the frontline village of Opytne near Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, on August 11. (Andriy Dubchak, RFE/RL)
A musician plays the violin at a traditional Belarusian wedding in Minsk on August 12. (Uladz Hrydzin, RFE/RL)
Azerbaijani Muslims celebrate Eid al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, in Baku on August 22. Sheep and other animals are slaughtered as a symbolic offering to God. (RFE/RL)
A soldier in Zaslaue, in the Minsk region of Belarus, during a city celebration on August 26. (RFE/RL)
Sheep belonging to Kuchi nomads in Afghanistan's Uruzgan Province on August 26. (RFE/RL)
A bride belonging to Kazakhstan's Dungan minority wears hand-embroidered clothing before her wedding in the village of Sortobe on August 27. For more photos of Dungan traditions, visit our photo gallery. (Petr Trotsenko, RFE/RL)
Riders fight in a mock battle on horseback on the opening day of the World Nomad Games in Kyrgyzstan on September 4. (Amos Chapple, RFE/RL)
A policeman bleeds after a clash with war veterans during a protest in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, on September 5. Several hundred veterans of the country's 1992-95 war were protesting for greater benefits and a unified register of all demobilized fighters. (Midhat Poturovic, RFE/RL)
Remains of a railway, known as Stalin's Dead Road, in the Russian taiga between Salekhard and Nadym, September 23. For more on one of the Soviet Union’s tragic gulag projects, see our photo feature. (Amos Chapple, RFE/RL)
A visitor mourns at the Monument of Heroes in Tbilisi, Georgia, on September 27. The monument honors Georgians killed in the conflict in Abkhazia in 1992-1993. (Mzia Saganelidze, RFE/RL)
A look inside the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine on November 1. For more photos from the site of the nuclear disaster, see our photo gallery, Under The Shield: Inside Chernobyl's New Safe Confinement. (Andriy Dubchak, RFE/RL)
Fog partly conceals the Motherland Monument in Kyiv, Ukraine, on November 6. The 102-meter-tall statue belongs to the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War. (RFE/RL)
A man carries a portrait of Vladimir Lenin during a celebration of October Revolution Day in Minsk, Belarus, on November 7. (Uladz Hrydzin, RFE/RL)
A Ukrainian soldier in a front line position in the village of Zholobok in eastern Ukraine's Luhansk region on November 7. (Serhii Nuzhnenko, RFE/RL)
Georgian Orthodox believers commemorate saints known as the Hundred Thousand Martyrs in the capital, Tbilisi, on November 14. (Mzia Saganelidze, RFE/RL)
A car with Russian diplomatic license plates burns in Kyiv, Ukraine, on November 25. Angry protesters fired flares outside the Russian Embassy after Russian forces seized three Ukrainian vessels and detained 24 Ukrainian sailors in the Kerch Strait. (Serhii Nuzhnenko, RFE/RL)
A man walks in front of the 800-year-old Great Mosque in Herat, Afghanistan, on December 10. (RFE/RL)