Best of Russia 2015: War and peace inside us all

A member of a special-forces unit after completing the final test in order to receive a maroon beret (an international symbol of elite airborne forces).

More than 1,000 soldiers that died during the Battle of Stalingrad were reburied on June 22, 2015.

A place in a museum. A museum in a patriotic club.

Yevgenia, an Old Believer and the daughter of a priest, prays while holding onto a prayer rope.

A woman praying in front of a local church during a cold evening.

Meeting after many years apart. Sredny Peninsula, the Murmansk Region. A common grave for marines. A woman from Moscow at the place where her husband died.

Military unit in Moscow.

“It’s also our pain.” A fragment from the Katyn memorial near Smolensk. The mass murder of Polish citizens was carried out here in the spring of 1940 by the NKVD secret police of the USSR.