Time flows like sand in an hourglass.
Last year marked a round number: ten years since the killing of Andrea Rocchelli on May 24, 2014. Now we enter another decade—how many more will it take to get answers? Luciana and Giorgio Alpi never received any in their lifetimes, and 31 years after the assassination/execution of Ilaria and Miran in Somalia, justice is still nowhere to be found.
Perhaps we can offer some answers to the questions we are sometimes asked—or that we ask ourselves.
People ask us why we persist in seeking justice after eleven years, why we continue to carry this weight of indignation and frustration in the face of partial and disappointing outcomes.
Indeed, there have been results: we know what happened that May afternoon eleven years ago—it’s written in the rulings of three levels of the Italian judiciary. We know about the attack, using both light and heavy artillery, launched by a brigade of the Ukrainian army and National Guard militias against a group of unarmed civilians. We know it lasted over half an hour, and that it was a war crime—this is how the Italian judiciary defined it. No one was meant to leave alive from the ditch where Andrea Rocchelli, his Russian friend Andrei Mironov, photographer William Roguelon, the taxi driver, and another civilian had taken refuge after the initial gunfire.
We know all this despite the Ukrainian authorities never cooperating and later constructing self-exonerating narratives.
So we can imagine every moment of that shooting gallery that killed Andrea and Andrei and severely wounded William. It’s a film that replays in our minds every day for eleven years.
But the crime remains unpunished, and justice is still missing.
The expectation of justice is a fundamental part of the citizen-state relationship—it’s the basis for our trust in the institutions of a rule-of-law state, and one of the pillars of our belonging to this civil community.
And when it comes to international relations, it’s not just about tariffs, trade wars, business deals, and financial flows—it’s also about the protection of human rights, mutual respect, adherence to internationally accepted rules, and therefore the pursuit of justice. These may be deeply out-of-fashion themes, but the fact remains: we hunger and thirst for justice—ideally in this world, not in the next.
What do we expect from politics? Always and only justice. Yet all we get is absence and silence—with one important exception.
On July 3, 2024, we took part in a hearing before the Permanent Committee on Human Rights in the World, established by the Chamber of Deputies and chaired by Hon. Laura Boldrini. We were honored by this show of attention after such a long time, even more so when we learned that a parliamentary question requiring a response had been submitted to the Foreign Affairs Committee regarding this unsolved crime, and that a meeting had been requested with the relevant minister.
We waited, hoping that a pattern of willful neglect might be reversed.
Indeed, never—not once—has the case of Andrea Rocchelli’s killing—an unarmed Italian citizen, a photographer trying to bring us honest, independent reporting from the spring of 2014—ever been included in the agenda of Italy-Ukraine diplomatic talks. Not once has there been a political or diplomatic commitment to address it.
Ten months have passed: Hon. Boldrini, the co-signers, and we ourselves are still waiting for a response.
Silence could not speak more loudly.
Elisa Signori
Originally published in Italian on the Articolo21 website on May 24, 2025.
Biography
Andrea (Andy) Rocchelli (September 27, 1983 – May 24, 2014) was a freelance photojournalist, and a founding member of the independent photographers’ collective Cesura.
After earning a Master’s degree in Communication Design from the Politecnico di Milano in 2007, Rocchelli began working in photography with an internship at the Grazia Neri agency and later became an assistant to Magnum photographer Alex Majoli. In 2008, together with four other photographers, he founded Cesura, an independent collective focused on producing uncompromising photographic projects free from commercial pressures.
Rocchelli’s photojournalistic portfolio was highly diverse: he documented the phenomenon of “velinismo” (media exploitation of young women) in Italy, the Arab Spring in Libya and Tunisia, human rights violations in Kyrgyzstan and Ingushetia, and the conditions of migrants in southern Italy, including their exploitation by organized crime.
Eastern Europe and Russia were areas of particular interest to Rocchelli.
His photographs were published in major international media outlets such as Le Monde, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Kommersant, and Novaya Gazeta.
At the time of his death, Russian Interiors, his first photobook, was nearing completion. The volume was later published posthumously by Cesura.
Rocchelli was killed on May 24, 2014, in Andreyevka, near the city of Sloviansk in Eastern Ukraine, while documenting the conditions of civilians trapped in the Donbas conflict. With him that afternoon were human rights activist and interpreter Andrei Mironov—who was also killed in the same attack—French photojournalist William Roguelon, and a local driver.
While stopped near abandoned railway tracks, the group came under heavy and sustained fire from both light and heavy artillery. The targeted attack, which killed Mironov and Rocchelli and severely wounded Roguelon, was deemed deliberate by the Italian investigative authorities.
In May 2016, the final photos taken by Rocchelli while under fire—moments before he was killed—were recovered. These images document the duration of the attack, the layout of the location where the victims had taken shelter, and their clearly civilian clothing.
