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Russia’s special forces, known as the Spetsnaz, are among the fiercest and most secretive fighting operatives in the world. Beliakovs portrait project on the Spetsnaz dates informally to August 1999, when he found himself at age 29 caught in a firefight together with a Spetsnaz group in Russia’s restive republic of Dagestan. Years went by, and as he covered the war in neighboring Chechnya, Beliakov came to know many of these fighters personally, building contacts among them. During the siege of a school in the city of Beslan in 2004, those relationships helped him embed with the elite Spetsnaz brigades charged with freeing the more than 1,000 children, parents and teachers trapped by terrorists inside the school. The images Beliakov took went around the world and later made him one of the subjects of the Emmy-winning documentary, “Three Days in September,” narrated by actress Julia Roberts and introduced at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006.

Photojournalist DMITRI BELIAKOV was born in 1970 in the Vologda region of Russia. He graduated from the foreign languages department of Yaroslavl University and started working in 1993 as a translator and researcher for Express Newspapers U.K. and stringer for various TV channels during the First Chechen War. Beliakov began to take pictures professionally in 1997 freelancing for the AP, the Daily & Sunday Express U.K., The Telegraph U.K., The Times and The Sunday Times of London. From 2002 to 2008 Beliakov was a photographer on a freelancer contract for Bloomberg News. His pictures illustrated business, political, economic and feature stories from throughout Russia and the former Soviet Union.