Faith and grim determination are reflected in Sunday’s images from a Ukraine at war.
Outside the capital of Kyiv, in suburban towns still emerging from weeks of Russian occupation, elderly people line up for donated food and workers raise bodies from a mass grave, hoping to identify them for proper burials and to document any war crimes. A plastic sheet covers the Bucha churchyard’s unearthed soil, anticipating spring rains after this bitterest winter.
Inside the church, services are held as abominations are uncovered outside. The work must not pause, because this opportunity may not hold: Kyiv’s mayor said Sunday that Russia’s military is sure to return if Ukrainian forces can’t defeat them.
The fighting is already intensifying as Russian forces refocus in the east, where a boy in a wheelchair is among a crowd trying to evacuate from Kramatorsk, the city where a train station platform became a killing field only days earlier. Further north in Kharkhiv, under withering attacks for weeks now, three men await their fate in a basement shelter.
For many, this is what survival looks like: maneuvering around an impact crater, searching through buildings turned inside-out, saying goodbye.
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