A father’s grief. A tender touch. A new country.
Ukrainians faced another grim day in the Russian invasion Thursday as the bombardment claimed more victims and destroyed buildings. Russian forces seized a strategic seaport and threatened to overtake a major energy hub even as the two sides negotiated corridors to safely evacuate citizens.
Residents poured out of the country by bus and train, sometimes in unheated cars, to cross the border to Poland or Romania. Some desperate to escape the bombings crowded rail stations and squeezed onto trains, not always knowing where they were headed.
The outgunned Ukrainians have put up stiff resistance, staving off the swift victory that Russia appeared to have expected. Volunteer fighters constructed barriers and taught others how to use weapons as the invasion entered its second week.
Serhii, father of teenager Iliya, cries on his son's lifeless body lying on a stretcher at a maternity hospital converted into a medical ward in Mariupol, Ukraine.
Photo: AP
A refugee fleeing the conflict from neighboring Ukraine talks to police officers at the Romanian-Ukrainian border, in Siret, Romania.
Photo: AP
Teenager Artyom, 15, wounded by shelling, lies in a car waiting to be moved to a maternity hospital converted into a medical ward in Mariupol, Ukraine.
Photo: AP
Refugees fleeing the conflict from neighboring Ukraine exit a tent at the Romanian-Ukrainian border, in Siret, Romania.
Photo: AP
Natalia, 57, cries as she says goodbye to her daughter and grandson on a train to Lviv at the Kyiv station, Ukraine.
Photo: AP
Children Vlada, left, Katrin and Danilo look out from a window of an unheated carriage of an emergency evacuation train which is traveling from Kharkov to Lviv, as it stopped in the Kyiv railway station in Kyiv, Ukraine.
Photo: AP