An old woman dressed in black leans over the coffin of a young dead Ukrainian police sergeant as mourners weep nearby. Refugees wrapped in blankets line up among tents in a makeshift camp as they wait to cross the border into Poland. And firefighters help a woman climb down a ladder to escape an apartment building damaged by Russian shelling.
On Day 15 of the war in Ukraine, residents kept fleeing, soldiers kept fighting and mourners continued to bury the dead.
Images captured by Associated Press photographers on Thursday show mourners gathering around the grave of senior police sergeant Roman Rushchyshyn as his coffin is lowered into the ground in the village of Soposhyn, a suburb of the city of Lviv in western Ukraine. In another frame, friends, relatives and neighbors sob or place their hands over their mouths in grief as they view his casket. In yet another, four men dressed in military fatigues aim their rifles at the sky and fire rounds in his honor.
Hospital workers scrambled to help the wounded, including a man shown in an AP photograph grimacing in pain as doctors and nurses bandage his wounded foot and a 14-year-old girl named Katya, who lies recovering in a hospital bed after being shot while fleeing with her family from a village near Brovary, north of the capital of Kyiv.
Evidence of the destruction is everywhere, as revealed in photographs of piles of rubble surrounding a church damaged by shelling in a residential district of the port of Mariupol; and a destroyed tank that still sits in the street on a main road near Brovary after battles between Ukrainian and Russian forces.
