Raging walls of flame light up the night from inside the gutted interior of a bombed brick warehouse where firefighters desperately shoot water toward crumbling walls and smoke that looks like it was belched from an erupting volcano fills the sky with dense, black clouds.
A doctor in a white coat makes his way through a dim, dank basement corridor and other medical workers huddle together in an underground room after an air raid alarm sends them scurrying from their work attending scores of wounded.
On Day 22 of Russia’s war on Ukraine, more bombs fell, buildings collapsed and thousands of terrified residents continued to flee when they could from their besieged cities.
Those who remained behind did what they could to help those who were hurt, to protect themselves and their property, and to fight back.
In one Associated Press photograph, residents can be seen hanging plastic sheets over glassless window frames after pieces of a Russian missile landed on their apartment block. In another, a 42-year-old entrepreneur sits on a couch next to a wall graced with an enormous children’s drawing and reads a story via video call for his two sons, who have fled with their mother to Poland.
Other images capture the country’s determined resistance to Russia’s invasion. In one, a paper target bearing the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin has been tacked onto the wall of a target range. In yet another, two Ukrainian servicemen, one with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a wary look in his eye, guard their position near Brovary, a city north of the capital of Kyiv.
