During six months of war in Ukraine, Associated Press photographers have captured images that are both succinct and eloquent. The click of a shutter is brief, but the stories they tell are deep.
Sometimes they show a life that ended in a moment — the body of a Russian soldier lying face down in the snow near a ruined tank. Others record a life ending, in agony and terror — medics carrying a mortally wounded pregnant woman on a stretcher through the ruins of a bomb-ravaged hospital in Mariupol.
There are moments of bold energy, such as a rifle-carrying woman waving a Ukrainian flag in the intensely blue sky as a Kyiv monastery’s tower rises in the background.
Some portray lives that are just about to change, heading into the unknown. A father stands outside a railroad car in Kyiv, his hands pressed against the window framing the face of his young daughter as the train prepares to depart the besieged city for far-away but peaceful Lviv. Hundreds of people crowd under a destroyed bridge in the Kyiv suburb of Irpin, wondering if gunfire will abate long enough to even give them a chance to escape into the unknown.
A woman walks her dog in Kyiv, an event from daily life. Her attentive gaze at her pet turns her face away from the ruins of a rocket-destroyed shopping center just behind her.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sits on a staircase in his office, seemingly casually, his legs crossed and his chin resting in a hand. By his posture, he could be a man waiting for a romantic interest who’s late. But the piles of sandbags behind him tell of the war’s constancy. He is waiting, but not for a date — instead, to see how and when the war will end.
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Full coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
