A woman screams in horror next to the body of a 15-year-old boy killed during a Russian attack in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Another woman is held by a friend as she collapses in grief next to the body of her father, lying on the ground after being killed in an assault on the city.
Across Ukraine loss was palpable all week, as strangers helped recover bodies of civilians from mass graves and relatives grieved over their beloved dead.
On Saturday, 70-year-old Nadiya Trubchaninova, wept as she clung to the coffin of her son, Vadym, as she was finally able to give him a proper burial i n their home village of Mykulychi, on the outskirts of Kyiv. The 48-year-old had been killed by Russian troops nearly three weeks earlier in Bucha, where hundreds of civilians have been killed, prompting calls for a war crimes investigation.
And in the town of Mykulychi, volunteers placed the corpse of a civilian into a body bag after it and others were dug up from a mass grave, during an exhumation on Sunday. They were to be taken to a morgue for investigation.
In testimony to the impact such horrors have on the Ukrainian children who witness them, 7-year-old Yehor, his face etched with the pain, clutched a wooden toy rifle next to destroyed Russian military vehicles near Chernihiv.
More than 5 million refugees had fled Ukraine by the end of the week, Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Among them were Lolita and her 4-year-old daughter Elina, who held their hands in the shape of a heart as they bid farewell to husband and father, Nicolai, through the window of a train bound for Poland from the western city of Lviv.
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