10 weeks in Ukraine, making images hard to forget

“I saw a lot of things I wish never happened, horror scenes I can only hope will never repeat.”

— Felipe Dana, Associated Press photographer

KHARKIV, Ukraine — The bodies of Russian soldiers, some horribly disfigured. Relatives weeping over the dead, some killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And always, the thousands of Ukrainians fleeing horrific destruction as their cities and villages came under bombardment.

These are the images that Associated Press photographer Felipe Dana captured while working in Ukraine for just over 10 weeks beginning in early March, from Lviv in the west, to the capital of Kyiv, and farther east to Kharkiv, Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia.

He says he often arrived in a neighborhood along with emergency workers, minutes after a Russian attack.

Sometimes Dana found a spouse next to the body, crying. Other times, bodies would be on a nearly empty street, fatally struck by a small piece of shrapnel.

“I saw a lot of things I wish never happened, horror scenes I can only hope will never repeat,” he said.

Especially hard, he said, were seeing the all-too-common scenes of refugees displaced from their homes, seeking a safe place from the shelling.

“Although we expect that to happen when there is war, it’s still hard to see, and it still impacts you a lot,” Dana said.

In some places, he walked into basements being used as shelters and found entire families, especially elderly women, living with no electricity or water, as their homes above them were bombarded.

More recently, as the Ukrainians retook control of some villages near the second-largest city of Kharkiv, he said many of these sites had the feel of an open-air morgue.

He saw bodies of men, believed to be Russian soldiers, arranged in a “Z,” which Moscow has used as a symbol of the invasion, as well as a charred body propped against an anti-tank barrier.

There was no immediate explanation for either, which could be considered war crimes, for disrespecting the dignity of the dead.

Dana said that he has been to Ukraine many times in recent years but what he saw in Ukraine was hard to imagine and even harder to forget.

(AP/Felipe Dana) A man rides his bike March 25 past flames and smoke rising from a fire following a Russian attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

Ukrainians crowd under a destroyed bridge March 8 as they try to flee fighting by crossing the Irpin River on the outskirts of Kyiv.

A woman injured in a Russian attack is treated by emergency workers April 16 in Kharkiv.

Ukrainian firefighters work March 15 at an apartment building after a bombing in Kyiv.

A neighbor walks March 24 on the debris of a burning house that was destroyed after a Russian attack in Kharkiv.

A family fleeing the village of Ruska Lozova arrive April 29 in their shrapnel-ridden car to a screening point in Kharkiv.

A man stands atop a destroyed bridge March 8 in Irpin, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine.