May 15, 2022 GMT
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-kharkiv-9303c5f705cc5775fb902ed835a49dbb
KHARKIV, Ukraine (AP) – The bodies of Russian soldiers, some terribly disfigured. Relatives weep over the dead, some killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And always thousands of Ukrainians fleeing horrific destruction while their towns and villages were bombed.
These are the photos that Associated Press photographer Felipe Dana took while working in Ukraine for just over 10 weeks in early March, from Lviv in the west to the capital Kyiv and further east to Kharkiv, Dnipro and Zaporizhia.
He says he often arrives in the neighborhood with ambulances minutes after a Russian attack.
Sometimes Dana found a husband next to her body, crying. Other times, the bodies would be on an almost empty street, fatally hit by a small piece of shrapnel.
“I’ve seen a lot of things I wish had never happened, horror scenes that I can only hope will never happen again,” he said.
It was especially difficult, he says, to watch the all-too-common scenes of refugees displaced from their homes looking for a safe place from the shelling.
“Although we expect this to happen when there is a war, it is still difficult to see and it still affects you a lot,” Dana added.
In some places, he entered basements used as shelters and found entire families, especially elderly women, living without electricity or water as their homes were bombed.
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Most recently, when Ukrainians regained control of some villages near Kharkiv’s second-largest city, he said many of these sites have the feel of an open-air morgue. He saw the bodies of men believed to be Russian soldiers lined up in a “Z”, which Moscow 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 a war crime, for disrespecting the dignity of the dead.
Dana says 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.
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