Every single day of this war, there have been images that hit like a gut punch. Some are simply hideous—the images of dead soldiers charred into pugilistic poses by the way that heat cooks the muscles, or the bodies of civilians lying limp in a park beside the meager belongings they were trying to carry away as they fled their homes. Others are so evocative that they tell a story at a glance, like a line of abandoned strollers sitting between the craters left by artillery shells on a highway, or an old woman sitting with her head bowed in a subway station turned bomb shelter.
So many of the images conjure up the past. They click in our minds with dates like 1968, or 1941, or 1917. They capture some of the same eerie, timelessness of frozen violence that Matthew Brady carried back from the battlefields of America when he hauled his clumsy camera gear out to capture images of the dead in the Civil War.
They are terrible, but transfixing. Heartbreaking even when they are heroic. They are as iconic, and as awful, as Nick Ut’s photograph of young Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing naked and burned along the highway outside Trảng Bàng.
They will be with us even when this war is over; reminders that we’ve seen their like before, and warnings that they could as easily come to us from the future as the past.
Strollers on a destroyed bridge outside Irpin. March 10, 2022.
An elderly woman in a metro station turned bomb shelter beneath Kyiv. March 8, 2022.
People try to get an evacuation train at Dnipro train station. March 5, 2022.
A woman stands besides graves for two soldiers in Lyiv. March 08, 2022.
A man says farewell to his children at Kyiv central train station. March 4, 2022.
Ukraine's first female volunteer fighter trains in a Kyiv basement. March 11, 2022.
A Ukrainian serviceman says goodbye to his girlfriend at Lviv. March 9, 2022,
The bodies of civilians killed by Russian shelling in the central park of Irpin. March 10, 2022.
A woman holds a baby basket on a train platform at Odessa. March 9, 2022.
A woman walks past shelled and destroyed cars outside Kyiv. March 12, 2022.
A girl preparing to evacuate Odessa. March 9, 2022.
Saturday, Mar 12, 2022 · 11:06:56 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
The origin of these rockets is unconfirmed. Why Iran would do this — when they’re trying to get sanctions against them lifted and seeing how Russia is getting burdened — is hard to understand. Hang on for more official information.
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