Ukraine war images show scale of devastation

Press photographers risk their own lives to document the realities of Russia’s vicious shelling campaign, which has reduced its neighbour’s cities to rubble and traumatised their residents

More than five weeks have now passed since Russia commenced its brutal invasion of neighbouring Ukraine, with no end to the bloody conflict in sight as peace talks between negotiators make little apparent headway.

Russian president Vladimir Putin told his citizens at the outset on 24 February that their country was not waging war but instead conducting “a special military operation” intended to “de-Nazify and de-militarise” the Ukrainian government and liberate its people from tyranny and genocide, a rationale with little grounding in reality given that its target was a sovereign democracy whose president is Jewish and a genial former TV actor.

What has ensued instead has been a horrific assault on Ukrainian cities like Mariupol and Kharkiv, surrounded and shelled into oblivion by Russian artillery as the Ukrainian armed forces and local residents stage a courageous resistance that has won the admiration of the entire world.

Russia has already been accused of carrying out war crimes as a conquest the Kremlin appeared to believe would be a formality has proven to be anything but. The latest horrific reports emerging from Bucha are stoking further outrage and prompting renewed calls for Mr Putin to be held to account for his solders’ actions.

Every day the war continues, press photographers risk their lives to document the realities on the ground, recording with an unflinching eye the destruction of entire districts and the devastation being done to the lives of ordinary people caught up in appalling violence through no fault of their own and deprived of basic amenities as they battle for survival.

Here are a selection of some of the latest shocking images to emerge from Ukraine, underlining the human cost of a senseless war.

Soldiers walk amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv on Sunday 3 April 2022 (Rodrigo Abd/AP)

Konstyantyn, 70, smokes a cigarette in the wreckage of tanks in Bucha on Sunday 3 April 2022 (Rodrigo Abd/AP)

A stray dog drinks water next to destroyed Russian armoured vehicles in Bucha on Sunday 3 April 2022 (Rodrigo Abd/AP)

A woman kisses a man while cooking on an open fire outside an apartment building with no electricity, water or gas in Bucha on Sunday 3 April 2022 (Vadim Ghirda/AP)

Tanya Nedashkivska reacts as she recounts how her husband, navy veteran Vasyl Ivanovych, was killed by Russian soldiers in Bucha on Sunday 3 April 2022. ‘He looked mutilated, his body was cold. They turned him over a little. He had been shot in the head, mutilated, tortured,’ she said (Zohra Bensemra/Reuters)

A local resident passes a destroyed apartment building in the southern Ukrainian port city of Mariupol on Sunday 3 April 2022 (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

More destruction in Mariupol on Sunday 3 April 2022 (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)

Citizens walk through the shelled streets of Odesa on Sunday 3 April 2022 (Petros Giannakouris/AP)

Civilians gather in a yard as smoke rises in the air in the background after shelling in Odesa on Sunday 3 April 2022 (Petros Giannakouris/AP)

A woman waits for distribution of food products in the village of Motyzhyn, which was until recently under the control of the Russian military, on Sunday 3 April 2022 (Vadim Ghirda/AP)

An elderly woman collects firewood to heat her house in Bucha on Saturday 2 April 2022, where the town's mayor said 280 people had been buried in a mass grave and that the town is littered with corpses (Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP/Getty)

Ukrainian rescue workers carry an elderly woman under a destroyed bridge in Irpin on Friday 1 April 2022 (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)

Flowers are placed on a Ukrainian military armored fighting vehicle destroyed during fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces outside Kyiv on Friday 1 April 2022 (Vadim Ghirda/AP)

A Ukrainian soldier stands on top of a destroyed Russian tank on the outskirts of Kyiv on Thursday 31 March 2022 (Rodrigo Abd/AP)

Fire burns after the town of Irpin was shelled on Wednesday 30 March 2022 (Oleksandr Ratushniak/Reuters)

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