“They’re Ukrainians, and they want to stay on Ukrainian land.” asf_hanna speaks to Ron Haviv, a veteran war photographer, one year on from the Russian invasion
, which came to light when the Russians withdrew. These events were defining moments in this war.
On the roads leading out of Irpin, people were running away from the Russian soldiers carrying white flags, hoping that nobody would fire on them. They ran past dead bodies on the ground. They had no idea where they were going next – they were just in survival mode. It was heart-breaking to see. People abandoned their possessions as they ran. I found an old man’s cane, a bouquet of flowers by a tyre, a surgical glove with a stroller, a stuffed dog in the windscreen of a car. Those mundane things tell stories. You know that somebody is now walking without a cane, or that a parent is carrying their child for miles.Photographer Ron Haviv reflects on the conflict .
The mood may be more hopeful but death is still everywhere. While I was in Irpin, I went to a cemetery. I met a young man who was visiting the graves of his entire family. They had stayed in Irpin and managed to survive the Russian occupation. But one night after liberation, the electricity went down and the man’s family lit a bonfire in their backyard to stay warm.
I noticed graffiti on the walls of the train station. Somebody had spray-painted the words “Welcome to the Ukraine, bitch” Mass graves kept being unearthed. In December I visited one in Izyum, a city near Kharkiv in the north-east of the country, that had been found a couple of months previously. Over 440 people were buried there. One of them was a renowned children’s writer. The ground had been churned up – in some places by tanks, in others by the digging of graves.n December I went to visit Slatyne, an isolated town on the Russian border near Kharkiv.
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