killed by Russian bombs, they will imagine their own children. Our children are the same. Our cities look the same. They will see themselves in us. They will feel it.” The doctors relented, and that night Dondyuk took a photo of the boy, whose name, reporters later learned, was Semyon. He was still in critical condition at the time. He died soon after.
The first patient to arrive at the main children’s hospital in Kyiv after the Russian invasion was a young boy named Semyon, photographed on Feb. 28. His family’s car had come under heavy fire, killing his parents and his sister. The boy later died
Maxim Dondyuk
It was one of the moments when Dondyuk broke down. Over the past eight years, he has photographed many aspects of the war between Russia and Ukraine. He has seen and documented it from both sides of the front. For Dondyuk, 38, the story was always personal, but never more than over the past few weeks. His mother has been forced to flee the nation as a refugee. His father lives in a town under Russian military occupation. “My city, where I lived for years, is being destroyed,” Dondyuk says of Kyiv. “I’m not coming at this from afar. This is my pain. This is my country.”
By the second week of the war, he says, the initial phase of panic in the capital subsided. Trenches and checkpoints appeared in residential neighborhoods, next to schools and playgrounds, as Ukrainians prepared to fight the Russian troops from street to street. Many people fled, but many others stayed to help, transforming the city into a wartime metropolis—far emptier, more somber, but full of purpose and resolve. Those who could not volunteer to fight have spent their time helping those who did, cooking meals, filling sandbags, tending bonfires, delivering supplies.
Read More: The Man On Ukraine’s Digital Frontline
The worst of the carnage has so far been confined to the city’s northern suburbs, which is where Dondyuk was wounded on March 6. That morning he set out by car to the suburb of Irpin, along with two other photographers. To stall the Russian advance,Ukrainian forces had blown up a bridge that leads south from that town into Kyiv, leaving only a small walkway over a river, just wide enough for one or two people to cross at a time.
Ukrainian photographer Maxim Dondyuk after he was injured by shrapnel on March 6
Jerome Sessini—Magnum Photos
As the photographers arrived, they saw a couple of vans near the bridge, waiting to take civilians to safety as they made it over. Many of those crossing were elderly. Others had babies in strollers and pets under their arms. A group of Ukrainian soldiers stood nearby. Dondyuk had stopped to take their photographs when they heard the first mortar incoming. It was the start of an assault that would last for around two hours, targeting the only pathway for civilians to flee Irpin.
The soldiers at the bridge fell back as the bombing continued. But Dondyuk and his two colleagues stayed to document the scene, retreating only after a piece of shrapnel hit him in the shoulder, ripping away a piece of flesh. Scores of civilians were injured or killed in the attack. Yet they kept streaming across the bridge even as the bombs were falling. “They could see the mortars ahead of them. They could see the bodies,” says Dondyuk. “But whatever they were running away from, it must have been worse.”
—With reporting by Nik Popli
A woman seeks shelter from Russian artillery and aerial bombardment in Kyiv’s subway system on March 2. Thousands like her have retreated underground, and some have not left the tunnels since the fighting began
Maxim Dondyuk
A maternity unit moved to the basement of their hospital in Kyiv on March 2 after a bombing nearby
Maxim Dondyuk
Civilians cross the Irpin river, near Kyiv, on March 5, where a bridge was destroyed by the Ukrainian army to stop Russian forces from advancing
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