In the seconds before impact, mortars whistle as they fall, making a loud and almost plaintive sound Maxim Dondyuk will never forget. He will not forget the sting of their shrapnel, which felt like a hot knife in his arm, or the sight of the women and children he photographed during the shelling near Kyiv on March 6. He hopes the people who see his photos will not be able to forget them either. “I don’t stay here and do this because I am a masochist,” Dondyuk, who is Ukrainian, says by phone from the center of Kyiv. “I do it because sometimes a photo can change people, change societies.” With luck, he says, it might help stop a war.
Photograph by Maxim Dondyuk
When this war started in late February, Dondyuk was in Kyiv as Russian forces rushed to encircle the city, dropping bombs and firing artillery while tanks advanced from the north. Civilians tried to flee or take shelter in the subway system. At the city’s main hospital for children, Dondyuk found the patients crowded into the basement while the doctors waited for the wounded to arrive.
The first one was a young boy, no older than 7, whose parents and sister had just been killed. Emergency workers carried him into the ward and told the doctors that the family’s car had been riddled with bullets near the heart of the Ukrainian capital. The boy was the only survivor. The emergency workers did not know his name, they said, because his documents were probably in the wreckage. The doctors registered him as “Unknown No. 1,” and performed emergency surgery.
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Pacing the ward outside the child’s room, Dondyuk found the head physician and asked for permission to photograph the boy. “I told him that the Russian people need to see this,” Dondyuk recalls. “When we show them the childrenkilled 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.
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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,
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