The photos that have defined the war in Ukraine

In the photo above, taken on March 6, Ukrainian soldiers try to save another man nearby — the only one at that moment who still had a pulse.“I’m thinking as horrific as this is, I have to document this because I just watched a mother and her two children get hit intentionally — because I knew it was intentional,” Addario said. There were hundreds of people at the train station that day.“Many were mothers with young children, tired, confused and numb with anguish having had their family units torn apart,” said Getty Images photographer Dan Kitwood.To date, more than 5 million refugees have fled Ukraine.“As a relatively new father, seeing that lady with her young son in that quiet moment struck a chord with me and left me wondering what their future might hold,” Kitwood said. It was just after Russia invaded.Aris Messinis, a photographer with Agence France-Presse, remembers how shocked many people were.“You could see in their faces the surprise, because until that moment, they didn’t believe that the war would start,” he said.This photo was taken two hours after the attack. “The fear in her face was still so obvious.”In this photo taken by the Associated Press’ Emilio Morenatti, people crowd under a bridge as they try to flee across the Irpin River on the outskirts of Kyiv on March 5.The bridge had been destroyed on purpose to prevent Russian forces from moving on to the capital, CNN’s Clarissa Ward reported.Ward said at the time that she was “seeing a lot of people who are clearly, visibly shaken, petrified because they have been trapped in terrible bombardment for days on end and are just now starting to get out.”The sound of constant artillery could be heard in the background.“These people have been under bombardment for seven straight days and are only just leaving their homes,” Ward said. “I recognized the importance of recording this scene because the woman was not simply entertaining the children, but distracting and shielding them from the horrors of war happening above ground.”A firefighter sprays water inside a house that was destroyed by Russian shelling in Kyiv on March 23.“The smoke and steam were almost unbearable at times, but thankfully, no one was killed that day,” said Associated Press photographer Vadim Ghirda. “The next day this picture was everywhere, and the whole world knew about the maternity hospital.”According to the AP, medics did not have time to get the woman’s name before her husband and father came to retrieve her body so she wouldn’t end up in one of the city’s mass graves.“I had seen a lot of human suffering before Mariupol, but I had never seen so many children killed in one single place in such a short period of time,” Maloletka said.Shocking images showing the bodies of civilians scattered across Bucha, Ukraine, sparked international outrage and raised the urgency of ongoing investigations into alleged Russian war crimes.Photographer Carol Guzy remembers seeing the body bags piling up.“It was heartbreaking,” she said. “The eyes of this child, and crying doctors.”A Ukrainian soldier carries a baby across a destroyed bridge in Irpin on March 3.This was the bridge in Irpin that had been destroyed on purpose to prevent Russian forces from invading.“At one moment during the evacuation, a couple was struggling to carry their belongings and their newborn baby,” said photographer Timothy Fadek, who was on assignment for CNN. Western officials had started to notice a shift in Russian strategy with increasing attacks on civilians and residential areas.People take shelter inside a subway car in Kharkiv as the Russian invasion began on February 24.“The invasion kicked off with a series of airstrikes, and one of the things I quickly learned was that the subways can be used a bomb shelters,” photographer Marcus Yam said.“I have never seen anything like it. “In these times of crisis, what I found was humanity coming across.”In the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion, there was a national directive in Ukraine to complicate the efforts of the Russian army.“I had heard that road signs were being removed, covered, or painted over in order to prevent invading Russian troops from easily orienting themselves, and as I was driving I saw a municipal worker in the process of removing this sign pointing the way to a nearby village,” photographer Brendan Hoffman said.