After the deployments, the denials and the diplomacy came the invasion and, with it, a war that was thoroughly foretold and yet still shocking in its savagery. A war with no rules, no limits and no quarter.
The first two weeks of the conflict – a fortnight for observers but a cold eternity for the people of Ukraine – have already yielded countless disturbing images even as Europe, a continent with a short memory, pinches itself raw to make sure that what should not, and could not, ever happen here again really is happening here again.
Ukrainian firefighters try to extinguish a fire after an airstrike hit a block of flats in Chuhuiv, Kharkiv Oblast. Photograph: Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu Agency
For all their dreadful novelty, the photographs from Kyiv, Kharkiv, Irpin and Mariupol stir memories of Guernica in 1937, of London in the blitz, and of Sarajevo under siege.
Fresher still are the memories of Russia’s dress rehearsal in Syria.
At dawn on 24 February, Vladimir Putin announced his long-dreaded invasion, or, as he put it in a phrase destined for the annals of martial euphemism, “a special military operation”.
A wounded woman outside a block of flats damaged by airstrikes near Kharkiv on 24 February. Above right: Ukrainian security forces help a man hurt in an airstrike on a block of flats in Chuhuiv. Photographs: Wolfgang Schwan/Anadolu Agency
Military helicopters, thought to be Russian, fly over the outskirts of Kyiv on 24 February.
Less than an hour after the Russian president vowed to bring about what he described as “the demilitarisation and denazification of Ukraine”, the country found itself under full-scale attack. Sirens sounded as explosions rippled through Ukraine’s cities, tanks rolled into its territories and helicopters strafed homes outside the capital.
A mother and child try to sleep in the Kyiv subway, being used as a bomb shelter, on 24 February. Photograph: Emilio Morenatti/AP
Missiles and shells, apparently targeting infrastructure near major cities including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, Dnipro and Odesa, killed hundreds of civilians and transformed blocks of flats into shattered and smoking ruins.
People grabbed blankets and sleeping bags – as well as toys and colouring books to distract their children – and hurried into shelters or underground stations.
When they emerged, many found their homes gone, damaged beyond repair, or hidden by curtains of flame and smoke.
The scale, swiftness and mercilessness of the first stage of the destruction were captured in two pictures that were used around the world.
Natali Sevriukova pauses next to her home in Kyiv, damaged in a rocket attack on 25 February. Photograph: Emilio Morenatti/AP
In one, a woman stands before a block of flats and stares, dazed, into the camera. There is blood on the bandage wrapped around her bruised head and blood on her teeth.
In the other, a woman called Natali Sevriukova holds a carefully manicured hand to her face and cries. Behind her is the rocket-destroyed block that was her home 24 hours earlier.
A Ukrainian territorial defence fighter examines a destroyed Russian infantry mobility vehicle GAZ Tigr after fighting in Kharkiv on 27 February. Photograph: Sergey Bobok/AFP
A distressed woman waits while paramedics perform CPR on a girl injured during shelling, at city hospital in Mariupol, on 27 February. The child did not survive. Photograph: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
People hoping to flee gather at Kyiv main railway station on 28 February. Photograph: Roman Pilipey/EPA
The deliberate targeting of civilian areas, a tactic widely employed to sow fear and despair in Syria, soon became one of the hallmarks of the Russian offensive.
A military convoy is strung along the highway, north of Ivankiv, on the approach to Kyiv, on 28 February. Satellite Image: Maxar Tech
A member of the Ukrainian emergency services looks up at the Kharkiv city hall after shelling on 1 March. Photograph: Pavel Dorogoy/AP
On 1 March, videos showed the orange flashes and grey smoke puffs of Grad missiles hitting residential buildings in the centre of Ukraine’s second-biggest city, Kharkiv.
Emergency workers carry a body out of Kharkiv city hall after the Russian shelling on 1 March. Photograph: Sergey Bobok/AFP
The city’s mayor said nine people had been killed and 37 injured on what he described as “a very difficult day”. He added that four of those killed died when they emerged from a shelter to find water. A family of five, including three children, were burned alive in their car.
A residential building in Borodyanka, in the Kyiv region, smoulders after shelling on 3 March. Photograph: Maksim Levin/Reuters
Damage after the shelling of buildings in downtown Kharkiv on 3 March. Photograph: Sergey Kozlov/EPA
People retrieve what they can from a burning house shelled in the city of Irpin, north-west of Kyiv, on 4 March. Right: Residents evacuate Irpin during heavy shelling and bombing on 5 March. Photographs: Aris Messinis/AFP
By Thursday 10 March, the port city of Mariupol had been under sustained bombardment for nine days, its buildings, parks and shops pummelled by Grad and Smerch rockets and Tochka-U missiles, and its inhabitants reduced to drinking the snow that had settled on the rubble.
A Ukrainian serviceman surveys the vertical tail fin of a Russian Su-34 bomber in a damaged building in Kharkiv on 8 March. Photograph: Andrew Marienko/AP
A day earlier, in an attack that plumbed fresh depths of depravity, a Russian warplane dropped a bomb on Mariupol’s maternity hospital number nine. Three people, among them a girl, died. Seventeen patients and members of staff were injured.
A injured pregnant woman is stretchered from a children hospital in Mariupol, evacuated after a Russia army bombardment on 9 March. Photograph: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
One of the pictures taken that day shows a heavily pregnant woman being stretchered through the smoke and snow past the shell of the hospital. Another shows a young and bloody expectant mother navigating a debris-strewn stairwell carrying blankets and a plastic bag.
The regional military administration estimates 1,207 people have been killed, with many more likely to lie under the debris. On Wednesday alone, 47 people were buried in a mass grave.
Mariupol’s deputy mayor, Sergei Orlov, said the words “bombardment” and “cruelty” did not come close to describing what was going on in the city, whose residents are trying to flee at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a day.
An injured pregnant woman picks her way downstairs in the damaged maternity hospital in Mariupol on 9 March. Photograph: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
“They have used aviation, artillery, multiple rocket launchers, Grads and other types of weapons we don’t even know about,” he told foreign reporters. “This isn’t simply treacherous. It’s a war crime and pure genocide.”
Ukrainian refugees queue to apply for residency permits at Prague’s foreigner police headquarters on 2 March. Photograph: Michal Čížek/AFP/Getty Images
Newly arrived refugees file past Polish army soldiers after crossing from Ukraine into Poland at the Medyka border, eastern Poland, on 9 March. Photograph: Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images
A girl fleeing the conflict looks out from a bus heading to the Moldovan capital, Chișinău, after crossing the Moldova-Ukraine border. Above right: Kyryl, a nine-year-old refugee from Kyiv, and his dog, Hugo, arrive at the Hungarian border town of Zahony on 2 March. Photographs: Nikolay Doychinov/AFP, Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Although Ukraine has dismissed the “humanitarian corridors” offered by Russia as “completely immoral”, as they allow fleeing civilians escape only to Russia or its ally Belarus, the exodus so far has been gargantuan.
Thousands of Ukrainian refugees, mostly women and children, arrive in Medyka, the crossing between Poland from Ukraine, on 7 March. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian
Friday’s figures from the UN’s refugee agency show that 2,504,893 people have fled Ukraine since dawn broke on 24 February, bringing with it the start of Putin’s “special military operation”.
Ukraine’s neighbours have borne the brunt of the evacuation, with Poland alone taking in more than 1.5 million refugees. The UK, apparently bedevilled by consular issues, had issued 850 visas by Wednesday this week.
A destroyed tank lies at the roadside after fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces on a main approach near Brovary, north of Kyiv, on 10 March. Photograph: Felipe Dana/AP
The past two weeks have tested not only the resolve of the Ukrainian people and the supposed might of the Russian military, but also the determination, unity and compassion of the west and the wider world.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has been clear from day one about what is at stake.
“What we have heard today are not just missile blasts, fighting and the rumble of aircraft,” he said on the day of the invasion.
Civilians and press run for their lives during a Russian attack while they were being evacuated from Irpin on 6 March. Photograph: Emin Sansar/Anadolu Agency
“This is the sound of a new iron curtain, which has come down and is closing Russia off from the civilised world. Our national task is to make sure this curtain does not fall across our land.”
