Warning: This story contains graphic images of a mortally wounded child.
They have been bundled out of their homes and into bomb shelters, forced to flee for the border as refugees, and wounded or killed by shelling and air strikes.
The images coming out of Ukraine in the wake of Russian’s invasion have all been harrowing—but none more so than those of the children exposed to the horrors of war.
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Hundreds upon hundreds of children left behind all they knew as Vladimir Putin’s attack began in the dark of Thursday morning, rushing with the families to border countries willing to take them in as refugees.
Below, a boy peeks from behind a curtain after fleeing from Ukraine to Romania, while a girl pushes a baby carriage toward the Shehyni border crossing to Poland.
Many families who could not get out in time abandoned their homes—intact or wrecked—to seek safer environs. Here, a family joins hundreds of residents who fled a residential building hit by a Russian missile to shelter in the basement of a Kyiv school on Friday.
Others crowded into train stations as Russian troops pushed further into the country on Saturday. Here, a woman holds her sleeping child in Lviv central train station in western Ukraine.
In a humanitarian center in Lviv on Sunday, a young girl joined the Ukrainian effort to fight back against the Russian troops, helping to sort empty bottles that could be turned into Molotov cocktails.
Ukrainian officials said Saturday that 116 children have been injured and 14 have died during the invasion. An Associated Press photographer on Sunday witnessed the death of a 6-year-old girl.
An ambulance rushed the child, still clad in her unicorn pajamas, to a hospital in the port city of Mariupol after she and her father were injured by shelling.
Members of a medical team had tears in their eyes as they struggled but failed to save her.
“Show this to Putin,” one doctor told the photographer, who was allowed into the hospital to chronicle their efforts. “The eyes of this child, and crying doctors.”
