In Pictures

Gallery|Humanitarian Crises

In Pictures: Ukraine’s collateral damage

Around 800 people have lost their lives in the Ukrainian conflict since mid-April.

Ukrainian women from the village of Grabovye get out of the rain after attending a service led by the local priest to pray for the souls of the passengers of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17.
By John Wendle
Published On 1 Aug 2014

Svitlana Kontratyuk shook with grief, fear, shock and disbelief. Tears poured from her eyes. As she wiped them away, her hands trembled. Her apartment building had been partially destroyed earlier that morning by a heavy aerial bomb during an attack on the town of Snizhnye, near Ukraine’s border with Russia.

“It fell at exactly 7:20 this morning. At 7:20, I always leave. I’d only just walked out of the building. Only just. Then it was flattened. Something just slammed into it,” she said, nearly shouting with hysteria. “That’s it. Now there is nothing left,” she said.

Though she lost everything, Svitlana and her husband just barely escaped joining the growing list of the dead – she was saved from shrapnel by heavy pine trees lining the pavement, he was saved because he was out on their balcony smoking a cigarette.

Since mid-April, around 800 civilians have been killed in the conflict in eastern Ukraine between the government and pro-Russian rebels according to a report released earlier this week by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

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With international attention riveted on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, the deaths of the roughly 800 people and the wounding of at least 2,155 people has gone mostly unnoticed by the rest of the world.

“Egregious human rights abuses have been committed in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine,” reads the UN’s latest report. “Increasing numbers of civilians have been killed.”

With the Ukrainian army tightening its encirclement of the rebel capitals of Donetsk and Luhansk – and its unprofessional use of old weaponry to randomly assault urban areas still populated with civilians – the human cost of this vicious civil war is set to rise in the coming weeks.

“This will not end soon, I am afraid. I am afraid of everything now. I’m afraid to go home,” said Svitlana. “I’m afraid of everything. I’m afraid! I don’t know! I don’t know if this will end or not.”

The belongings of the passengers are scattered throughout the surrounding fields.
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Pavel, a young rebel guarding the MH17 crash site, examines the plane wreckage. The rebels have been accused of downing the passenger plane, tampering with the crash site, and delaying the collection of the bodies of passengers. Heavy fighting is now raging around the crash site as the Ukrainian army fights for control of it.
Labourers fill in a trench dug in the backyard of a house they had just finished building before the town was taken over by rebels earlier this year and the compound was turned into a fighting position. The roof lies in ruins after being hit by Ukrainian shells targeting the position.
Slovyansk(***)s main square has returned to a somewhat normal state after Ukrainian forces captured the town in early July. Residents still feel resentful and angry at the random shelling they endured at the hands of the army.
Passengers on the Kiev-Donetsk train speak on their phones to family members worried about their return to the embattled city of Donetsk amid renewed fighting for the city.
Novorossiya stencils have begun appearing all over the city. The term, used by Russian President Vladimir Putin in an address in April, was historically used to denote parts of Ukraine and southern Russia during the Russian Empire, and has since been adopted by rebels to denote the federation of the Lugansk and Donetsk People(***)s Republics.
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Women from a suburb of Donetsk take in the damage to an apartment building after the Ukrainian army began shelling in the area near the train station. They say there were no rebel fighters in the area.
After heavy fighting on the edge of Donetsk, civilians from the area began to flee, emptying the city.
Emergency workers and volunteers cleared rubble from a residential apartment building in the town of Snizhne, a town near the Russian border, after it was hit with aerial bombs. The Ukrainian air force claimed it did not fly that day.
Svetlana Kontratuk, a retired nurse, is emotionally distraught after her flat took the brunt of the air strike, a bombing run that was supposed to have targeted a rebel headquarters some 300 metres down the road in Snizhne.
Kontratuk(***)s neighbours look on in shock and anger as men work to clear debris and rubble after the air strike in Snizhne. In the past two weeks, the town has become a rebel stronghold, with much of the fighting centred here after the nearby downing of MH17.
A rebel commander holds a chunk of shrapnel from an aerial bomb.
Lugansk, the capital of the second breakaway province, has undergone heavy shelling. As a result, the city has lost much of its population. Here, an errant Ukrainian army shell blew open the roof of a nine storey apartment building. No one was injured.
A woman recovers from her wounds after a Ukrainian army artillery strike hit her house in Lugansk. The UN said on Monday that 799 civilians have been killed in the conflict since mid-April and at least 2,155 have been wounded.