‘s journalists have already been reporting to Finns on the situation in Ukraine for six months. Five journalists who visited Ukraine talk about moments that have been indelibly etched in their minds.
Suvi Turtiainen: “The line became more chaotic hour by hour”
Ukraine-Poland border, border crossing Shehyni/Medyka 25/02/2022.
The Russian war of aggression had started a day earlier. We arrived at the anti-Poland border crossing as a photojournalist Benjamin Finland with.
The flight of millions of people to other parts of Europe had begun, and the beginning was chaotic.
We met Tanjawho had walked through the night with his six-year-old daughter Thirsty with to the border crossing. The car lane was congested, so many people walked for hours.
There was no fighting anywhere near the crossing, but there was a state of emergency at the border. The state of war was new to everyone, and the border guards were nervous.
Thousands and thousands of women and children tried to cross the border out of Ukraine, but in the first days the border did not pull. The queue became more chaotic and desperate hour by hour.
The border also showed how the war tore families apart right from the start. The men were escorting their families to the border, but they themselves were not allowed to cross.
We met Sergei’swho pressed his one-and-a-half-year-old grandson on his forehead Alexei forehead and said goodbye to him. At the same time, Sergei comforted his daughter Come onAleksei’s mother.
– Everything will turn out for the best, Sergei said and started to cry himself.
At the same time, at the border station, a clearly calmer but steady flow of people went in the opposite direction. From the first moments of the war, Ukrainian men living abroad returned to Ukraine to defend their homeland.
Read more: Across the border between Ukraine and Poland: Those fleeing the war have to wait for days without food and shelter – Ukraine restricts women and children from leaving the country
Mika Mäkeläinen: “There is no sense here”
The thunder of the cannons is carried from afar and echoes from the walls of the apartment buildings that have been shot into ruins. Danger sensitizes hearing. How far away did it bang now?
A walking photographer Benjamin Finland with the Street of Friendship between Peoples in the suburb of Saltivka in Kharkiv, near the Russian border. I dodge shards of glass and holes made by grenades.
Friendship between peoples here always means friendship between Ukrainians and Russians. Now it sounds grim and unreal.
There are few people. In the manner of Oleg Vasilievich and his family. They came in a bright blue Lada to see what was left of Oleg’s mother-in-law’s apartment.
Oleg cannot fathom Russian terror. He has a Russian passport. His family speaks Russian and they have close relatives in Russia. Yet Russia is bombing them. Why?
– This is a nightmare, and we are still completely devastated, says Oleg.
I’m tired too. There’s not an iota of sense here.
Russia says it protects Russian speakers. Here, however, Russian-speakers have to protect themselves from Russian artillery.
And Russia says it is protecting civilians. However, Saltivka – or Saltovka in Russian – is a sleeping neighborhood inhabited only by civilians, where there should not be military targets.
Still, Russia has been burning down houses since the beginning of the war. Russia terrorizes and kills civilians, on purpose.
There are almost as many residents in Saltivka as in Helsinki. Or it was, because almost everyone has fled. And some of them are dead.
Oleg drives away in his Lada. You can no longer live on the street of friendship between nations without gas, water and electricity.
In Kharkiv, friendship between peoples is dead. It is in ruins and scrap, perhaps for generations.
Jenny Matikainen: “A lot is still in the dark”
We were standing in the yard of a small detached house near Kyiv on an early summer evening. Three children stared at me and the photojournalist Janne Körkköa confused.
We were looking for an interviewee who could tell about their missing family member. Children’s mother Olha Shvadchenko was ready to talk about her husband.
The front was far away. Russian troops had withdrawn from the area in April after the attack on the capital had failed. In two months, the occupiers had managed to do an incredible amount of destruction.
You could see the ruins of houses and collapsed bridges with your own eyes, but part of the terror was quieter. All over Ukraine, people have disappeared without a trace during the Russian invasion. Some are known to have ended up as prisoners in Russia.
The father of this family Serhi had been missing for over two months. Shvadchenko told us that Serhi had gone to get food aid and never came back. According to his wife, he was not a soldier, but an ordinary family man.
We had received from Dymer city authorities a list of people reported missing in the area during the occupation. In addition to Serhi, there were dozens of names on it.
The list made me think about what has happened – and is happening all the time – in eastern and southern Ukraine in areas that outsiders have not been able to access for almost six months.
The horrors of the suburbs of Kyiv were revealed to the world in the spring, but much is still in the dark.
Maxim Fedorov: “A tear came to my eye when I saw the signs of a time of peace”
The most touching day in Ukraine was in July. We went to photograph a residential building in Kyiv that was hit by a Russian missile on the third day of the war.
In a house roughly as tall as the tower blocks in Kalasatama, the impact destroyed the corners of a few floors. Residential buildings of this size are rare in Finland, but Kyiv is full of them.
About a quarter of the house is in an uninhabitable condition, but there are residents in the other apartments. They have nowhere else to go.
The house is currently being urgently repaired, because if it is not sealed before the cold comes, it can no longer be saved.
We stood with the residents on approximately the 21st floor and looked at the destroyed apartments.
The residents told what kind of families lived in these apartments, when the renovation was completed in which room, and where the residents were during the attack.
A tear came to my eye when I saw the signs of peacetime: An unopened package of toilet paper rolls in the closet, a spinner lying on the floor, Disney’s Airplane patterned wallpaper on the wall of the Children’s room – a room where there is no floor, but a hundred meters of emptiness under the wall of wallpaper.
But what was empowering about this visit were the people. They did not complain or despair. They believed in better things and told who helped them and how. They praised the community spirit of Ukrainians, and there was no fear in their words or in their nature.
Antti Kuronen: “I have thought a lot about their fates”
For me, Russia’s war in Ukraine began in the spring of 2014.
Russia seized Crimea in March and then began to incite war in the Donbass of eastern Ukraine.
I remember that beautiful spring day in April 2014. People gathered in the center of the city of Slovyansk in eastern Ukraine to marvel at the soldiers without insignia who appeared there.
It later emerged that these Russian special forces soldiers had participated in the annexation of Crimea. Now the idea was to expand the attack to the mainland of eastern Ukraine.
That was the start of Russia’s hybrid war in eastern Ukraine.
In the summer of 2014, I saw the same things in Ukraine that I have seen this year. I saw how people buried their loved ones in backyards and how bodies were kept in sheds in the yard because it was not safe to take them any further.
I made a couple of trips to Donbas in January and February of this year, when Russia’s open, large-scale offensive began to seem certain. I went to Mariupol a couple of times. I remember the winter and the desire of the residents and soldiers to defend themselves against Russia. I’ve been thinking a lot about their fates since the Russian invasion began on February 24th.
In February, I moved from eastern Ukraine to Kyiv a day before the start of the major offensive.
I remember the disbelief in Kiev when Russia started shelling cities all over Ukraine, including Kiev.
I remember the will to defend after the first day and how people volunteered for the defensive fight in droves.
I remember the atmosphere in Kiev when the Russian soldiers were on the outskirts of the city, and the liberated joy that the Ukrainians felt when they managed to push the Russian army out of Kiev and all of northern Ukraine.
In the spring and summer I have been following the war in Donbas – partly in the same places where I have been following it since 2014.