Kherson, Ukraine —
We meet Aleksandr Petrenko on the sidewalk as workers clean up glass shattered in an early morning bombing. He greets us silently, wearing a thick, white mustache and black winter cap. The signs for the Merry Berry Café and other nearby storefronts are destroyed, but no one was hurt.
He speaks a few quiet words and beckons us to follow him through a door behind the building.
Inside his apartment, we can tell Petrenko’s single street-facing window had been boarded up long before the blast. Russia captured the city of Kherson last March, and Ukraine fought bitterly for eight months to win it back.
Now Ukraine controls the city, and Russia bombs it daily.
Petrenko’s two-room apartment is on a tree-lined street by a park that regularly takes fire, but that is not why he wants us to see inside. One wall is lined with organized CDs, and two tables are crowded with electrical wires and an assortment of dated computers and other equipment.
It soon becomes clear what he wants to say, and that he is physically incapable of much speech. He shows us a business card that identifies him simply as “photographer.” Then, he pulls out a stack of prints and sits on the beige couch next to Yan Boechat, our cameraman, and the two flip through.
They are beauty shots of sunsets and swimming ducks. There are close-ups of an orange tulip and a bright yellow butterfly. It is all his work, shot in Kherson in its better days.
Without words, he insists we chose prints to take as gifts.
Only a few minutes' drive away, we stop at an apartment complex with a giant crater in the shared yard.
The bomb hit in January, hurling fire and mud over the tops of the buildings. Shards of glass and other debris litter the garden, and water collects in the bottom of the pit, which is about 2 meters (7 feet) deep.
Tymur Soloviov, our translator, approaches a woman who sweeps dirt off the walkway by her apartment, despite the wreckage around her.
“How are you?” he asks, hoping she will tell us more details about the bombing.
“Great,” she responds, sarcastically, swiping her small broom with venom as she moves away from us. “You can see how great,” she mutters, gesturing toward the crater.
We start to leave because she clearly is not in the mood to chat with journalists. But she calls out to share one thought: “Whatever moron did this — I wish their death,” she says.
Outside Kherson city, we visit the village of Pravdyne, which was once a front line of the war and is now populated by only a few families.
The bridge from the main road to the village was destroyed in the fighting, and we follow a van of aid workers to the wide ditch it once covered. Slowly, our driver eases his car down into the trench and we trudge behind on foot as the four-by-four crawls out.
In the village, the aid van stops by a home where a man and a teenage boy scrape dark green paint off their truck. It had been commandeered by the Ukrainian army and then returned. The family is trying to restore its original white color. A dark green vehicle is a military target.
Larysa Zakharchich, 50, the teen’s mother, walks out onto the dirt street to meet the aid workers. She accepts some soaps, oranges and a sleeve of cookies. The aid workers jump back in their van and drive away.
“Someone comes almost every day,” she says. “It’s nice. But we don’t need groceries. We need building supplies.”
The village is strewn with the remnants of Russian tanks, and the fields surrounding it are heavily mined. Zakharchich says the house she is living in was abandoned by a family who fled when Pravdyne was a warzone. But in her village, about 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) away, every home was destroyed.
Her family fled in a hurry as bombs struck the village, leaving their black and brown dog, Roman, behind. Pravdyne was a safer option.
A few months ago, she went back to see her village. “You can’t enter it without tears in your eyes,” she explains, wistfully.
Roman, however, survived the battle and months on his own. He now lives in his new home in Pravdyne.
“Yes, we were so happy to see him,” Zakharchich says.
In his cramped Kherson apartment, Petrenko, the photographer, signs the back of the prints he gives us over objections that they are too dear to share.
The cameraman, Boechat, leaves first to film in the yard. As he walks us out, Petrenko uses gestures and a few words to ask Soloviov where his pictures are going.
“That one goes to Brazil,” Soloviov says, pointing toward Boechat, who lives in Sao Paulo. Petrenko smiles. His eyes water.