In western Ukraine, Tetiana Kasian stopped on the pavement to take in a wall of flowers that had gone up overnight in memory of those killed since Russia’s invasion.
Scanning the bright burst of artificial petals, the 32-year-old found the smiling faces of men, women and children, including some people she knew.
“It’s devastating,” she said. “I never thought that it would happen in Ukraine in the 21st century.”
Photo: AFP
Kasian explained that she was originally from the southern port city of Mariupol, now almost entirely under Russian control.
“I don’t know if I will see my parents” again, she said quietly.
The war has killed thousands of people since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, including at least 2,224 civilians, according to the UN.
The laminated photographs displayed in central Lviv represent just a tiny fraction of them.
Among them is 11-year-old gymnast Kateryna Diachenko grinning in a leotard, before she was killed at home in Mariupol by a Russian missile.
There is army paramedic Valentina Pushich, who lost her life trying to help evacuate civilians near the capital, and Indian student Naveen Gyanagoudar, who died in the eastern city of Kharkiv on his way to buy food.
After mass on Orthodox Easter Sunday, dozens paused in front of the memorial.
A pink scarf tied around her hair, an elderly lady carefully examined several pictures and each name below.
Leo Soto, an American born in Venezuela, traveled all the way from Florida to put up the floral tribute.
“It’s a wall of hope,” the 27-year-old hospitality school student said.
Soto said that he had made his first memorial in Miami after a building collapsed there last year, killing 98 people including a high-school classmate.
People responded well, and he now wanted to provide what little comfort he could to Ukrainians.
In his latest wall of flowers in Lviv, he chose artificial flowers — all donated in Poland — so people would not have to replace them and it would be more permanent.
The response has been overwhelming, he said.
As he and bystanders attached the stems with plastic ties on Saturday, a soldier in uniform approached him to ask if he could add a picture of his late brother.
Soto saw a funeral procession pass by, a mother in floods of tears behind the coffin draped in the national flag.
“It’s every day, it’s reality,” he said.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS