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.
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