At dawn on February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine with aerial bombardments across the country and the deployment of ground troops.

Borodyanka of the Kyiv region after the attack of the RussiansPhoto: Hiroto Sekiguchi / AP – The Associated Press / Profimedia Images

Within days, Russian troops captured the key port of Berdyansk and the capital of Kherson region, very close to the Black Sea, as well as several cities near Kyiv, in north-central Ukraine.

But their attempt to conquer the capital Kyiv ran into resistance from Ukrainian forces, stimulated by their president Volodymyr Zelensky, who became a military commander.

Dramatic footage on the streets of Kyiv: a Russian armored car ran into a car driven by a civilian (February 25, 2022, the second day of the war unleashed by Vladimir Putin):

A rocket hit a residential building in Kyiv (February 26, 2022). Powerful images – how to see them from the inside:

Footage after the explosions in the residential quarters of the capital of Ukraine (March 2022):

Kyivans are hiding in the subway

Kyiv after the bombings

Ruined buildings, piles of rubble and burned Russian military equipment – the image of the town of Borodyanka, located approximately 60 kilometers from Kyiv, where fierce battles took place (March 2022):

On April 21, the Kremlin announced the capture of the city of Mariupol, a strategic port on the Sea of ​​Azov that Russian forces have surrounded and bombarded since early March, cutting off vital infrastructure, water, electricity and heating.

The capture of this city will allow Russia to provide a link between its forces in Crimea – the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Moscow in 2014 – and the separatist regions of Donbas.

Image of a pregnant woman after the shelling of the maternity hospital in Mariupol

But about two thousand Ukrainian fighters, barricaded in the underground labyrinth of the Azovstal plant, along with hundreds of civilians, continued to fight. They held out until mid-May, when they surrendered.

Image of a Ukrainian fighter in Azovstal

According to Kyiv, the city of Mariupol was 90% destroyed, and at least 20,000 people died there.

Footage from the theater in Mariupol bombed by the Russians in March 2022, when hundreds of civilians were hiding there:

Drone footage of battles in Mariupol – Russian tanks among high-rise buildings fire guns at houses (April 2022):

A picture of one of the huge cemeteries in Mariupol, where most of the crosses have only numbers, not names:

The moment of surrender of Ukrainian fighters in Azovstal, the last bastion of the defense of Mariupol (May 2022):

The evacuation of hundreds of Ukrainian servicemen, many wounded, from the Azovstal metallurgical plant (May 2022) to cities controlled by Russian forces probably marked the end of the longest and bloodiest battle of the war in Ukraine. Mariupol was left a ruined city after the Russian siege, which, according to Ukraine, took the lives of tens of thousands of people:

Image from the small town of Maryinka in eastern Ukraine, a town of almost 10,000 people before the war, next to the metropolis of Donetsk (December 2022):

Terrible footage: Russians allegedly killed all men aged 18 to 60 in Buch (April 2022):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_8MTj9sT2o

Bucha Street after the departure of the Russians

Tribute to the dead civilians of Buchi

Photo of dead civilians of Irpiny who tried to escape

The Russians fired two rockets at a train station in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, full of civilians trying to flee the war (April 2022):

Trenches near the city of Bakhmut, where Ukrainian infantrymen hold back Russian troops (October 2022):

Photo source: Profimedia Images