Debris: Short Stories of Destruction

Workers dismantle the Soviet Union monument that symbolizes the Ukrainian-Russian friendship due to continuing Russia's invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by Salvatore Cavalli / SOPA Images/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

20 short stories of war, collected by Reporters.Media, A COLLECTIVE OF LITERARY JOURNALISTS IN UKRAINE.

A man, whose brother had not been in touch since early March, finally found his body. His brother had been shot in the back in his own home in Vorzel. Then they doused the body with gasoline and set it on fire.

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A mother, with trembling hands, wrote her daughter’s name, surname, date of birth and contacts of relatives on her back with a ballpoint pen, in case one of them was killed or the child was lost.

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A girl from the bombed-out city of Mariupol was called “the Ukrainian Anne Frank” for documenting war chronicles in her diary.

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An old lady from Bucha could not tell anything about herself except her name, so journalists searched for her relatives on Facebook. And found them.

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A villager near Kyiv tried to evacuate in his own car but was shot dead in it on the Zhytomyr highway. His relatives managed to find out about his death a month later, but they were not allowed to take the body immediately because it was probably mined.

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A young woman from Kharkiv stayed in the city to look after her seriously ill mother. The woman was raped by a Russian occupier for a week. That man then shot her mother dead right in front of her.

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A 12-year-old boy and his mother from Irpin were buried in the yard of their residential complex. They had been living there until they were killed by mortar fire just outside.

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A man’s phone was stolen by the occupiers. He does not know to where his wife tried to escape and whether she succeeded. He now attempts to find her through social networks and volunteers.

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A 4-year-old boy, Sashko, disappeared on a boat with his grandmother while fleeing shelling. All of Ukraine looked for him, but found him dead—the boat probably capsized because the Russians were shooting at it.

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A pregnant woman from the Mariupol maternity hospital, whose hip was shattered by an explosion asked to be “finished off” because she did not want to suffer, and then died along with her child.

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A Ukrainian football player from the village of Motyzhyn was killed along with his parents. The occupiers had kidnapped the family, because the footballer’s mother was the head of the village.

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A 6-year-old boy turned gray after the occupiers raped his mother several times right in front of him. The woman later died of severe injuries, incompatible with life.

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A woman attached the tags with her son’s personal information to his clothes in case the boy got lost in the crowd heading to or crossing the Ukrainian-Polish border.

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A resident of Bucha lost his entire family to the shelling and now gives interviews to journalists right in the cemetery, on the graves of his wife and children, to witness this crime of the Russians to the world.

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An 11-year-old boy traveled alone from Zaporizhia to Slovakia and crossed the border at night, carrying only a package with his passport and a phone number written by his parents on his hand.

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A photojournalist filmed in Ilovaisk [a town besieged in 2014] and escaped alive. Eight years later he was killed by two shots in the head in the Kyiv region.

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A pensioner was shot right in the street when he was heading to the house next door to feed his old bedridden mother.

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A 6-year-old boy from Bucha brings canned food to his mother’s grave. She died of starvation during the occupation of the city. Now she is buried right in the yard of their block of flats.

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A woman from Irpin bought an apartment in a new residential complex and was doing repairs there when an enemy shell hit the building. Later, she was captured in a famous photo—the one where civilians are hiding from shelling under a destroyed bridge.

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A resident of Bucha lived in the basement for more than a month. He personally buried three of his friends in the yard. One of them he gathered in parts. The occupiers gave him 20 minutes for all the burials.

Reprinted with permission from Reporters.MEdia. you can support the work of their journalists here.