The Wider Image: With lives shattered by war, Ukrainian teens

Marharyta Chykalova, 16, from Kherson, looks out of a train window as she travels to theatre class, in Gdynia, Poland, February 17, 2024. Chykalova, who turns 17 in March, left her hometown of Kherson in southern Ukraine with her mother in April 2022 after sleeping in a basement for weeks as Russian troops occupied the city, fearing for her life. They fled to Moldova, then to Romania before settling in the Polish city of Gdynia. In December, 2022, she was sent pictures of her flat in Kherson which had been destroyed by a bomb. “I just started crying, crying really hard because at that moment I understood that everything I had just disappeared. It is simply gone, the home is gone, there’s nothing left,” she recalled. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel