Eero Epner

A Trip to Kyiv With European Presidents

Broken houses alternate with undamaged ones. Here and there children catch fish. Where there was a house a month ago, there is now a nine-story cemetery. There is an advertisement for a beauty salon hanging above a basement door that promises to make everything beautiful and healthy. In one village, where about 80% of the houses are gone forever, about three-quarters of the people we see wave to us — statistics of life and death, hope and emptiness.