Stories
‘Never saw such hell’: Russian soldiers in Ukraine call home
AP | February 24, 2023
One Russian soldier tells his mother that the young Ukrainians dead from his first firefight looked just like him. Another explains to his wife that he’s drunk because alcohol makes it easier to kill civilians. A third wants his girlfriend to know that in all the horror, he dreams about just being with her.
Evidence of Russian crimes mounts as war in Ukraine drags on
AP | December 30, 2022
Ten months into Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine, overwhelming evidence shows the Kremlin’s troops have waged total war, with disregard for international laws governing the treatment of civilians and conduct on the battlefield.
Russia scrubs Mariupol’s Ukraine identity, builds on death
AP | December 22, 2022
Throughout Mariupol, Russian workers are tearing down bombed-out buildings at a rate of at least one a day, hauling away shattered bodies with the debris.
How Russian Soldiers Ran a “Cleansing” Operation in Bucha
AP | November 3, 2022
The first man arrived at 7:27 a.m. Russian soldiers covered his head and marched him up the driveway toward a nondescript office building.
‘Kill Everyone’: Russian Violence in Ukraine Was Strategic
AP | October 26, 2022
Even by the standards of the important military officers who came and went in this tiny village, the man walking behind the Kamaz truck stood out.
‘They Took My Big Love’: Ukraine Woman Searches for Answers
AP | October 25, 2022
Tetiana Boikiv peered from the doorway of the cellar at the Russian soldiers questioning her husband about his phone. “Come up,” her husband, Mykola Moroz, called to her. “Don’t be afraid.”
How Moscow grabs Ukrainian kids and makes them Russians
AP | October 13, 2022
Olga Lopatkina paced around her basement in circles like a trapped animal. For more than a week, the Ukrainian mother had heard nothing from her six adopted children stranded in Mariupol, and she was going out of her mind with worry.
Russia smuggling Ukrainian grain to help pay for Putin’s war
AP | October 3, 2022
When the bulk cargo ship Laodicea docked in Lebanon last summer, Ukrainian diplomats said the vessel was carrying grain stolen by Russia and urged Lebanese officials to impound the ship.
10 torture sites in 1 town: Russia sowed pain, fear in Izium
AP | October 2, 2022
The first time the Russian soldiers caught him, they tossed him bound and blindfolded into a trench covered with wooden boards for days on end.
Ukraine train system attacks may be war crimes, experts say
AP | August 26, 2022
Russia’s attack on a Ukrainian train station that killed more than 20 people this week is the latest in a series of strikes on the country’s railway system that some international legal scholars say may be war crimes.
Ukraine pushes to try alleged war crimes as fighting rages
AP | July 26, 2022
The appeal of Ukraine’s first war crimes conviction was adjourned on Monday, as prosecutors keep pushing to hold Russia legally accountable for atrocities even as fighting rages in the south and east of the country.
UN: Russia and Ukraine are to blame for nursing home attack
AP | July 9, 2022
Two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Russian forces assaulted a nursing home in the eastern region of Luhansk. Dozens of elderly and disabled patients, many of them bedridden, were trapped inside without water or electricity.
Targeting schools, Russia bombs the future
AP | May 17, 2022
As she lay buried under the rubble, her legs broken and eyes blinded by blood and thick clouds of dust, all Inna Levchenko could hear was screams. It was 12:15 p.m. on March 3, and moments earlier a blast had pulverized the school where she’d taught for 30 years.
‘This tears my soul apart’: A Ukrainian boy and a killing
AP | May 12, 2022
Another killing was in progress on a lonely street in Bucha, the community on the outskirts of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, where bodies of civilians are still being discovered weeks after Russian soldiers withdrew. Many had been shot in the head. The 14-year-old Yura Nechyporenko was about to become one of them.
AP evidence points to 600 dead in Mariupol theater airstrike
AP | May 4, 2022
She stood in just her bathrobe in the freezing basement of the Mariupol theater, coated in white plaster dust shaken loose by the explosion. Her husband tugged at her to leave and begged her to cover her eyes.
The woman who would make Putin pay
AP | April 15, 2022
The messages, reports from across Ukraine, scroll in real time: One civilian dead. Thirteen military casualties. Five civilians injured. Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova glances at her cell phone. The stark numbers and bare-bones accounts that unreel in her hand are just the start; her staff will catalog them, investigate them -- and try to bring the Russian perpetrators of war crimes to justice.
A devastating walk through Bucha's horror
AP | April 9, 2022
There is a body in the basement of the abandoned yellow home at the end of the street near the railroad tracks. The man is young, pale, a dried trickle of blood by his mouth, shot to death and left in the dark, and no one knows why the Russians brought him there, to a home that wasn’t his.
Hard path to justice in Bucha atrocities
AP | April 5, 2022
The horrific images and stories tumbling out of Ukrainian towns like Bucha in the wake of the withdrawal of Russian troops bear witness to depravity on a scale recalling the barbarities of Cambodia, the Balkans, World War II.
Russia's onslaught on Ukrainian hospitals
AP | March 25, 2022
For a month now, Russian forces have repeatedly attacked Ukrainian medical facilities, striking at hospitals, ambulances, medics, patients and even newborns — with at least 34 assaults independently documented by The Associated Press.
How would those accused of Ukraine war crimes be prosecuted?
AP | March 25, 2022
Each day searing stories pour out of Ukraine: A maternity hospital bombed in Mariupol. A mother and her children killed as they fled Irpin in a humanitarian corridor. Burning apartment blocks. Mass graves. A child dead of dehydration in a city under siege, denied humanitarian aid.
Why? Why? Why? Ukraine's Mariupol descends into despair
AP | March 16, 2022
The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped. There's 18-month-old Kirill, whose shrapnel wound to the head proved too much for his little toddler’s body.