Funeral photos of Ukrainian children killed in Russian attack are hard to view

Images are a stark reminder of the horrors of Putin's war, but look at them we must to remember that this an evil and unjust conflict, not an abstraction

A mourner marks the graves of three children killed in the April 4 missile attack on Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih. Ukrainian and Russian graves often bear pictures of the deceased. The grave in the foregeround is for Tymofii Tsvitok, 3. To the left is the grave of Kostiantyn Novik, 16. The marker on the far right is for Mykyta Perekhrest, 15.

Warning: Take a deep emotional and physical breath before you scroll down to the five additional photos at the bottom of this story.

The pictures are hard to look at. They are photos taken at the funerals of some of the nine Ukrainian children killed when a Russian ballistic missile hit a residential area in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih on April 4.

They are not gruesome in a physical sense. They are heartbreaking shots of parents and friends distraught over the open caskets of children — war casualties — ranging from 3 to 17 years old.

I pulled them off the Facebook page of a dear friend and popular minister from Ukraine whom I’ve known for nearly 40 years. I don’t know who shot the pictures, but my friend gave me permission to use them and vouched for their authenticity.

Still, I hesitated about publishing them. They are so emotionally potent and disturbing. As a long-time journalist at a family newspaper I learned that publishing pictures of dead bodies is a taboo that turns off readers.

But I’m going ahead, and it’s not mainly due to my own Ukrainian heritage. My reason has a twist of irony about it.

“A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

That’s a well-known quote from Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator who killed millions of Ukrainians and Russians through forced starvation, firing squads and exile to Siberian “gulag” prison camps.

Wars in distant lands are an abstraction for us. We don’t hear the blasts of guns and bombs, bury the dead and live in fear that we might die in the next 15 minutes. We don’t feel the terror of being the target of a genocidal war.

Through these photos, I hope to make readers feel a dose of anguish that individual Ukrainian families are feeling — and to understand why they will not yield defeat.

This conflict is, unfortunately, the latest tragedy among many Ukrainians have endured over the centuries. (By some estimates, 15 million Ukrainians died violent deaths from 1914 through 1945.)

Again, statistics alone don’t capture the full emotional and human impact of war. But photos and individual stories can. Baby Boomers might recall the effect that Life magazine had in 1969 when it published “One Week’s Dead” — brief stories and photos of all 242 U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam in one week of that conflict. The war suddenly became real — and unpopular.

In the same spirit of that publication, here are the first names and ages of the nine children who died in the April attack on Kryvyi Rih, followed by the funeral photos. (I do not have additional caption information).

• Tymofii, 3

• Arina, 7

• Radyslav, 7

• Herman, 9

• Alina, 15

• Danylo, 15

• Mykyta, 15

• Kostiantyn, 16

• Nikita, 17

Ukrainians won’t forget these kids, and neither should we.