“We were taking a stroll in Shevchenko Park, which is in the centre of Kharkiv. It was a really nice warm, sunny day. People were sitting outside chatting and drinking coffees.”
Shaun Walker, the Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent, was walking around a park in Kharkiv, Ukraine, when he heard an explosion in the distance.
“When you looked around at all the people, you could just see this very split second of hyper-awareness, of stopping in their tracks, but it was almost imperceptible. And then this previous scene just continued, and people just continued getting on with the day, which is not that surprising, given that, for the last few weeks, pretty much every day – sometimes several times a day – there have been air strikes on Kharkiv.”
Shaun tells Michael Safi about the recent Russian advances in the war in Ukraine, and the people trying to live near the front line.
Photograph: Libkos/Getty Images
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