Death at the bus stop… the intimacy of loss in Putin’s horror

The tragedy and horror of what Putin is doing to the people of the Ukraine are portrayed sometimes in the intimate detail.

The intimate details of what it is really like to meet death without warning on a street corner.

We are brutalised by modern ways of dying – the glint of a lone-wolf’’s knife on our capital’s bridges, a refugee child drowned in freezing black water, fleeing diplomats hanging from rescue helicopters, teenagers blown up at a concert, shopping families mown down by brain-washed drivers …

But in this picture – credited to Reuters – it’s not the horror that brings it all back home, it’s the quiet devastation.

The moment your own life ends but you are left standing.

And your child is lying torn and dead before you.

Callous killers had flown their tin cans overhead and killed him for no other reason than he was standing with his dad and sister at a bus stop in northeastern city of Kharkiv.

Hurricane salvo rockets tore through the grey sky and sucked the air of the streets as they hit.

Then this thirteen year old boy was gone.

Yes, the horror is in the detail, the dad’s sensibly-worn man bag, his tick tock zip-up loose at his waist, his dark designer denim jacket… they all meant something before this moment. In a way they defined the man, the dad.

The son’s black trainer protrudes from the red tarpaulin which are used to hide carnage. They cover the bodies for dignity, they say.

But dad and son are holding each other in the veils of death.

***

At least three Ukrainians were killed in this Russian airstrike.

The dead teenager’s 15-year-old sister was also injured, according to the Kharkiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office.

In another image, the father was seen with his hand on the boy’s exposed chest. Another distressing photo showed two other men moving the boy’s corpse.

A 69-year-old man and his wife were also killed in the attack, authorities said.

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