Photojournalist Peter Turnley, who has witnessed most of the world’s major conflicts over the past four decades, spent a week along the Ukrainian-Polish border and inside Ukraine, and captured these images of refugees as they fled the country.
Ukrainian Refugees
They traveled with only what they could carry, their destinations often unknown.
Ukrainian Refugees
According to UNICEF, there have been three million Ukrainian refugees since the war began, most of them children, women and the elderly.
Ukrainian Refugees
Some experts expect there may be many millions more trying to escape Russia’s bombing of Ukrainian civilians.
Ukrainian Refugees
Turnley’s photographs have appeared in Newsweek, Harper’s, Stern, Paris Match, Geo, LIFE, National Geographic, The London Sunday Times, Le Figaro, Le Monde, and The New Yorker, among others.
Ukrainian Refugees
Turnley captured the refugees’ heartache as they said goodbye to loved ones, not knowing if they would see them again.
Ukrainian Refugees
Turnley notes that this crisis is different from others he has photographed, because this time it is women, children and the elderly who are on the move, leaving men behind to fight for Ukraine.
Ukrainian Refugees
This image, of a man named Vitali saying goodbye to his family in Kyiv, haunts Turnley still: “He stood on the tracks for a long, long time,” he told “Sunday Morning” correspondent Lee Cowan, “and he and his wife and daughter just stared at each other. But suddenly the train just left. And it was like, it was like breath had just, air had just come out of a balloon, but you couldn’t get it back. And I remember feeling this incredible sense of pain for this gentleman, Vitali, that just had lost contact with his wife and child. And the destiny for all three of them was completely unknown.”
Ukrainian Refugees
Turnley told Cowan, “I ran into a journalist, and he asked me what I had experienced. And I told him the sense of guilt that I felt that I could walk away from the situation and the people that I had seen could not. And I literally, without warning, just began to sob.”
Ukrainian Refugees
David Miliband, president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, told “Sunday Morning,” “We have to remember that for every person who makes it out of Ukraine, there are ten still inside Ukraine.”
Ukrainian Refugees
Turnley said, “This moment feels very dark. And as so many people have been forced to leave the country, one has a sense as well that a lot of light and illumination has been taken away from their hearts.”
Ukrainian Refugees
Want to help people in Ukraine? Here are ways to donate (CBS Moneywatch)
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