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surreal . Hot coffee , a glass case filled with pastries and sandwiches , and pop music playing on the sound system . We could have been anywhere in Europe , or America , in this moment and again that normalcy felt unsettling .
Our days around Kyiv were spent walking through the city to make some pictures of the stunning architecture and parks , visiting the exhibition of destroyed Russian military vehicles by the St . Sophia cathedral , and riding to Bucha , Irpin and Hostomel . With these cities being attacked and occupied in the early days of the war , the level of destruction was as shocking as the lines of blownup Russian tanks rusting beside the road . We met a local motorcyclist called Roman who had been displaced in the early days of the invasion . Working as a liaison between aid providers and other internally displaced people , he used his motorcycle to move quickly and efficiently to the places he was needed to provide help . His house was damaged , but not destroyed , but his place of work was not so lucky . We rode out to see the factory where he was employed producing car parts and our collective shock level just kept rising . A massive facility , with presumably hundreds of employees , the whole complex was destroyed . The bent and buckled roof , black from flames and slumped over the sagging walls , had huge holes ripped through it and the level of destruction was beyond anything my imagination could have produced . Some of the workers had died that day , but mercifully most were ok .
The clarity of hindsight has been well discussed through the ages , and I stood under a badly damaged apartment building in Irpin , staring intently through my long lens at Kiran on a damaged balcony waiting like a
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