Spanish photographer Emilio Morenatti has managed to snap an image that has become emblematic of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
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The picture, which has been featured in newspapers around the world, shows hundreds of Ukrainians huddling beneath a bombed-out bridge as the attempt to flee across the Irpin River on the outskirts of Kyiv on March 5.
Morenatti, 52, has won a Pulitzer Prize for his photography and currently serves as chief photo editor for the Associated Press in Spain and Portugal. He has been in Ukraine since mid-February, prior the start of the current war.
Speaking to Israel Hayom about the bridge photo as he leaves Ukraine for Poland, Morenatti says, "I had gone there [the Irpin River] two days earlier. A series of elements created a picture that tells what happened.
"We located the place and went back. I thought it would be the same as it had been a day before, but long before I got to the bridge, we discovered a flood of people fleeing. There were people walking in the streets and on the highway, families with their children and possessions," he says.
"What I never imagined was that the more I moved forward, the fuller the bridge became. It was so full that they were piling into the part underneath so they could go across it," Morenatti adds. "There were loud sounds of artillery that were causing people to look scared, and then there was this moment when I could see that there were a lot of people who meant to cross it. The hundreds of people gathered under the bridge are the ones who were about to leave, rushing to avoid becoming targets. That's what happened a day later – four people were killed by a mortar fired from Russian territory, apparently Russian artillery," he says.
Morenatti says that what the picture doesn't show are the "sounds of explosions in the background, the shelling of Irpin, from where they [the people] were fleeing, leaving their homes behind."
Morenatti has been stationed to a number of war zones. This is his fourth time in an eastern European country. He says that he and his fellow war correspondents all think that the Ukraine war is "very violent, aggressive, and inhumane."
"We haven't learned anything since Kosovo, and haven't managed to work through the horrors of war," he says.
"This war is bringing out a few aggressive elements we thought we had left behind. We thought we learned something, but we see that we haven't," he continues. "What we're see in this war is terrible dehumanization, which in my opinion will lead to a precedent in modern history … we have witnesses in Mariupol who told us that people were suffering from the siege and starting to feel hunger. They are starting to boil snow [due to a lack of drinking water] and are suffering the effects of the Russian siege.
"There is a surprising issue in the fragility [here] compared to other wars," Morenatti says. "No one is safe, from journalists, who have become targets, to civilians. No one is safe this time, and I have a feeling that there is an intentional attempt to hide the situation."
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