The interior ruins of an apartment destroyed by Russian shelling were visible from the streets of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. People in winter coats and hats took cover from an attack inside a building entryway in Mariupol, a besieged port city. And in neighboring Poland, a young refugee in blue jeans and a red sweatshirt played with a green, toy horn inside the Przemysl train station.

On the 19th day of the war in Ukraine, AP photographers captured scenes of destruction and fear across the embattled country -- and some moments of playfulness among children forced to flee their homeland -- as Russian artillery kept falling from the sky, shattering buildings and lives. No breakthrough was made in high-level talks between Russia and Ukraine, and a Red Cross official said Moscow’s unrelenting bombardment has created “nothing short of a nightmare’’ for civilians.

In Mariupol, where the war has produced some of the greatest suffering, a woman in a fur coat walked down the street as flames poured out of the window of a nearby apartment shelled by artillery. Elsewhere in the city, under a partially blue sky, men huddled around a makeshift stove to prepare a meal.

In Lviv, in western Ukraine, volunteers at a workshop prepared first-aid kits and worked with blue and yellow fabric to sew Ukrainian flags, while people displaced from their homes were served meals at a school canteen.  

In Poland, veterinarians set up a rescue service for animals left behind by the war, including a small black dog with white paws, and a white baby goat with deformed hooves, named Sascha.