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Day 26: In Ukraine's capital, scenes of fortitude

A shopping center lies in smoldering ruins after being bombarded by Russian forces in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. A man can be seen pacing in his upper-floor apartment after an entire wall of his residential building was sheered off in a shelling attack.

The Russian assault on the Ukrainian capital continued Monday with devastating force, targeting the homes of Kyiv's residents, with deadly consequences. A worker at the crematorium of the city's Baikave cemetery, 40-year-old Ruslan Trishchuk, took a brief smoke break from the sad task of incinerating the dead, dozens of wooden coffins stacked up behind him.

A woman measures a window before covering it with plastic sheets in a building damaged by a bombing the previous day in Kyiv, Ukraine, Monday, March 21, 2022. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Still, the resilient spirit and determined fortitude of the city's survivors was everywhere: A woman measured her apartment window destroyed by bombing a day earlier, before covering it with plastic. Serhii Volosovets, a commander in the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces, fired a pistol at a training camp for volunteers in Brovary, northeast of Kyiv.

And a young woman, 19-year-old Daryna Kovalenko, held her little terrier, Tim, close upon arriving at Kyiv’s train station, after leaving her home in Chernihiv through a humanitarian corridor.