In pictures: How ordinary ­Ukrainians are coping six months into Russia's invasion

Since February of this year however when Russia launched its all-out invasion, I’ve returned to the country several times, the most recent visit being over the past month.

In that time, I travelled to some of the towns and cities most devastated by the fighting and witnessed how ordinary ­people are coping six months on in a ­conflict with no end in sight.

In Borodyanka I saw a ruined ­landscape where apartment blocks and those ­civilians inside were ­indiscriminately shelled and rocketed. In Bucha I saw the final resting place of those victims of atrocities that will be remembered in the same way as the massacres that took the lives of innocent Bosnians in Srebrenica and Vietnamese at My Lai.

In Kyiv I watched recently as the city’s citizens showed their defiance during Ukraine’s Independence Day by lining the city’s elegant Khreshchatyk Street with destroyed Russian tanks and ­armoured vehicles.

And finally, over the past week or so I’ve been in the south of the country and the city of Mykolaiv which has faced ­relentless bombardment over the past six months taking a heavy toll on the civilian population.

It’s from Mykolaiv too that much of the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive to try and retake the Russian occupied neighbouring city of Kherson is being launched. This photo essay offers a few glimpses from the most recent visit along with some images taken earlier this year at the start of the war.

Shattered windows on the Mykolaiv Hotel which was hit by Russian rockets

As a portfolio of the war, they focus mainly on the conflict’s toll on ordinary people who could never have imagine this time last year that their lives and country would be turned upside down.

As a bitter winter looms, Ukrainians know that things will get worse before they get better. But their ­determination to rid their country of its Russian ­invaders and restore peace and freedom to their nation is inspiring to witness.

These ­photographs I hope go a little way to showing the struggle they face and the courage with which they face it.

The Garden of Remembrance in Kyiv

On a chilly morning in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, the wife and daughter of 32-year-old Volodymyr Rurak kneel in the street as his coffin approaches the Saints Peter and Paul Garrison Church carried by pallbearers

In more peaceful times, more than one million people a day rode the trains of the Kyiv Metro. The three-line network boasts underground stations decorated with marble friezes, mosaics, chandeliers and vaulted ceilings. Since the Russian invasion those stations have also served as emergency shelters for an estimated 15,000 Kyiv residents. Here Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is seen giving a television address on one of the station’s many screens.

An apartment block damaged by Russian shelling on the south-east outskirts of Mykolaiv