The Wider Image: Inside a Ukrainian village where farmers stay for the wheat harvest but fear Russian...
The wheat has been sown for the coming season but nobody in Yakovlivka, a small farming village outside Kharkiv, in north-eastern Ukraine, knows if it will be harvested. A week after Russian forces launched their invasion on February 24, the village was bombed. "We were sitting in our cellar for four hours and read the Lord's Prayer. We wrapped the kids into blankets and just couldn't fall asleep until three or four in the morning," said Nina Bonderenko, who works on her cousin's farm. Since the village was bombed, residents say all certainty has been lost. "We have planted all the wheat. But will we be able to grow anything and harvest it under the current circumstances?" said Vadim Aleksandrovich, director of Granary of Sloboda, a farming company that emerged from a former Soviet-era collective farm. "Only God knows. We are doing our best." With the country at war, the uncertainty facing Yakovlivka is shared across the country by farmers who produce the grain that has historically made Ukraine, the world's fifth biggest wheat exporter, one of the great breadbaskets of the world. REUTERS/Thomas Peter SEARCH "YAKOVLIVKA" FOR THIS STORY. SEARCH "WIDER IMAGE" FOR ALL STORIES. TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
