With his shadow of a moustache and baseball cap, Bohdan Levchykov would be your typical teenager anywhere if he didn't embody the tragedy of what has happened to a generation of young Ukrainians after nearly four years of war.

His father Stanislav, a career soldier, was killed defending the country's second city Kharkiv just weeks after Russia invaded in 2022. On top of all they have been through, his mother Iryna, 50, was recently diagnosed with stage-three cancer of the uterus.

Originally published on doc.afp.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.