Photos this week: May 18-25, 2023
The coffin of Oleksandr Shargorodskyi, a Ukrainian soldier killed in Bakhmut, is carried during his funeral in Trebukhiv, Ukraine, on Sunday, May 21.
Nicole Tung/The New York Times/Redux

The week in 32 photos

Updated 2336 GMT (0736 HKT) May 25, 2023

The coffin of Oleksandr Shargorodskyi, a Ukrainian soldier killed in Bakhmut, is carried during his funeral in Trebukhiv, Ukraine, on Sunday, May 21.
Nicole Tung/The New York Times/Redux

Ukraine has claimed it still controls parts of Bakhmut after Russian forces said they had captured the besieged eastern city.

The conflicting claims follow a monthslong slog where Russian soldiers have had to grind for every inch of territory. The battle for Bakhmut has been compared to the kind of fighting seen in World War I, with soldiers fighting in a hellish landscape of mud and trenches, trees and buildings mangled by artillery fire.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in Japan this week for a G7 meeting, compared the damage in Bakhmut to the destruction wrought on Hiroshima after it was hit by an atomic bomb. But he said Sunday "we are keeping on, we are fighting."

Here are some of the stories that made headlines over the past week, as well as some photos that caught our eye.