Why the Lviv Herald Does Not Publish Photographs of the Dead

By Matthew Parish

Thursday 29 October 2026

War journalism presents editors with choices that do not arise in ordinary times. Some are questions of accuracy, some of personal safety and some of military security. Others are questions of dignity. Amongst the latter is a question that has confronted the Lviv Herald repeatedly since we began writing about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: should we publish photographs showing the bodies of people who have been killed? Our answer is no, save in the most extraordinary circumstances where an overwhelming evidential or historical necessity might require otherwise.

This morning, 29 October 2026, that editorial policy acquired a particularly immediate significance. A Russian attack struck Dnipro’s principal railway station, causing deaths and injuries among people at or around one of Ukraine’s most important civilian transport hubs. Emergency services attended the scene and photographs of the aftermath began circulating rapidly on social media, messaging applications and elsewhere.

Some of those photographs show what happened with a degree of immediacy that words cannot easily reproduce. They are evidence of the appalling human consequences of an attack upon a place that forms part of the ordinary civilian infrastructure of Ukraine: a railway station, somewhere people go because they are travelling to work, visiting relatives, returning home or simply trying to move from one Ukrainian city to another. Some of the images circulating after the attack show dead bodies. The Lviv Herald will not publish those photographs.

This is not because we wish to sanitise the war. Quite the opposite. Anyone who reads this newspaper regularly will know that we have never attempted to disguise the nature of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. War involves torn bodies, blood, amputations, burns, screams, grief and death. Those realities should not be disguised behind euphemisms about “kinetic activity”, “collateral damage” or other antiseptic expressions devised to make organised violence easier to contemplate. Nevertheless, acknowledging death and exhibiting the dead are different things.

The dead remain people

The first principle underlying our policy is extraordinarily simple. A dead person remains a person deserving of dignity, even though death has deprived that person of the ability to insist upon it for themselves.

The people lying dead at Dnipro railway station this morning did not wake up intending to become photographs. They did not consent to having the final condition of their bodies distributed across Telegram, X, Facebook, newspapers and television screens around the world. They were people going about their lives in a railway station until, suddenly and without their consent, they became casualties of war.

Until shortly before the attack, each was somebody with the innumerable attributes that make a human being rather than a casualty statistic. They had names, families, memories, possessions, arguments, appointments and plans. Some may have been expected home. Some may have been travelling to see somebody they loved. Some may not yet have been formally identified when photographs of their bodies began circulating around the internet. Death does not extinguish our obligation to respect those things and, in some respects, it increases it.

A living person can object to the use of an image, demand its removal, explain its context or turn away from a camera. A dead person can do none of these things. The journalist therefore possesses enormous power over somebody who has suddenly become incapable of exercising any power at all. Restraint is the proper response to that imbalance, particularly where publication serves no substantial informational purpose beyond creating shock.

There is another person whose interests must also be considered: the relative who has not yet received the telephone call. One of the most horrifying possibilities created by instantaneous social media is that a mother, husband, daughter or friend might discover that somebody they love has died not through a visit from the police, a telephone call from a hospital or a conversation with another member of the family, but by recognising a coat, a shoe or a face in an image being circulated online. The public interest required to justify imposing that experience upon somebody would have to be overwhelming. Ordinarily it does not exist.

Evidence does not require exhibition

There is an argument for publishing such photographs that deserves to be taken seriously. Wars produce propaganda. Governments lie, armies minimise civilian casualties and atrocities are denied. Photographic evidence may therefore become important in establishing what actually happened and in preserving a record against subsequent attempts to rewrite history.

There have been moments when photographs of the dead have transformed public understanding of atrocities. Images from liberated concentration camps, the Vietnam War, the Balkans and innumerable other conflicts have acquired historical importance precisely because they prevented comfortable societies from pretending that distant horrors were less terrible than they actually were. It would therefore be intellectually dishonest to pretend that photographs of dead human beings can never possess evidential, journalistic or historical value.

But preservation is not the same thing as publication and publication is not the same thing as indiscriminate reproduction. A photograph may be important evidence and ought therefore to be preserved by investigators, historians, journalists, prosecutors or human rights organisations. It does not follow that the same photograph belongs on the front page of a newspaper or in somebody’s social-media feed. The evidential value of an image can frequently be described without displaying the body it contains.

In the case of Dnipro, there is no obvious evidential gap that requires us to publish photographs of corpses in order to establish that people died. The attack, its location and its casualties can be documented through official accounts, eyewitness evidence, photographs of the physical destruction and independent journalism. Showing a dead passenger therefore adds remarkably little factual information. What it principally adds is shock and shock should never be confused with information.

Journalism is not social media

This distinction has become increasingly important because the modern information environment rewards images according to their emotional intensity. The more horrifying a photograph, the more likely somebody is to stop scrolling. The more shocking the video, the more likely it is to be shared. Human suffering consequently acquires an economic currency measured in clicks, reposts, reactions and engagement. A newspaper should resist that logic rather than imitate it.

There is nothing intrinsically courageous about publishing something gruesome and restraint is not necessarily cowardice. Editorial judgement consists precisely in deciding that some things which we possess the technical and legal ability to publish should nevertheless remain unpublished. If newspapers merely reproduced whatever material generated the strongest emotional response, there would be little need for editors at all.

The Lviv Herald adopts a particularly firm version of this principle in relation to death. We do not want a human corpse to become decoration for an article, a device for attracting attention or a means of increasing the emotional force of a headline. A person’s final physical condition is not a journalistic commodity merely because somebody had a camera available when that person died.

There is also a question of propaganda

There is another reason for caution in wartime. Images of mutilated bodies have political power, which is precisely why propagandists use them. A photograph of a dead civilian can be employed to communicate outrage against the person responsible for killing them and that outrage may be entirely justified. Yet the fact that an image advances a cause with which an editor sympathises does not remove the editor’s obligations towards the person depicted.

Ukraine does not need to imitate the aesthetics of propaganda to explain what is happening to it. The moral case against attacks upon civilians does not become stronger because the dead are displayed more graphically. Indeed, treating Ukrainian victims with dignity is itself a statement about the values for which Ukraine claims to be fighting.

There is already something profoundly compelling about an empty railway platform, a damaged carriage, shattered glass, abandoned luggage, emergency workers carrying stretchers or the faces of survivors. Such photographs can document violence without reducing its victims to objects. An abandoned suitcase tells us that somebody expected to continue a journey. A damaged child’s toy may tell us something about the life that surrounded an explosion. A bloodstained platform may tell us what happened without identifying the person whose blood it was.

The absence of a body from the photograph does not imply the absence of death from the story. Good journalism can allow readers to understand horror without forcing them to inspect a corpse, just as good writing can describe suffering without exploiting it.

There may be exceptional cases

No responsible editorial rule should pretend that circumstances can never arise in which competing considerations become overwhelming. If photographic evidence of bodies were indispensable to proving a major war crime that was otherwise being successfully concealed or denied, an editor might face a genuinely difficult decision. Historical photographs may also acquire a different status with the passage of time, particularly once identification, consent from surviving relatives and questions of evidential importance can be considered carefully.

There are also specialised contexts in which images of the dead have legitimate purposes. Police, prosecutors, forensic investigators and organisations searching for missing people may have compelling reasons to retain and sometimes circulate such images for identification or evidential purposes. That is an entirely different purpose from illustrating a newspaper article and the distinction matters.

The Lviv Herald therefore does not claim that an image of a dead human being can never possess legitimate public value. We say something narrower and more practical: photographs displaying identifiable or graphic human remains will not ordinarily be published by this newspaper merely because they illustrate the brutality of an event we are reporting. The burden of justification must fall upon publication, not upon restraint.

Dnipro

That brings us back to Dnipro. The attack this morning requires no embellishment. People at a railway station were killed and others were injured. Rescue workers, doctors and police were left to deal with the consequences while families elsewhere waited for information about people who had been travelling through the city. Those facts are terrible enough without converting the bodies of those killed into illustrations.

The Lviv Herald can report what happened. We can investigate why the attack occurred. We can examine the weapon used, the pattern of Russian attacks upon Ukrainian railway infrastructure, the military and political significance of attacks upon civilian transport and the consequences for the people of Dnipro. We can interview witnesses and survivors, photograph the railway station and describe what happened there in uncompromising language. None of those journalistic functions requires us to display the bodies of the people who died.

Those people have already paid the ultimate price for being in the wrong place when a weapon arrived. They owe us nothing more, and their families owe us nothing either. Their deaths are matters of legitimate public concern but the physical condition of their bodies need not thereby become public property.

There is a temptation in wartime journalism to believe that bearing witness means showing everything. It does not. Bearing witness means establishing the truth, preserving the evidence and telling people what happened. It also means remembering that the subjects of journalism are human beings rather than content and that the obligations of a journalist do not disappear at the moment a subject dies.

The dead cannot give consent. They cannot complain about an undignified photograph, ask an editor to choose another image or explain that their children might see it. The editor must therefore exercise the judgement that they can no longer exercise themselves, with a presumption in favour of dignity rather than spectacle.

The Lviv Herald will report the dead. We will count them and, where appropriate and possible, we will name them. We will investigate how they died and who was responsible. We will not pretend that their deaths were clean, painless or abstract, nor will we shrink from describing the brutality of war when accuracy requires it.

But we will not ordinarily exhibit their bodies. That is not censorship and it is not an attempt to make war appear less horrible than it is. It is an acknowledgement that journalism has obligations not only towards the living readers who want to know what happened, but also towards the dead people who can no longer ask us to treat them with respect.