Third-grader Maria Shanovska is mulling which toy to pack in her emergency evacuation bag should the Russian forces massing at the border invade her war-shattered town in east Ukraine, IgbereTV reports.
“A family photo, my favourite toy and some food so that I don’t get hungry,” she tells her mother Natalia as they debate what they would need most should their traumatised country plunge into an even bloodier war.
Shanovska’s town of Krasnogorivka sits in government territory close to the impoverished outskirts of Russian-backed separatist stronghold Donetsk.
Their apartment block has had no heating since a 2014 pro-EU revolution provoked the Kremlin into annexing Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula and then backing armed insurgents in the ex-Soviet state’s industrial southeast.
Natalia knows the pains of war and personal loss. Her building has been hit four times by shells and her flat relies on the whims of a makeshift wood-fired stove.
“We live in constant fear,” the mother of six says. “Our neighbour was wounded by shrapnel three months ago.”
Yet even the frontline town’s 15,000 remaining residents — familiar with life of the barest subsistence — are now more frightened than ever at the prospects of what might happen next.
More than 100,000 Russian soldiers have massed near Ukraine’s borders in what Washington warns could be a precursor to an all-out invasion designed to reverse Kyiv’s steady drift toward the West
