‘Four houses have been burnt down and almost every house in the village has been damaged.’

I live in Berezove village. We have 1,500 square metres of land as a vegetable garden. There’s the Mariupol highway nearby. There have been lots and lots of explosions in our vegetable gardens. I don’t know, it has been flying from over there. Those shells don’t come here labelled, you know.

With sleeping pills, I sleep for two hours. I feel it all trembling inside me. When night falls, you think, ‘God knows what will happen’. You don’t think about anything else. And if you hear shellfire starting somewhere, you just don’t want to live. They usually shell in the evening, it starts at eight in winter and at nine in summer.

We had a vegetable garden, some poultry, and could give something to our children, to everyone. Well, now, I don’t really know... Pensions are low, and if you want to buy something, you have to go to Volnovakha or Vuhledar, and the trip there… What can you really afford to buy if the pension is 1,700 hryvnias? It’s really hard. If not for the humanitarian aid they’re giving out, I don’t even know how we’d make it.

My son lives in Donetsk, and my great-grandson will be in Mariupol in June. I have my granddaughter there. We don’t have any Internet connection. I had to go to a person I know and at least I could use his Internet connection to check in with my relatives to see how they were doing.

Two children, two grandchildren, and great-grandson Kyrylo. He’s four years and a half now, was born right before the war, in December. He speaks clearly and distinctly now, his parents had to take the kid to a speech therapist because of his speaking problem, but now he speaks all right. This is good news.

I wish he could come here, I could hug him and take him here for a walk. I wish he could stay with me at least for a summer.