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<\/div>\nKateryna says she does not know where her grandson ended up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Ukraine: <\/b><\/p>\n
Kateryna’s blue eyes fill with tears as she tells how police ordered her grandson to evacuate from the frontline town of Avdiivka in Ukraine, where she lives in a cellar.<\/p>\n
Police are forcibly evacuating any children left as the Russians bombard the town from three sides and the mayor says not a single building remains undamaged.<\/p>\n
“They took my grandson, he’s 15,” says 64-year-old Kateryna, sitting in an underground shelter recently opened for residents in the eastern town.<\/p>\n
“They’ve started evacuation by order and they took him. He didn’t want to leave and his mum didn’t want to leave. Home is home, although they also lived in a cellar.”<\/p>\n
Kateryna says she does not know where her grandson ended up due to problems making telephone calls. He was going to a nearby town before being taken further away.<\/p>\n
She admits he may be better off, however.<\/p>\n
“Maybe I’m even glad. Maybe it’s better there. They fire here and you can’t sleep at night.”<\/p>\n
Avdiivka’s mayor Vitaliy Barabash said Monday he knew of eight children still in the town, accusing parents of “hiding” them.<\/p>\n
“We will pick them up and take them away,” he vowed.<\/p>\n
‘Living in this hell’<\/strong><\/p>\n The organiser of the newly opened shelter for residents, Mykhailo Puryshev, says police evacuated two children on Monday, each accompanied by a parent.<\/p>\n The 37-year-old is well-known for evacuating people from his home city of Mariupol until it fell to the Russians.<\/p>\n A local resident carries a tree branch for firewood in the frontline town of Avdiivka, Donetsk region<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He has set up similar shelters in the war’s worst hotspots.<\/p>\n He estimates just over 2,000 people remain in Avdiivka, which is close to Russian-occupied Donetsk and encircled to the east, south and west by Moscow’s forces.<\/p>\n He has little patience with families staying with their children, whom he calls “hostages of their parents”.<\/p>\n He points to a missile strike that killed a five-month-old boy and his grandmother and says children living in cellars sometimes “don’t see the sky for three months”.<\/p>\n A few steps down from street level, the large shelter he runs is bustling with locals and volunteers.<\/p>\n Organisers dug a 40-metre well to access water for showers and washing machines. There is even a hairdressing service.<\/p>\n “When you turn on a tap and water flows out, it’s magic for people,” says Puryshev, “because they have been living in this hell for a year”.<\/p>\n ‘Will we survive?’<\/strong><\/p>\n One man, Sergiy, 68, removes his fur hat and winter coat to reveal matted hair and long-unwashed clothing as he is helped into a shower.<\/p>\n He emerges clean and heads for a haircut.<\/p>\n Two retired women sit watching their clothes swirling in the washing machines.<\/p>\n Apart from shelling and dogs barking, Avdiivka is a ghost town and eerily quiet. There is almost no sound on the streets of the town where more than 30,000 used to live.<\/p>\n People wait in front of washing machines in a shelter run by volunteers, where they can charge their devices, take shower and do laundry<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A few passing vehicles carry soldiers. The air smells of coal smoke from stovepipes sticking out of cellars.<\/p>\n One soldier likens Avdiivka to “Chernobyl”, the town in northern Ukraine devastated by a nuclear accident in 1986.<\/p>\n Lyudmyla, 66, is busily chopping branches for the stove in the cellar where she lives with six others.<\/p>\n She says she is “constantly tense and afraid, not knowing what will happen: will we survive, will we not survive?”<\/p>\n “Everyone has got much thinner and greyer,” she says.<\/p>\n ‘Too scary’<\/strong><\/p>\n “We sit in the cellar because it’s too dangerous to be in a flat.”<\/p>\n She has heard she can wash clothes at the new shelter, a 10-minute walk away, but has not yet ventured over.<\/p>\n “So far, it’s too scary to go there,” she says, as an explosion rings out.<\/p>\n Avdiivka no longer has state services such as an ambulance or rescuers.<\/p>\n In the central hospital, two remaining doctors say they can offer only basic treatment and stabilise seriously injured patients, who must be evacuated by police or volunteers.<\/p>\n The lone surgeon, Mykhailo Orlov, says civilians get hit by shrapnel, bullets and exploding mortars.<\/p>\n They suffer “open traumatic brain injury, penetrating chest and abdomen wounds (and) injuries to upper and lower limbs”, he says.<\/p>\n Medical director Vitaliy Sytnyk opens the door of one of the abandoned wards, dislodging newly cracked glass.<\/p>\n “That’s the latest (damage),” he comments sadly.<\/p>\n “And we put so much effort and money into renovations.”<\/p>\n (Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"3nqlabo8\"](\"https:\/\/c.ndtvimg.com\/2023-04\/3nqlabo8_ukraine-avdiivka-afp_625x300_05_April_23.jpg\"\/)
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