Death comes to a soccer field

if I had legs or not. Then I turned and saw my leg.”

Flashes from shelling light up the medics as they stand in a parking lot waiting for the next emergency call.

In the hospital nearby, a father buries his face into his dead 16-year-old son’s head. The boy, draped under a bloodstained sheet, has succumbed to wounds from shelling on the soccer field where he was playing.

Hospital staff wipe blood off a gurney. Others treat a man whose face is obscured by blood-soaked bandages.

The medics prepare to go out, strapping on their helmets.

They find a wounded woman in an apartment and take her in an ambulance for treatment, her hand shaking rapidly from apparent shock. She yells out in pain as the medics wheel her into the hospital.

On the darkening horizon, orange light flashes at the edge of the sky and loud bangs reverberate in the air.

Children will play

to the sight of a camera, raises an arm and waves.

But the mother underneath has tears in her eyes.

They’re lying together on the floor in a gym-turnedshelter, waiting out the fighting that rages outside.

Many families have young children. And as children can do anywhere, some giggle and run around the floor covered with blankets.

“God forbid that any rockets hit. That’s why we’ve gathered everyone here,” says local volunteer Ervand Tovmasyan, accompanied by his young son.

He says locals have brought supplies. But as the Russian siege continues, the shelter lacks enough drinking water, food, and gasoline for generators.

Many there remember the shelling in 2014, when Russia-backed separatists briefly captured the city.

“Now the same thing is happening — but now we’re with children,” says Anna Delina, who fled Donetsk in 2014.

Tanks in a row

In a field in Volnovakha on the outskirts of Mariupol, a row of four green tanks hold their cannons at roughly 45 degrees.