“My two-year-old has started losing her hair from the stress.” “I stay up all night worrying about them,” the 33-year-old single mother said from the garden of an abandoned cottage she found near the now-destroyed Kramatorsk tower. Zakharova then risked it and made a mad 20-kilometre (12-mile) dash with Yevgen and his two little sisters for the relative safety of Kramatorsk. They ended up sheltering for a week in a Galyna school basement from a frightening battle between Russian tanks and Ukrainian forces dug in the surrounding hills. Lyubov Zakharova had spent much of the war trying to keep Yevgen off the streets.
That Yevgen appeared to distinguish the calibre of exploding shells - adopting the shorthand used by Russian and Ukrainian soldiers - worried his mother to no end. “I am not scared,” he declared with a resolute shake of the head. Yevgen kicked a few boulders and wandered through the rubble that layered a yard once filled with children from families operating the surrounding factories and farms. The booms of what could have been 122-calibre shells rolled in from the environs of one of the biggest battles of the eastern front.
“That was a 22,” the serious-looking boy from the ruined hamlet of Galyna volunteered from the edge of his severed block of concrete. The 13-year-old was now contemplating having to run again in the fourth month of Russia’s invasion of its pro-Western neighbour. Yevgen and his mother had already escaped the ruins of one village smoking on the horizon of Ukraine’s increasingly besieged war zone capital Kramatorsk.
An overnight attack had levelled an abandoned building facing the Russians approaching through the nearby woods.
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