At the door of the evacuation bus in the centre of the southern Ukrainian port city of Mykolaiv, Lyubov Verba squeezes the arm of her daughter Diana as her son Vyacheslav, 12, looks on.
It is a brief and poignant moment. Lyubov is tired and drawn. Unable to sleep under the Russian shelling that has targeted the city since the beginning of the war in February, she has developed a tremor.
Now she is leaving for Odesa, two hours drive away along the coast, accompanied by one of her daughters, 15-year-old Ksenia.
Once a city of almost 500,000 people, Mykolaiv’s population has almost halved over the past five months. More residents, like Lyubov, are leaving every day.
Lyubov’s husband, Serhiy, will remain in the city with Vyacheslav and Diana, 20, who is married to a Ukrainian soldier. They say they do not want to leave.
“I’m very nervous about the situation,” Serhiy admits after his wife’s bus has departed. “But for her, it was much worse. When the shelling woke her up, she could not get back to sleep. She couldn’t stay here any longer. We spent so much time in the basement and she had developed a shake.
“It’s like they [the Russians] have a schedule,” he adds. “They start firing at three in the morning and it goes on until 7 or 8am. People feel safer during the day. It’s not so heavy as it is at night.”
As if to prove the point, that morning, just after 3am, a missile had struck a few blocks away, leaving a huge crater in the middle of a car wash and blowing out the windows of the surrounding houses.
The house of Oleksandr Golovkin, 49, was one of the closest to the blast, which scattered glass throughout his home and cracked a wall from the floor to the ceiling. Just below his window, a section of rocket fin is visible.
Golovkin, a greengrocer, says he had a premonition of something bad happening and had slept in a house in a village on the outskirts of the city.
“You know,” he says. “I knew something was going to happen. So yesterday, we moved to the village and then the same night we moved this happened. God saved me!”
Golovkin has a sheet of plastic folded in his arms which he brought to seal up his damaged windows.
He echoes Serhiy’s remark. “It’s like they have a timetable,” he says. “They start at three in the morning.”
A week before, the nearby university was struck. The casing of the munition is still visible, burst open among the debris.
While the owner of the carwash and other businesses are busy sweeping up the dust and rubble, at the university the damage is too much for brooms and shovels. A drift of rubble and glass has spilled across the pavement.
“Out of 148 days of war,” says mayor Alexander Senkevich, “there have been 21 days when we have not been bombarded.”
Some damage from the war is less obvious.
Far from the city itself, the main water pipe that supplies Mykolaiv has been damaged by Russian fire. The city is pumping brackish, saline water to wash and supply toilets. Drinking water comes from tankers that residents must queue for.
Food is another issue. Next to the water queue, Vaneeva Valentyna, 68, and Vasyukova Rymma, 84, arrived at 9am, like two dozen others wanting to be first in the queue, for food distribution that begins at 2pm.
“Come two o’clock, there will be 200 people here,” says Valentyna.
Despite the missile landing on the car wash, however, people say it has been a “quiet day” – the second in a row.
The shops are open, as are some of the cafes. By 11am, there are families walking in the street. People are running errands. Some sit at the pavement cafes.
A young man in yellow trainers lies on a bench under a tree with his head in an older woman’s lap, perhaps his mother, as she scrolls through her phone.
Over the bridge across the Southern Bug river, to the Odesa side, a column of thick black smoke is visible, rising beyond the derricks of the city’s port.
Quiet days in Mykolaiv are never really quiet.
