
The pro-Russian soldiers from the separatist-controlled area of Donbas arrived one day in mid-March.
“They just walked into our shelter and said that women and children must leave it,” recounted a young woman who had been hiding with her family in a suburb of the heavily shelled Ukrainian port city of Mariupol. “We asked if it was possible to stay at all, and they said no, that this is the order. We did not know where they were taking us.”