A young mum lost 20lbs as she starved while holed up in the besieged Mariupol steelworks in Ukraine.
Anna Zaitseva, 24, said food shortages in the maze of bunkers became so bad some women started to lose their teeth.
Both she and her mother lost 20lbs during the ordeal, while her father’s weight plummeted by three stone.
It comes as Russian forces are now attempting to storm the Azovstal steelworks to crush the last pocket of Ukrainian resistance in Mariupol.
Civilians and Ukrainian troops have taken shelter in the nuclear bunkers underneath the factory.
After weeks of fighting, food and water are now in short supply in the subterranean complex.
Some of the men are having to make a dangerous dash outside to collect rainwater from puddles.
Anna told the Daily Mail : “I would sometimes pretend that I wasn't hungry and take even less food, so I could give some more to my father and my mother.
“We used to light some candles to heat up the water for (my son’s) baby formula.
“All the time (the children) were drawing pictures of food, or playing as if they were in a supermarket and asking, 'Anna, do you want to buy tomatoes? Do you want to buy apples?'”
The young mum has now finally escaped the steelworks, where she was holed up for eight weeks, and is staying in the town of Zaporizhzhia.
Her son, Svyatoslav, was one of 18 children in the bunker.
She said the helpless civilians would also use rainwater or melted snow to stave off dehydration.
Anna added that even going to the loo carried the risk of death as the only working toilet was on the ground floor, which was exposed to Russian shelling.
The dreams of those trapped in the bunkers soon turned to nightmares about Vladimir Putin ’s troops bursting into the steelworks and killing all of them.
Terrified civilians would scream out ‘help me’ in the middle of the night, Anna said.
On April 30, Anna was finally evacuated from the hellhole, although she was held at a Russian ‘filtration camp’ before being allowed to pass through their lines.
She said two female Russian soldiers told her to strip naked.
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The mum was also interrogated by a man in a balaclava at the camp.
Shortly after she was released by Russian forces she discovered her husband Kirill, 22, had been shot in the legs in a clash against Kremlin troops.
The pair managed to speak over the phone on Wednesday, with Kirill asking her if she would still love him if he could never walk again.
Anna pledged her undying love for her husband, who is still holed up in the Azovstal plant.
