As the fog of war lifts and the horrors of Bucha and other areas surrounding Kyiv are slowly revealed, Valentina Cherkai reacts with little surprise.
The 21-year-old Red Cross volunteer glimpsed them, speeding in and out of the bombarded city on evacuation missions up to around a fortnight ago.
Hurrying with her team through shellfire to get out those they could, she had no time to stop, or even think, let alone process, but her exhausted eyes scanned sights she never imagined she would see.
“I saw burnt out cars with, how can I describe it,” she hesitates. “Remains of people inside.
“I saw dead bodies near the roads.”
She tries to explain her inability to dwell. “Every evacuation you try and do as fast as you can. The longer you stand the more dangerous it becomes,” she says.
The last time we spoke three weeks ago Valentina had been evacuating Irpin.
Living in the Red Cross office in Kyiv with her colleagues since the outbreak of war she sounded ferociously resilient. Her ability to steel herself to war, at least on the surface, was awe inspiring for a medical student barely beyond her teens.
On Sunday night she speaks through heavy layers of fatigue, audibly eroded by what she has witnessed and the relentless days of caregiving and risk. She is more withdrawn, more distracted.
She struggles to remember dates, timescales, details. She has returned home just once, for half an hour, three days ago, to “collect necessities.”
She recalls in Bucha going to evacuate an elderly couple who had not left their apartment for around three weeks as fighting raged around them.
To get to them they had to pass through a checkpoint.
“We said we had come to take an old lady and an old man,” she describes. “They checked our car and then allowed us to go to the house.”
They did not answer her knocks at the door for a very long time, to the point where she and the team became nervous.
She recalls: “The door opened in the end. The building was partly destroyed and there were a lot of unexploded missiles in the yard.
“They wanted to catch their cat, get their things, but at last we could take them with us in the car. We told them to hurry, we are risking our lives.
“When they realised they were in a safe car with safe people they calmed down.
“They told us they were freezing, there was no heating or electricity. They had little food, they were scared they would starve.”
In the centre of Bucha, Valentina collected wounded men from a hospital.
“Their legs were shot through,” she says.
The 21-year-old is careful as she chooses her words. She cannot feel emotion, she says, because it would not allow her to do her work.
Fresh from two nights and days helping in a Kyiv hospital, she admits: “For now I don’t think it affected me, because I was ready for it.
“There is a lot of emotion but I can’t express it, I have to stay neutral. I am trying to stay as calm as possible. I will try and deal with this afterwards when everything will end and I’m in a safer place.”
For now, she says Kyiv is a little quieter. There are fewer air raid sirens.
She admits she barely knows how life is looking on the streets as she has no time to absorb it.
But she is wary “everything can change in one or two days or hours” and airstrikes are still a threat.
For the next couple of days Valentina will rest as a curfew stops her and her teams returning to Bucha and surrounding areas. The military must make the heavily-mined areas safe.
Then, the young woman will return to support those civilians who are left in the debris, as best she can.
You can support the work of the Red Cross, by donating to the DEC Humanitarian Appeal, www.redcross.org.uk/Ukraine
