Svitlana Marchenko has gone to great lengths to keep her young daughter safe from the Russian attacks on their home town of Mariupol, but as the civilian death toll rises in the besieged city, she fears her parents are among the dead.
The young mother knew it wasn't safe at her home in the Left Bank district — an area that has since been hit by Russian air strikes — so she relocated to a safer suburb before shelling started there too.
Then Svitlana moved to an icebreaker boat that was docked in the port. She was able to take shelter there until about a week ago.
Ultimately, no place in Mariupol proved safe and the young mother decided to leave, driving out of the city with strangers and eventually catching a train to the western city of Lviv.
She is nervous and desperate for a plan as she boards a bus she says is "to nowhere".
"I have no relatives," Svitlana said.
The bus will take her to Warsaw, but she knows no-one there and will rely on the charity of volunteers and the Polish government to survive.
"My parents stayed and most likely did not survive. I asked people who live in that area [and] there are no undestroyed houses," Svitlana said.
"My pets are left, friends are left. [My] relatives disappeared."
Russian missile strikes have pummelled Mariupol and reduced much of it to rubble, residents have been trapped with little food, shelter or services.
Efforts to establish humanitarian corridors out of the city had largely failed until recent days.
"When it started to rain, we were very happy. We stood under the drain and collected water, because we did not know when there would be water," Svitlana said.
The city that is 'no more'
The journey out of Mariupol is treacherous.
There have been reports of buses full of children being fired on by Russian forces, of forced evacuations across the border into Russia and of difficulty at checkpoints for civilians trying to escape on foot.
For three weeks, Eduard and Iryna Orel's family took shelter in their Mariupol basement, but when the explosions they had been hearing all around them literally hit their home, they decided to start walking out of the besieged city.
It was March 17 when this family started its journey out of Mariupol, a city they say is "no more".
Their daughter Maria Lapeikina describes how they made it out and what little is left behind.
"In our yard where we lived with our parents, a shell flew in and blew up our yard and our windows were broken. In the end, we all had to leave," she said.
Her father said the attacks were indiscriminate.
"They attack everyone without exception. A shell came to [within] three metres from the corner of the house. This is our house, there were no soldiers there," Eduard said.
Maria said the family was a group of 15 people, walking 10 kilometres south-west on a main road out of Mariupol before they found space on a bus to the small town of Mangush.
From there, other civilians escaping the city gave them lifts to Berdyansk where they were intercepted by the Red Cross who brought them to Zaporozhye.
It's then they found space on an evacuation train headed for Lviv.
They escaped with what they were able to carry and the stories of what they'd seen.
When asked for photos or videos of the damage to their homes and neighbourhoods, Maria said Russian soldiers forced them to delete the evidence from their phones.
"We were not allowed to leave anything. On the borders of the occupied territories, Russians check phones. Phones were taken and checked. My father was beaten," she said gesturing to cuts on Eduard's ear and hands.
While she's speaking, her mother Iryna reaches into a bag and starts unwrapping a small parcel.
The family collected metallic fragments from their backyard and believe them to be pieces of the explosive that hit their home.
The dead and the missing
Russian forces moved into the city on March 2, but when attacks intensified three weeks ago, a Telegram channel dedicated to posting photographs and videos from inside the city started to share information about missing persons.
Post after post, people were trying to figure out if their loved ones were alive.
The civilian death toll in Mariupol is unclear, but this week a spokesman for the city's Mayor said nearly 5,000 people, including about 210 children, had been killed.
Associated Press has documented mass graves in the city and air strikes on hospitals.
UNICEF representative on the ground in Ukraine, James Elder, told the ABC "there are few places worse on Earth right now than Mariupol".
"Heavily populated residential areas are increasingly in the firing line and that's where children are, that's where families are. They're desperately short of food," he said.
"We know the stories about water. More than two weeks ago, I was hearing from people in Mariupol who were trying to take water out of oil heaters. So, it's desperate and deteriorating."
The Orel family said there was no city left for them to return to.
"Mariupol is being destroyed. Consider that the city is no more. Much has been destroyed, many have died and many have left," Eduard said.
On Friday, local authorities provided an update on a theatre in Mariupol that was destroyed while being used as a shelter, saying they now believed 300 people had been killed in the strike.
The theatre was a refuge for vulnerable people and was hit despite satellite images showing the Russian word for 'children' etched into the ground beside the three-storey building.
Russia denies the attack.
The United Nations has designated grave violations against children during times of war, including the killing or maiming of children, denying them access to humanitarian assistance and attacks against hospitals and schools.
All of which have been documented in Mariupol.
"At the very least — the very least — if those grave violations were to stop, then children would be in a safer context versus a war of indiscriminate attacks," Mr Elder said.
Refusing to surrender
Much has been written about the importance of Mariupol to Vladimir Putin. The city has geographical, economic, and symbolic significance in his mission and there is little sign of Russia relenting.
And last Monday, Ukraine refused to surrender the city. Although Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has now said his government is prepared to discuss adopting a neutral status as part of a peace deal with Russia.
Mr Elder said until a decision was made to stop the war, the human cost would continue to climb.
"So long as the war continues, so long as indiscriminate attacks continue – and obviously Mariupol is the darkest example of that right now – we will just keep seeing children killed," he said.
"Our response is to put an operation in place for the worst case scenario of continued fighting at this scale, indiscriminate attacks and this out-flux of people – or internally displaced [people]."
Eduard has escaped the city and, as a Baptist preacher, he says he is a pacifist, but he says he understands why surrender is not an option.
"The Russians announced that they would kill the soldiers of Mariupol, especially the Azov Battalion," he said.
"How are they supposed to give up? Either they will destroy our enemies or they will surrender and be shot.
"They don't have any choice."
