Maria Goncharova still clearly recalls those dark days when soldiers first came to her village.

In the second of a series of articles on the humanitarian crisis resulting from the conflict Foreign Editor David Pratt reports from frontline communities in the country's volatile Luhansk Oblast region.

As a fragile ceasefire holds, emergency specialists from aid agency MercyCorps are working under difficult conditions to bring relief provision to some of the most vulnerable.

This series of articles marks a new partnership between the Sunday Herald and MercyCorps that will see us reporting on humanitarian crises around the world where the agency is responding.

She and her family were bundled into a truck covered by a tarpaulin and taken some distance to a compound where they were held for a few nights.

"We had to sleep on the ground and local people would come and bring us bread that they would throw over the wall to us," Maria says, casting her mind back to those difficult and dangerous times.

Nadezhda Zhurova too has similar memories from that period. For her it is was the constant gnawing hunger and pleading with her mother for a morsel of the bread that the war had made so scarce that remains indelibly etched in her mind. That war, the Second World War, ended over 70 years ago. Today, however these elderly women, who were both around 12 years old when the Nazis trundled into eastern Ukraine, find themselves once again caught in the

maelstrom of a conflict gripping their country.

Having survived the ravages of the Nazi occupation and the subsequent Cold War decades there is something especially sad about the cruel twist of fate that has left these women and others of their generation hunkered down in basements as shells fall or uprooted from homes they have often built with their own hands.

For some like 85-year-old Nadezhda, it has become a traumatic, confusing and bewildering experience that is now proving all too much for her health.

"Sometimes she wakes up in bed and asks for the radio to be turned on to hear the latest news from the front,"

explains her daughter Valentina, who says her mother's mind has now blurred both wars past and present into one enduring nightmare.

Just as in the past, so again today dark times have descended on eastern Ukraine where more than 6,000 people have lost their lives in the last year alone.

A million more like Maria and Nadezhda have found themselves joining the human flotsam of refugees and displaced that are the tragic hallmark of all wars across the globe.

Before speaking to Maria and her husband Mikhail "Misha" I had gone to see for myself all that remains of their house in the village of Triokhizbenka, a hamlet that sits along the frontline of this war between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatist fighters that has rumbled on for the past year.

During this period Maria and Misha, like other residents of Triokhizbenka, lived for almost seven months under near constant threat of bombardment.

At the entrance to their front yard the tell-tale shrapnel holes that perforate a high metal gate is a forewarning of the greater destruction that lies inside.

The mortar rounds or shells that fell have blown in most of the windows and brought down chunks of the ceiling.

It was only by chance that Maria and Misha survived.


"I was outside and Misha indoors when they started firing from both sides," Maria recalls of that December day last year. "I was deafened for a few moments by the explosion then started shouting Misha, Misha, where are you?"

On the impact of the first shell Misha had run outside looking for his wife, himself shouting back at Maria to try and take cover.

All in the space of a few moments, the house they had built with the help of neighbours and lived in for 20 years was destroyed.

For the next three weeks this frail couple lived in the ruin of the building without electricity.

In the midst of Ukraine's bitter sub-zero winter temperatures they cooked their dwindling supply of food on an open fire in the yard.

As we talk in a neighbour's house that has become their temporary home, I listen as Maria tells me about the special relationship that she and Misha have had during their 50 years of marriage.

They tell, too, of the experiences they have shared in the past including the Second World War, surviving typhoid and coping with the schizophrenia from which Misha now suffers.

"We have been through good times and bad times together, he doesn't smoke or drink and is good man," she confides, becoming emotional before openly weeping.

"Even during World War Two it was not like this," she insists, as Misha sitting nearby nods his head in agreement.

With the collapse of eastern Ukraine's administrative infrastructure because of the war, the couple have not received any pension payments for three months, and are now struggling to make ends meet and acquire the medication that Misha needs for his condition.

"This is no place to live in the future, for the past two nights there has been shooting again," Maria says. And this, too, despite the fact that a ceasefire is meant to be in place here in Luhansk Oblast and across eastern Ukraine.

There was something immensely dignified and touching about the way Maria and Misha have endured the hardship of this war using their obvious love for one other as the most effective of coping mechanisms.

But sometimes such people need other material help when such disasters befall them.

To that end international aid agencies like Mercy Corps, whose European operation runs out of Edinburgh, has already started to make its presence felt here.

While it remains early days in the provision of the humanitarian relief so badly needed across the region, it is the most vulnerable members of the community, the infirm and elderly like Maria and her husband, that Mercy Corps' cash voucher, reconstruction and other programmes will focus on.

If the village of Triokhizbenka has borne more than its fair share of the destruction, killing and maiming in this war, so too has the larger town of Stanitsa Luhanska a few hours' drive away Journeying into its rain-soaked centre a few weeks ago, it became immediately apparent how widespread the damage here is from the shelling.

In the town's main square, a giant socialist realist statue of Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin stands defiantly surrounded by burned-out crushed and buckled buildings that have taken the full impact of artillery fire.

From the town's centre the last government checkpoint and emplacements sit barely 800 yards away, a short buffer of no-man's land the only territory between the opposing side's positions.

Dr Svetlana Semenenko headed up the local medical team that coped with the flow of casualties at the height of the fighting in Stanitsa Luhanska.

The hospital was only partially functioning during this time because of the damage inflicted on it. At least 20 shells fell around the building during an initial bombardment and many more in a subsequent barrage that blew the windows out, says Semenenko.

"We worked through the bombardments, we had no choice and it was a real test of nerve," she tells me as we walk through a ravaged neighbourhood.

It was here I was to meet another elderly woman who, like Maria Goncharova and Nadezhda Zhurova, had suffered terribly because of the fighting.

It was back in August that rockets rained down on the neighbourhood in which Anna Dmitriienko, 72, lived.

"I lost consciousness and was bleeding badly," she explains as she shows me around the yard and outhouse that was flattened.

Even now a huge crater sits in the middle of the ruined building and Anna points to the grey metal remains of the casing from one of the Grad missiles that landed as part of the barrage decimating the area.

The conditions under which Anna now lives are appalling. Cold and in a damp rundown shack of a house, she is alone save for her two cats.

"I spent all my pension paying for electricity and getting my yard cleared up so I can continue to live here," she says.

Limping heavily from the still excruciatingly painful shrapnel wounds to her legs, she is now unable even to collect any of the humanitarian food aid available unless it is delivered right to her door.

To say that Anna is extremely vulnerable would be stating the obvious. Her only daughter, who lives in a nearby village, is herself unemployed so in no position to provide any support in this war-wracked economy.

"My neighbour helps with bringing water from the well, but I struggle to chop wood and that's my only way to provide heat or cook," she explains, desperation etched across her face.Even those elderly citizens I met who are now in receipt of some support face tremendous challenges.

During the last few days of my stay in eastern Ukraine I was to meet Petr Pshenichniy who fled from the Lenininsky area of Luhansk City during intense fighting and is now living in a hostel for the displaced in the comparatively stable city of Sievierodonetsk.

Born in 1939, the year of the outbreak of the Second World War, Petr was a professor of neurology at Luhansk National Medical University until his world was catapulted into hell last year.

"I was in my flat and the shells were getting closer and closer before one landed outside our house," Petr recalls of that nightmare day in August.

As we talk it becomes obvious that this is a man who remains deeply traumatised.

It is hardly surprising given that during that fateful day when the shells fell ever nearer to his family he himself was wounded, spending four months in hospital with injuries that included serious contusions to the brain.

Petr, however, did survive. More than can be said for his wife, son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren who were killed.

They had simply gone to fetch water but the timing was unfortunate.

"While they were waiting in the queue with others at the well, the shells landed and they were all killed," says Petr.

Time and again as we speak he breaks down crying and offering unnecessary apologies for his "emotions".

Fast running out of money for his medication, only the help of visiting aid and medical workers ensures he has the injections needed to help him heal if healing in every sense can ever be fully possible from such an experience.

Today, Petr lives in this rundown hostel with the local newspaper cuttings that tell of what happened to those he loved so dearly.

He came here to Sievierodonetsk with only the clothes he was wearing. Nothing else, neither possessions nor family members, remains.

How does anyone find their way back from such an experience? Can someone who has undergone such a thing put some semblance of their lives back together again and could Petr ever see himself return to Luhansk City? "I would only return for the grace of my children, but I have no one, I am alone now," he tells me.

Maria Goncharova and husband Misha, Nadezhda Zhurova, Anna Dmitriienko and Petr Pshenichniy, survivors of wars past and present.

Elderly, frail, vulnerable and alone, their names may not be easy for us to remember, but remember them we should.

You can donate today and help give critical supplies to those in desperate need.

Please go online at www.mercycorp.org.uk or phone 08000 413 060 (24 hours) or 0131 662 5173 (Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm).