No daughter can be restored. No leg can be replaced: our report from the frontline of the war in Eastern Ukraine

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.

A shroud of mist and drizzle hung over the village like some ominous portent of things to come.

Clearing the last Ukrainian army checkpoint our car made its way along a narrow road chewed up and rutted by the tracks of passing tanks before dropping into the village of Triokhizbenka.

Across the world I've long since learned that frontline communities have all much the same feel and atmosphere.

Almost always there is that palpable tension or eerie quiet, as if something, anything, could happen at a moment's notice. This village was no exception.

The rain was heavy now, but here and there a few of Triokhizbenka's citizens had come on to the streets milling around in little clusters, talking most likely about the war, food and electricity shortages, whether to stay or leave and what the uncertain future might bring.

It was on these same quaint village streets lined with their little tumbledown houses and slatted wooden fences that Nadezhda Kalashnikova and her nine-year-old daughter Valentina were walking when the spectre of war came to visit them in person last November.

"They had been for a vaccination at a nearby hospital and were on their way back a short distance from home when the shelling started," recalls Nadezhda's husband, Anatoliy, his wife sitting listening close by.

What Anatoliy described next was something that will haunt both their lives forever. It was the moment when a shell fell from the sky thumping into the ground barely three yards from Nadezhda and Valentina scattering its lethal red-hot razor-edged shrapnel in all directions.

The little girl was killed instantly and her mother torn apart by the deadly flying metal, resulting in the loss of her left leg.

As we talk in the modest living room of their home, Nadezhda sits on the edge of a bed, her other daughter, seven-month-old Polina propped in her lap.

Around the floor are scattered some of the toddler's toys. Nadezhda is wearing a dressing gown but the stump and wide scar of her amputated leg is clearly visible as are other now healed wounds on her right calf.

Even before that terrible day when Valentina was killed and Nadezhda maimed, this young mother's health had been fragile.

Having only one fully functioning lung her survival from the trauma of her wounds is testimony to her own self will and the "heroes" of the ambulance and emergency service staff whose devotion to duty running the gauntlet of bullets and bombs she so admires.

Valentina is one of more than 6,000 lives lost in eastern Ukraine's war in the last year alone. In this bitter conflict that rarely makes headlines, more than one million people have been left without homes.

Nadezhda Kalashnikova, her family and many others I was to meet during my time in the region are the real faces behind these statistics, the true human cost of a conflict where many fear the worst of which is still yet to come.

While a fragile ceasefire between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian separatist fighters by and large holds across the firing line, Triokhizbenka and similar towns and villages continue to sit in the shadow of war.

Triokhizbenka itself doesn't so much sit near the frontline but straddles it.

Residents in there told me that only the night before my arrival in the village there had been exchanges of gunfire. For many months, too, these same people have survived sub-zero temperatures without electricity, many often sheltering in basements in the hope of protection from the arc of shells, missiles and mortar rounds that would crash into the heart of the village. "Candles have become normal," was how one old woman put it.

Those who could afford it, or had somewhere else to go, got out when they could.

But often the most vulnerable; the elderly; infirm; poor; disabled; had no choice but to sit out the violence engulfing their community. Nadezhda Kalashnikova's husband, Anatoliy, makes the point that some 80 per cent of the residents of Triokhizbenka have work elsewhere, meaning that with the restrictions on movement imposed by the fighting people are left with no income and reliant on what meagre savings, if any, they might have.

Also, with the collapse of any administrative structure, those caught in flashpoint areas are left without pensions or benefits for disability, which Nadezhda herself has yet to receive since she was wounded last year. She and her family are far from alone.

On a good day it's a two-hour drive from Triokhizbenka to the much larger town of Sievierodonetsk. Travelling on the roads Continued on page 34 Continued from page 33 across eastern Ukraine is to be instantly reminded of the way this region has been politically dislocated and violently dismembered.

Every few miles on this the government side of the frontline, our car grinds to halt while we wait to be called forward to some checkpoint with its concrete and sandbagged chicanes that block the way.

Given the presence of 'foreign' fighters in this war, government controlled checkpoints are wary of strangers. At most of these, passports and documents are checked and a brief search made by the armed men cradling assault rifles. Ominous black ski masks are de-rigueur here for the soldiers manning these positions, in part as protection against the bitter cold and also to conceal their identity.

"This one is famous, it's called Stalingrad," our driver tells us as we slowly draw up towards one checkpoint near the town of Stanitsa Luhanska, around which has been some of the fiercest fighting in the region.

As we drive through I notice that most of the tall birch trees on either side have been shattered by shellfire. Alongside the road, trenches and emplacements are deeply dug in and the detritus of past fighting is scattered everywhere, including the charred carapace of a tank, its turret lying decapitated from what could only have been a direct hit and massive explosion.

In Sievierodonetsk, however, it is the damage to the lives of ordinary, already vulnerable, civilians that I have come to find out more about. Crammed into a rundown hostel where sometimes as many as 10 family members share a room, I came across 70-year-old Nelly Chernikova and her middle-aged son, Igor, who is blind and mentally disabled.

They had fled their home of Stakhanov last October as the fighting raged around their neighbourhood, leaving behind Nelly's daughter and granddaughter. "The windows were vibrating, we were on the ninth floor with no water, no electricity," recalls Nelly.

Worried about Igor's deteriorating health she decided to flee Stakhanov but had to borrow money from friends to do so as their savings had run out.

Igor's father, a former miner, had long since died and Nelly had become the sole guardian and trustee of her son's disability benefit, but by then they were receiving next to nothing.

"Igor has had eight operations on his eyes, we have tried all our lives to make things better for him but it has been very difficult and now this," she says, a momentary sense of despair creeping into her voice.

After they managed to get out to the comparative safety of Sievierodonetsk, Igor spent three weeks in hospital having become aggressive, no doubt in part from the trauma that he and his mother had suffered.

"All he keeps asking is when we can go home," Nelly says, only moments before Igor himself asks my photographer colleague if he has a car and if so could he drive he and his mother home.

Having left with only the clothes they were wearing and a few belongings in a bag they had no time to bring Igor's precious cassette player and the collection of tapes to which he would often sing along to, to help keep his mind from the terrifying thump of shellfire resounding around their neighbourhood.

"He liked to sing along especially to religious chants, now we only have this," Nelly explains, holding up a small battered radio that provides them with their only entertainment now.

As we talk I cannot help notice a poster taped to the wall, perhaps left over from a previous resident in the hostel. The poster was a publicity flyer for the Donetsk Uefa 2012 European Championship that was held in the nearby eastern Ukrainian city a few years ago, a memory of happier times before that city too succumbed to the ravages of the war.

Along with the dozens of other "displaced people" who occupy this hostel in Sievierodonetsk, Nelly now pays 800 hryvnia (£23) where last month it was only 500, this from a total income of 2,800 hryvnia (£81) which must also pay for food and other essentials.

As prices soar because of the war such people, already among some of the poorest Ukrainians, are struggling to survive. Savings have long since gone to buy food and cover accommodation costs for basic shelter like this overcrowded rundown hostel. Across the region there are hundreds of thousands more scared and traumatised people like Nelly and Igor. As in all wars, the displaced know no boundaries and here are to be found both in Ukraine government-administered areas and on the other side of the frontlines in non-government controlled zones.

As rumours that a breakdown in the current fragile ceasefire could be looming - adding further to this human misery - aid agencies are gearing up their programmes in the worst affected areas like Luhansk Oblast. Mercy Corps, whose European headquarters are in Edinburgh, has been among the first to gain access to such regions and is now setting up programmes that will directly help the most vulnerable like Nelly and her son.

In the immediate term everything from plastic sheeting, blankets and water containers to hygiene and sanitation provision needs to be addressed in areas damaged by fighting.

On a wider level, the aim is to provide cash vouchers to help with shelter for those displaced and help host families. Cash transfer programmes will also enable people to buy food and help protect livelihoods, while food parcels will be distributed in those non-government controlled areas in the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) which lie under the administration of pro-Russian separatists. For just as the displaced know no boundaries in wartime, so too must any humanitarian response where the needs of civilian victims comes first.

Travelling across eastern Ukraine's unrelentingly flat steppe, bleak at this time of year before the colours of spring have made their mark, is to traverse a region in dire need of humanitarian support.

Historically, this is a country no stranger to the ravages of war. Many of the elderly I met who sadly cower from bombardment today did so too during the Second World War. Most could never have imagined that once again they would face such horrors.

Before leaving the home of Nadezhda Kalashnikova and her family in Triokhizbenka, I asked her husband if he was angry at those responsible for the death of his daughter and maiming of his wife?

"No daughter can be restored, no leg can be replaced," was his resigned reply. How true that is. But at least the chance remains of ensuring his surviving family and others like them have what they need to help cope with the ongoing hardship this war creates.

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).