Donetsk Civilians Suffer Amid Shelling and Appeal to Poroshenko

Petro Poroshenko will have a hard time winning back hearts and minds in this city. As the people of Donetsk sweep up the debris of their homes and livelihoods, they are hardened against a president they say is killing his own people. "We are Ukrainian, but they kill us," this man says,

"So we probably need our own country because these people in Kyiv, they are not brothers for us."

The shells hit these homes days ago, but the tears are still fresh.

We live underground. It was so hard for two weeks, especially for twenty-seventh, twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth.

But only today it's quiet.

Sorry, sorry, I need to go. Two people were killed outside this block of flats last Wednesday.

One of them was a fifty-year-old woman, the other a thirty-four-year-old woman.

Her husband, who won't talk to us, he says he's in shock, managed to make it down to the cellar with their little child, but she just didn't have the time.

And this is a story that repeats itself over and over in dozens of apartment blocks with civilians being killed by the constant shelling around Donetsk.

The city's trauma hospital is filled with the civilian wounded.

Shrapnel embedded in the flesh and bone of market sellers legs.

The broken limbs of pensioners far too old to run.

"There was one war, and this is the second war," this old lady tells me.

"I was born in nineteen forty in World War II, and I will probably die before this war is over."

Valentina Popova in the next door ward lost her leg and her arm to indiscriminate artillery shells.

Switching to the Ukrainian language, she makes a heart-rending plea to the president. "We used to dance, sing, do everything in Ukrainian," she says.

"Poroshenko, Mr. Poroshenko, please listen to us.

Why don't you understand your people? Be a man, be human.

Please stop your aggression. Stop this war."

But there is little sign of that. This once thriving city is now half empty, its railway station bombed.

The forces unleashed by this conflict, greater perhaps than Mr. Poroshenko can control.