Civilians Suffer in Donetsk Conflict

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 sta-