Sawt Falasteen - 'Russian roulette': last residents brave shelling in east Ukraine

Wearing a cap and thick glasses, the Ukrainian pensioner was lying at the bottom of a shell crater, trying to pick himself up and gather the food that had spilled out of his shopping bags.

In the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka, battered by shelling since 2014, Grozdov had strayed into the crater while returning from a grocery store in April this year.

An AFP team pulled him out, found his shopping and saw him on his way back home.

This week journalists tracked him down again, with help from local officials, since the town has almost no communications.

"I was walking along the avenue and thought I'd quickly walk round the hole where the shell fell -- or a bomb, I don't know," recalled Grozdov, sitting in his flat near the town's former cinema.

"I stumbled as I stepped and fell in. I tried to get out but the earth was loose and slipping under me, I couldn't get out at all."

Despite having no intact buildings, mains water or electricity, Avdiivka still has 1,719 inhabitants, according to Vitaliy Barabash, the head of the town's military administration.

"Around 60 percent are people aged 65 and over," he told AFP.

A suburb of the city of Donetsk built around a huge coke fuel plant, Avdiivka is eerie and very dangerous.

It gets shelled on average 30 times per day, the town's chief said.

"In the last four months or so, there hasn't been a day without aerial or rocket strikes."

Grozdov uses a stick to walk outside and keeps to routes he knows well.

- 'Won't go anywhere' -

Despite his poor vision adding a further obstacle, Grozdov, a wiry 77-year-old, is determined to stay where his wife and son are buried.

"Whatever happens, I won't go anywhere now," he said.

"My soul is at home, it's not trying to leave. I'm not anxious, I've become calm."

In his flat, all the windows have glass blown out and there is a sheet hung across one.

The wallpaper is peeling around formal family photographs.

There is a radio set on his bed and bottles of sunflower oil and tinned food in the bath.

Volunteers bring Grozdov water and supplies, and he can cook on a camping stove.

When shelling starts, Grozdov said he hides in the bathroom and sometimes lies flat on the floor.

He appears to pay no attention to the sound of incoming tank rounds outside.

After his mother was killed when he was a baby, he grew up in a children's home in Donetsk.

He then worked at Avdiivka's coke plant most of his life.

He hinted at a life of great difficulty -- his late son was a violent drug addict and hit him in the head, causing him to lose vision in one eye.

On the ground floor of his block of flats, a strike has left a shell stuck in the wall of the landing.

Grozdov's neighbour, 63-year-old Vitaliy Zemin, sits in the cellar carving wooden animals -- a hippo, a turtle, a monkey -- wearing a head torch.

"It distracts you from the thoughts a person has all the time: about people, about Ukraine, about why there isn't any peace," he said.

- 'Russian roulette' -

The main respite for residents is a public shelter in a cellar where volunteers provide food and hot drinks, and they can use Wi-Fi, watch TV and charge devices.

Around 25 people sat there on Wednesday, mostly wearing headphones and engrossed in phones and tablets.

Pavel, 65, whose spectacles only have one arm, was watching war news on a tablet.

The retired factory worker said this was the only time he could relax.

"It's safe in the cellar. There's light, there's internet. At home you wonder if a strike will hit you or not -- it's like Russian roulette."

- 'Such despair' -

"Sometimes I feel such despair, I would go to the end of the world not to see these destroyed buildings," he said, insisting he must guard his home from looters after his family left.

In a sad development for residents, the shelter's water supply via a deep bore-hole --- opened in March -- has fouled up with sand and mud, meaning the washing machines and showers cannot be used.

"It's impossible to clean up," said Barabash, the head of the town's administration.

"We'll need a new one," he said, promising this in the "near future".

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Z.AlNajjar--SF-PST