In the future, there are will be the children of war.

Children in the city, village  play war with sticks among the real war damage. To them, the so-called ‘bad guys’ are the pro-Russian separatists.

The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that 1.7 million children on both sides of the front line have been harmed through lack of proper shelter, nutrition, medicine or schooling.

Seven-year-old Seryozha, drawing with coloured pencils and crayons flags on his battle tank to put the blue-and-yellow Ukrainian.

The five-year-olds Nikita, when the bombing starts, parents point to the bathroom. He already knows that the family hides there during the frequent shelling. "In the future, these will be the children of war."

"Everyone talks about the same thing, about when the war will end," says Katya, who lives in a two-room apartment with her mother and her eight-year-old son, Gleb. The distribution centre where she worked has closed down, and instead she spends half the day hauling water to the apartment. In the afternoons and evenings, she sits and talks with neighbours.

"Kids draw tanks and planes when earlier they drew flowers and trees… My kid wakes up every day and asks, 'Did they bomb us?' He's scared," she says, telling me how last month they came under heavy shelling at the children's hospital where they were getting a doctor's note for Gleb's summer camp to say he was in good health.

Tolik, who is 11, said he got too close to the real fighting: “The bullets tore through the cloth on my shoulder here and flew past… I was born lucky.”

Tatyana (29 years old) has taken shelter in a basement with her daughter Marina.

The mother said: “She is three years old, she knows what a tank is, that’s not normal! Children have psychological problems already at this age. What next? They say children of the 90s are unbearable. What will happen to these children? They will grow up among the ruins. There are no kindergarten or schools, nothing!”

"Earlier, we didn't have to scrimp on the kids' food; we bought veal, chicken, milk and sweets," Tatyana says. "Now we go home and they say, 'Momma, give me sweets', and you can't explain to a child that there's no money."