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MARINKA, Ukraine — The last time Marina Korneeva heard about her home in Marinka, a small town in eastern Ukraine, it had been requisitioned by the army and was being used as an improvised morgue. Corpses were stored in it without refrigeration. Marinka, an unkempt town of about 5,000 residents that mixes rustic homes and gray apartment blocks, was once renowned in the region for its milk plant. Not anymore, because it is at the front lines of a five-year conflict in eastern Ukraine opposing Ukrainian government forces and separatists backed by Russia.

Korneeva is considered relatively well-off. She is 37, married and employed as a pharmacist, and her family of three is able to rent an apartment in another town, Kurakhovo, about 10 miles away. People who are old and have no family support cannot afford to do so.

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One of her former neighbours in Marinka, Aleksandra Belotserkovets, is 86. Belotserkovets’s son was killed inside his apartment by a direct artillery hit when the war began in 2014. Two weeks later, her house was destroyed. She ended up in a facility for displaced people, an abandoned kindergarten building, also in Kurakhovo. Conditions there are barely basic: Forty residents share one shower and one toilet. Belotserkovets lives in a 25-square-feet room, a former broom closet, that she has decorated with Orthodox icons and pictures of her family.