remembers the second world war. i think she lost some fingers as well from the war. the pain and despair in that photo. tell us a bit more about this lady. so i want to say that was about two weeks ago in kharkiv and it was, again, in the morning because most of the shellings and attacks happen at night. and so we had come into this residential building. that was heavily damaged. this woman was in a state of emotional agitation and i went to shake her hand and she was missing two fingers on the hand and she kept saying boyna, boyna, which means war. my translator had an interaction with her. she was very emotional. what it boils down to is she lost those when she was a toddler in world war ii and the germans bombed her house and she lost part of her hand. her mother died in that war.
and i was on that place once also what is the what is the feeling among civilians there, maria? is it pure terror? people are resistant. they are fighting fires. i have been to the underground metro stations where pple are living now for more than a month. and what i hear from them as we are going to fight and we will win this war and so the morale is very high because we see that our military is fighting fires way the russians have no chance. this is all we are looking forward to the moment when the victory will come. but still it s difficult for people here because what we see now is that russia has this tactic of threatening the civilians and the people are really have very difficult times to survive. more than a thousand buildings have been destroyed in kharkiv. this is the, the most
watching very closely over the next 24 to 48 hours. russian generals saying yesterday in moscow that they are looking to focus on the east of this country saying phase one of that military operation, as they put it, is complete. so that they re going to look over towards donetsk and luhansk. you see the marked on the map there. that area around them is generally known as the dombi. it has long been the scene of fighting with involving a russian separatist movement. so what they are implying here is that this was their aim all along. they didn t really want to own ukraine. they just want to take that eastern area where russian separatists are operating. now that may be a signal that they clearly have realized that they are not getting to where they wanted in terms of moving in to keep they ve been pushed back there. they re being pushed back as we just heard from maria devah in kharkiv around that is ukraine s second city.
we re listening, a huge explosion in kyiv and north of kyiv. they have increased the intensity of strikes. we will not give anything away and we will fight for every meter of our land. city of kharkiv is a ukrainian city and it will remain ukrainian. mr. putin has not been fully informed by his ministry of defense. announcer: this is cnn breaking news. good morning. thank you for your company. it s thursday, march 31st, 9 a.m. here in london, 11 a.m. in ukraine where president volodymyr zelenskyy says it is ready for new attacks from russia in the donbas region. russia has said it plans to focus in the east. held if you remember by russian-backed separatists with ukraine s southern coast including the besieged port city of mariupol. russia does not appear to be keeping the promise to scale back military operations.
now she was saying my house is getting bombed, this time by the russians is the long and short of it. and her name is alexandra who is 83. forced to move again. i don t know if she s from kharkiv or not. that was the last i saw of her. alec, how do you deal personally with everything that you witnessed, you know, the brutality, the bloodshed, the families torn apart? i know you ve covered iraq and syria. how do you deal with it personally? i don t think there s enough time in this interview to really cover that, but i d say that journalism and photography especially i think listen, you can t stop these things from happening whether it s in a foreign conflict, whether it s civil unrest in the u.s. anything where there s strong negative emotions. as a journalist you re