‘I’m too old for this’: the harrowing flight from Donetsk’s perilous border towns

Urged to evacuate, vulnerable residents are being carried to safety in makeshift volunteer convoys

• Russia-Ukraine war: latest updates

It was Nina's 88th birthday, and she marked it by leaving behind everything she had known. Volunteers, not particularly young or fit themselves, carried her down three flights of stairs from her flat, past the irises about to bloom in her neighbour's patch of garden.

Apartment buildings hid the ruins of the local school, destroyed last week by a Russian missile, but the war intruded on the yard anyway, the regular thump of distant artillery echoing through the sunny afternoon.