RT reporter Roman Kosarev, who was recently caught in shelling in Syria, says the atrocities he has seen at hotspots such as Syria and Eastern Ukraine have at times rendered him speechless, but this is also where unprecedented compassion can be found.

I was reporting on the terrible killings of civilians in eastern Ukraine for about a year and a half. Now I am doing the same in Syria, but I want to talk about Donbass, where the overwhelming majority speak Russian and where you always feel a bit surreal – you are in a different country, but everything around seems so familiar.

These are real people and it is real death. Thousands of innocent people have died. Children and adults have lost their lives in the most barbaric way. These were boys playing soccer on the school field – they got blown into pieces by mortar fire. Or an elderly couple who were putting meat on the grill and got killed in an instant by a shell that hit their house. These are many people who lost their children or parents because of this undeclared war and now have to live with this nightmare for the rest of their lives.

These are all known facts, but what many people don’t know is that in the midst of this daily hell, human kindness and the unwavering will to live in peace prevail. Not every Russian family has been affected by the horrors of war. Most people know about it from daily news programs - they think of it as something that is only possible somewhere far-far away, not in their own world. But it doesn’t mean that they are indifferent towards the suffering of the people. We’ll come back to this later.

The shock from what I saw lasted shorter with every new shell-ridden district I visited. Tears would dry up in several minutes when I took the mic and tried to show how low humans can fall once they lose their moral values. It may well be that these scatterbrained gunners were not aware of their actual targets, but what could have been on the mind of a soldier who shot dead at point blank range an 18-year-old pregnant girl with her hands tied behind her back? What substance was he under the influence of when he buried her together with other victims near his base?