Yahoo TV

STORY: The retired librarian lives in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city of 1.5 million people that lies near the Russian border. It has been barraged by Russian air and rocket strikes that have reduced many buildings to rubble.

"I could never imagine that a new war would start in my old age. In my worst nightmare, I could not even imagine that such a massacre would be repeated, it is horrible," she told Reuters.

Morozova was just seven years old in 1941 when German forces began the siege of the Soviet city of Leningrad in Russia, now known as St. Petersburg, where around 1.5 million died during two years of blockade.

She said she still has vivid memories of the Nazi bombardments after she and her mother missed a ferry out of the port, only to watch with horror as the boat was then destroyed by shells.

After the war, she moved to Kharkiv in Ukraine, where she has lived for the last 60 years and where she now finds unmistakable echoes of her past.

"In my childhood I hid from bombardments in the corridor. We took shelter in old buildings. And it is the same now," said Morozova, a native Russian speaker who has a daughter living in Kharkiv and a son in St. Petersburg.

Earlier this week the mayor of Kharkiv said the city had been under constant attack by Russian forces. Russia refers to the invasion as a "special military operation" and says its forces do not target civilians.

Caught up in a conflict between the land of her birth and the land where she lives now, Morozova believes it will be a disaster for both sides.