MARIUPOL, Ukraine — The morning routine begins promptly at 8:05 at Public School 68, with a round of calisthenics followed immediately by the daily shelling drill.
A bell clangs on the loudspeaker, and unsmiling children pour out of classrooms in perfect formation, knees bent, heads down, squatting along the thick corridor walls far from any windows, hands clamped over their ears.
“They don’t think it’s something funny,” said Elena Klemanchuk, whose fourth graders huddled in the gloomy hallway near a mural of a girl skipping rope. “They take it very seriously. You need only look around to understand why.”
With the battle for control of the crucial railroad town of Debaltseve nearing what seems to be its climax, the focus of the conflict in eastern Ukraine is shifting southward to Mariupol, an industrial port in government hands where the pro-Russian rebels are massing their forces.
“You can feel a fear and anxiety in the air,” said Yuri Hotlubey, the mayor. “People are coming up to me all the time, especially elderly people. They are worried that Mariupol is next to be attacked.”
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Across the street, a crew of sign painters was refreshing the markers that point the way to the nearest bomb shelter.
Ms. Klemanchuk, the fourth-grade teacher, said she was at the school on the Saturday morning the market was hit, leading an orientation group of preschoolers, all 5 years old.
“They were very scared,” she remembered. “Many of them were crying. I tried to calm them down. I said, ‘No, it’s not real, it’s just a game.’”
She paused and took a deep breath, looking down the dark hallway at the children squatting on the floor with their ears covered.
“But they said, no, they did not believe me,” Ms. Klemanchuk continued. “They said it was not a game. They knew. You see, it was not their first shelling.”
