MARIUPOL, Ukraine (AP) The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling.

Theres 18-month-old Kirill, whose shrapnel wound to the head proved too much for his little toddlers body. Theres 16-year-old Iliya, whose legs were blown up in an explosion during a soccer game at a school field. Theres the girl no older than 6 who wore the pajamas with cartoon unicorns, among the first of Mariupols children to die from a Russian shell.

They are stacked together with dozens of others in this mass grave on the outskirts of the city. A man covered in a bright blue tarp, weighed down by stones at the crumbling curb. A woman wrapped in a red and gold bedsheet, her legs neatly bound at the ankles with a scrap of white fabric. Workers toss the bodies in as fast as they can, because the less time they spend in the open, the better their own chances of survival.

The only thing (I want) is for this to be finished, raged worker Volodymyr Bykovskyi, pulling crinkling black body bags from a truck. Damn them all, those people who started this!

More bodies will come, from streets where they are everywhere and from the hospital basement where adults and children are laid out awaiting someone to pick them up. The youngest still has an umbilical stump attached.

Each airstrike and shell that relentlessly pounds Mariupol about one a minute at times drives home the curse of a geography that has put the city squarely in the path of Russias domination of Ukraine. This southern seaport of 430,000 has become a symbol of Russian President Vladimir Putins drive to crush democratic Ukraine but also of a fierce resistance on the ground.