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On a warm summer's evening, Maryna Kovalenko is playing football with her two teenage daughters in their backyard.

Iryna and Olena laugh as the family dog attempts to wrestle away the ball, scattering the startled chickens.

But out beyond the family鈥檚 back fence, all is silent and still.

Numerous houses, a shop and a library stand vacant in the village of Steshchyna, northern Ukraine. Only the forest is gaining ground as creeping plants explore the cracks in this abandoned village.

The family do have a few neighbours, but almost all are in their 70s and 80s.

Despite the lack of amenities or opportunities, four years ago Maryna and her daughters packed up everything they owned and travelled hundreds of miles across Ukraine to live here - just 30km from the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone.

But some people never left.

Today it is still illegal to live inside the exclusion zone. Despite this, do. Many are women, still farming their ancestral land in their 70s and 80s.

And just outside of the exclusion zone, there are a number of new arrivals.

Maryna鈥檚 house is in desperate need of repair. The floors are rotting and the metal radiators have cracked - a major problem in a place where temperatures can drop to -20C in the winter.

They have basic amenities - gas, electricity and a mobile phone signal, which means they can access the internet. But they only have an outside toilet. Water is a problem - their only source is a polluted well which connects to the house via a single pipe. They need to boil all their water before it鈥檚 used.

A house in good condition in the village might cost $3,500, but such properties are rare. Most of the vacant homes - many made of wood - are being sold by their former occupants for less than a few hundred dollars.

Maryna was too poor to buy even one of those when she arrived. Instead, the governing council offered her family an unusual house-share.

In return for their bed and board, the family cared for an elderly man in the late stages of dementia. When he died two years ago, the family inherited the house.

Outside in the yard, Iryna and Olena show off the rest of their 鈥渇amily鈥� - several hens, rabbits, goats, even a couple of guinea-pigs.

When not at the school - a 5km walk away - the sisters spend much of their time helping mum in the garden, growing vegetables and looking after the animals.

The family鈥檚 sole source of income is state benefits - $183 a month (5,135 Ukrainian hryvnia). Growing their own food and keeping livestock for milk and meat is essential on their budget.

Maryna and her daughters fled from Toshkivka, a large industrial town in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. After four years of conflict in the east of the country, an estimated , and about two million displaced.

The conflict began in 2014.

After Russia鈥檚 annexation of the Crimean peninsula, armed separatists claiming to act on behalf of local Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine decided to act. Fighters declared two separatist enclaves around the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbass, the heart of the Ukraine鈥檚 coal industry.

As pro-Russian separatists began capturing villages and driving the Ukrainian military out of the region鈥檚 towns and cities, Maryna and her daughters鈥� home came under heavy shelling.

Except for a few hours each morning, the bombardment was relentless. During these temporary ceasefires, everyone would attempt to regain some sense of normality. Iryna and Olena would go to school, while Maryna went to the market. But by noon, the firing would resume. Most nights were spent sheltering in the cellar.

Walking home from school during one such hiatus, Iryna and Olena were unexpectedly caught in crossfire. With mortars raining down, Maryna could not get to them. The girls owe their survival to a shopkeeper, who dragged them off the street and into the safety of her cellar.

That鈥檚 when Maryna decided they had to leave.

There are at least ten other families from the Donbass region who have made the same long journey to the abandoned villages close to the exclusion zone.

Like Maryna, most of them came on the recommendation of old friends or neighbours. One woman even says she simply Googled 鈥渃heapest place to live in the Ukraine鈥�. The result - near to Chernobyl.

Since the disaster, scientists have been continuously monitoring the radiation levels in the soil, trees, plants and animals around Chernobyl, even in areas outside the exclusion zone.

There is no longer a risk from radiation in the atmosphere, says Professor Valery Kashparov, director of the Ukrainian Institute of Agricultural Radiology (UIAR). But in some areas soil contamination could pose a threat to people鈥檚 health.

Kashparov and his team recently reported produced outside the exclusion zone. Caesium particles, absorbed by grass roots, had been passed on to grazing cattle.

In large enough quantities, ingesting it can damage human cells, and in some cases lead to serious diseases such as thyroid cancer.

But these risks, Kashparov says, are limited to specific hotspots. For more than 30 years his team have been working to map such hotspots so they can estimate the potential risk for people living and working around the exclusion zone.

On one map, showing the dispersal of caesium-137 from the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, Kashparov points out the village of Steshchyna where Maryna and her daughters live. He says the risk from growing vegetables or drinking goats鈥� milk in Steshchyna is very low. But the area is currently being investigated for the risk of radiation in wild food stuffs, such as forest mushrooms or wild berries.

Maryna says she has thought about the potential risks from radiation, but believes her family fled from something much more dangerous - the threat of war.

"Radiation may kill us slowly, but it doesn't shoot or bomb us," says Maryna. "It's better to live with radiation than with war".

Vadim says he does sometimes think about the radiation. He even bought himself a handheld Geiger counter to measure it.

But he鈥檚 not worried. He is confident that the atmospheric radiation level is safe.

鈥淎fter what you witness in war, radiation is nothing. It was a miracle we survived.鈥�

He鈥檚 enjoying life here.