Anna, 17, has been staying at nights in the huge hall of Moscow's Kursk railway terminal since she arrived from the provincial town of Tula at the start of the current cold snap, in which temperatures have reached as low as minus 30 Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit).

She stands at a counter, eating a hotdog and drinking a cup of tea bought for her by two employees of the relief organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, Doctors Without Borders), Marina Bobrova and Sergei Pankratov.

"I couldn't live in Tula region any longer. My mother had been drinking for six years. She kicked me out," Anna said with a smile.

The aid workers from MSF offer their help to street children each day.

They are met by the children's de facto guardian, Sirik, an energetic 28 year-old.

He was born in Kazakhstan and never knew his mother -- she was 13 at the time of his birth.

Having spent much of his life on the streets he has become the children's leader and protector, he says.

He leads Bobrova and Pankratov outside onto the windswept, snow-covered station platform and reveals under the concrete of the platform an opening just wide enough for someone to creep inside.

It leads to a cramped space with an earth floor and a ceiling too low to sit upright.

There is a cooking pot at the entrance, and at the back a large number of sleeping bags and blankets.

"Right now, it's too cold here at night. But since the children cannot really sleep in the station they come here around 6:00 am to rest under several blankets for a few hours," Sirik said.

On the way back to the station hall, he greets an old lady sitting inside her kiosk.

"She feeds us, and MSF pays her," he said.

Next to the kiosk is a small, unheated shack with benches inside, where children sometimes come to take shelter. But it is freezing cold.

Only on the station's upper floor is there some warmth. Hanging out there are Andryusha, 15, who ran away from an orphanage, Vasya, 17, who says he fell out with his mother a month ago, and Anna, the latest arrival, from Tula.

"I don't know how I would have managed without them," Anna says, explaining that she gets a little sleep travelling on Moscow's suburban train network.

Bobrova tells the children to meet an MSF doctor on the following day at a nearby health centre for the homeless where they can wash and see a doctor. From there, they will go to MSF's day centre, in the south of Moscow.

"It is a good place. We can have a shower, eat, receive clothes, and people talk to us, they ask us about our lives, we talk about our parents," Vasya says.

MSF began its programme for Moscow street children in 2003 and has a team of 12 local staff, including three doctors.

It cooperates with numerous Russian organisations including the country's pryuts -- children's shelters that are comfortable but lack badly needed psychological help, one of the programme's directors says.

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