In the small town of Chasiv Yar, not far from Ukraine’s eastern frontlines, rescue workers were still searching through the wreckage left by Saturday’s multiple rocket strike. At least 43 people died, one of the biggest losses of life in Ukrainian-controlled Donbas since a single Russian rocket killed at least 52 people at the train station in the nearby town of Kramatorsk in April.
The rescuers had managed to pull nine people out of the rubble but by Tuesday, they told the Guardian, they expected to recover only corpses.
As Russian forces advance from newly conquered Luhansk, the frontlines appear to be encroaching on what is left of the civilian population in Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk. The two provinces make up Ukraine’s industrial Donbas region.
Ukrainian officials are urging locals to leave what may soon be a battle zone, but many of those left in Chasiv Yar say they do not have the means to start anew and would rather stay in their homes than live in a hostel elsewhere in Ukraine. It is a situation replicated for millions of Ukrainians living along the frontlines or in the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
Russian forces have bulldozered their way through the Donbas town by town using superior numbers of artillery pieces and large ammunition stocks, which Ukraine is only now targeting using newly supplied long-range western rocket systems. Moscow announced a pause in operations last week after declaring victory in Lysychansk, the last Ukrainian stronghold in Luhansk, but Ukrainian officials say there has been no let-up in attacks.
On Saturday three precision rockets hit two apartment buildings in Chasiv Yar where civilians lived. Some soldiers from a nearby barracks had moved in, according to locals, but it is not clear how many, or how many of them died. Neither of the buildings appeared to have been of high strategic importance.
The town’s residents are still reeling from the strikes and rallying to clean up the debris. Windows on apartment blocks near the strikes were blown out and there is no running water.
Several people said they had nowhere else to go and did not feel welcomed by the rest of Ukraine, who they said assumed that they were pro-Russia.
“It’s not our fault that we were born here,” said Yevhen, in his late 30s, who until April worked at a factory in Kyiv and had returned to be with his family. “Contrary to what people like to think, we didn’t spend our lives waiting for this. I lived [in Kyiv] for four years and for four years people would say ‘oh, you’re from Donbas, you’re a separatist’. But they don’t even understand what that means. I’m not running around with guns.”
Yevhen described being in the entrance of his block of flats and throwing himself to the ground after the first strike, together with some of his neighbours. Moments later, lying face down, he felt a second strike hit even closer. It had hit the end of his block of flats, about 12 metres away. He said he got up and ran into the building to find his wife and 13-year-old son crouching, unharmed, in the doorway of their apartment.
He and other neighbours tried to locate and evacuate those still inside in the block. “It sounded like a plane. I don’t wish hearing that sound on anyone,” he said of the strikes. “I don’t understand why we are torturing each other, someone should just press the big red nuclear button and stop people from suffering.”
Natasha, one of Yevhen’s neighbours, said she felt that no one cared about them because “bad things happening in the Donbas is a foregone occurrence” for many outside the region.
“People keep saying leave, but where to? With what money?” Natasha said. “We used to get 4,000 hryvnia (now worth about £110) a month, then they raised it to 7,000. We don’t get any benefits for the children. We’re basically homeless people but with apartments.”
Yevhen added: “Everybody who left on 24 February [when Russia launched its invasion] spent all their money and then came back. There were no opportunities for them.”
The situation for internally displaced people is harder than in 2014 when Russian-backed separatists seized parts of the Donbas, because Ukraine’s economy then was still functioning normally in most places.
In an apartment on the far end of the block, next door to the section that took a direct hit, 64-year-old Valery Nepochatykh was lying on a sofa, holding a bandage on his forehead where doctors had stitched up a wound. His legs had cuts from windows shattering into the flat he shares with his wife, Nadia.
Just as he started to tell his story, shelling that had up to then been rumbling in the distance sounded in the town. Yevhen urged everyone outside in the street to run into a basement.
There in the basement, the neighbours sat around a table with a candle and a few KitKats, waiting to see if there would be more shelling. One elderly couple, Ludmilla and Pavlo, showed where they had been sleeping on the floor since the strike.
“Here we all know each other. We all know the people who were killed,” said Pavlo, who said he would now celebrate the day of the strike as a second birthday because he had survived.
Ludmilla, 67, wearing a flowery summer dress, gave the room advice on what to do when they hear the whistle of a shell. “Never run, just get down on the floor and try to hide your organs from the shrapnel,” she said.
