The constant ringing of a phone punctuates the crunch of broken glass splintering underfoot as officers lay out a corpse bag across the debris-strewn rooms of the bomb-blasted residence.
However, the call will never be returned. The phone’s owner lies deceased on the floor of his home, in a front room where he was found by the explosion of a missile, one of the dozens that pounded this eastern Ukrainian town.
According to Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko, the missiles that rained down on Pokrovsk Saturday night and into the early hours of Sunday were part of a barrage of strikes on cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region that killed at least ten people Saturday.
They came as Ukraine launched a counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region to the north, forcing Russian soldiers to withdraw from vital positions.
Six of the fatalities were from Pokrovsk, according to the mayor’s statement on Telegram. The industrial town, located about 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the front lines, had been pounded by missiles twice previously, in May and July, but never by so many in one night.
A flare filled the night sky as the second of six explosions rang out throughout the town. An ambulance sped through the dim streets as flames erupted from a fire started by the missile strikes.
At least three people were killed when one of the missiles landed between a series of modest dwellings and adjoining railroad lines, collapsing part of a neighbouring abandoned structure, destroying one home and seriously injuring many others.
As the cops came, Oleksandr Zaitsev, 67, stood silently outside his friend’s house. He claimed that his friend’s wife had been contacting her husband since the strike began, but no one answered.
The home’s windows were smashed, the walls were pockmarked with shrapnel, and the front door had been blown off its hinges. The officers carefully slid Zaitsev’s companion into a black corpse bag inside.
Next door, Yevhenia Butkova, 47, remained frozen in the middle of her living room, attempting to soothe her two anxious pet dogs. When the first missile struck, she and her husband sat on the sofa, watching television. She added that he was recuperating in a hospital on Sunday morning after surgeons removed glass pieces from his wounds.
Chunks of ceiling debris scattered the floor throughout the house, which had been reduced to a mess of splintered wood, plaster, glass, and brick. One of the plywood planks the couple had used to shield their windows had been flown clean across the garden.
However, the combination of it and the plastic they placed over the glass most likely saved their lives.
Butkova said.
“It was all quiet in Pokrovsk; this was very unexpected,” she said. “It was horrible.”
Further down the row of single-story houses, an elderly couple swept rubble and glass from their small porch dried blood still streaking their faces.
Mariia Trutko, 85, and her husband Oleksii Maksymenko, 75, were asleep when the blow woke them up.
“I can’t hear anything without my hearing aid, and then it hit so hard that I heard,” said Maksymenko, a retired coal miner. “Everything flew. … I started bleeding, so we got up to see what that was, and then there was another one: boom!”
Trutko described their bed as riddled with sharp fragments of glass and plaster from the roof that covered them both. A huge, square chunk of glass lay on the pillow, and blood splatters covered the floor.
“Oh my God, we could never anticipate going through this at this age,” Maksymenko added.
