![Residents of Shakhtersk run towards buses being provided by the Pro-Russian rebels for people wanting to flee the town from the conflict after heavy shelling over the past two days in the area. Photo: Kate Geraghty Residents of Shakhtersk run towards buses being provided by the Pro-Russian rebels for people wanting to flee the town from the conflict after heavy shelling over the past two days in the area. Photo: Kate Geraghty](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/8bc5a7f5-316f-4012-ae3b-df8b4f60380e.jpg/r0_0_729_409_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
![Marsha (right) embraces her scared daughter Lylia as they join other people from Shakhtersk fleeing the continued heavy shelling of the town half way between Donetsk and the MH17 crash site. Photo: Kate Geraghty Marsha (right) embraces her scared daughter Lylia as they join other people from Shakhtersk fleeing the continued heavy shelling of the town half way between Donetsk and the MH17 crash site. Photo: Kate Geraghty](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/a6378020-7e0e-4963-8904-07805175f2bd.jpg/r0_0_729_410_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
![Dimitriy Gorozhaninov sits inside the remains of his families home where his father, mother, sister and wife died when a shell landed on the home in Petrovskiy on the outskirts of Donetsk. Photo: Kate Geraghty Dimitriy Gorozhaninov sits inside the remains of his families home where his father, mother, sister and wife died when a shell landed on the home in Petrovskiy on the outskirts of Donetsk. Photo: Kate Geraghty](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/91f922cc-88e2-49ba-8586-cc2b465cda13.jpg/r0_0_727_410_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Shakhtersk, Ukraine: A blanket of pale smoke hung over Shakhtersk and jagged pillars of darker smoke rose from the downtown area, as the Ukrainian army attempted to tighten its noose on key rebel-held cities in eastern Ukraine.
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Four towns and cities in the vicinity of the MH17 crash site came under bombardment on Tuesday as Kiev’s forces pushed multiple objectives.
These included depriving the rebels of supplies, particularly men and weapons from Moscow; to shrink their territory; and pressing them back into their last big strongholds – the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk.
But most of all, they seemed bent on robbing the Russian-backed separatists of control of the MH17 crash site, lest the West find the rebels to be capable of delivering, if only on the emotion-charged issue of access to the wreckage of the plane.
For the first time, Kiev’s forces directed missile fire at downtown Donetsk, apparently targeting the city bunkers of senior officials of the so-called People’s Republic of Donetsk – the Russian imports Igor Girkin, aka Strelkov, who is the rebel defence chief, and the DPR "governor", Aleksandr Borodai.
They missed, gouging holes in streets. But the strikes were enough to make people scurry for shelter in underground parking lots and bomb shelters.
A volley directed at a rebel base about five kilometres from the centre also missed its target, instead slamming into several apartment blocks, leaving gaping holes, killing a civilian city employee and forcing dozens of families to evacuate, one man clutching a caged bird and another a bulky computer.
Some were more resilient that others. Emerging from his apartment carrying a red plastic bucket filled with shattered glass, 67-year-old Vladimir Yaroshenko laughed on being asked why he was so nonchalant: “I’m a senior citizen and I’m still alive, I’m not scared and I’m not moving.”
But panic seized Shakhtersk, an industrial city between Donetsk and the sprawling MH17 crash site. As the bombardment continued through Tuesday, a steady stream of people fled, mostly on foot to an evacuation point on the western edge of the city.
As truckloads of rebel fighters and tanks with a dozen or so fighters on top of each headed east, buses and civilian cars queued to ferry evacuees to Donetsk and further afield.
A black Kia sedan screeched into the parking lot and several weeping women piled in. “I’ll take as many as I can fit in,” the driver yelled to two young rebel fighters attempting to impose order on the evacuation.
The blind Viktor Ryabchanov, 79, complained that he had to leave after neighbourhood women who had looked out for him had abandoned him – “they fled to Russia because there was gunfire in our street”.
A stressed young couple arrived in co-ordinate shades of blue – his shirt, her shirt and the plastic bag they carried between them, holding meagre possessions.
A weepy Ludmilla Menzul, 72 years old and jaunty beret on her head, arrived with a rebel soldier pulling a shopping trolley on which she had packed two small bags. “I don’t know where to go or how to get there – my sister’s in Zhytomyr, 1000km; my daughter’s in Sumy, 500km; and my grandson is near Kiev, 750km.”
Fifty-five-year-old Ludmilla Chernukha was shaken – “We left our apartment when the building started to shake from the shelling.”
Her neighbour Valentyna Voloshina was getting out, she said, because the shelling had become too intense. But she was bound for Donetsk, where as much as half the population has fled out of fear of an imminent Ukrainian assault on the city.
Was she leaping from the frying pan into the fire?
“No – they’ll evacuate us from Donetsk as soon as we get there.”
The Ukrainian imposition of a 40 kilometre-radius combat exclusion zone around the crash site was an undertaking to the West, to allow access for crash investigators from Australia, which lost 38 citizens and residents in the downed aircraft, and other countries.
And it worked to the extent that, according to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the rebels who had control of the site were slowly allowing greater access, to the point that Canberra and The Hague had dispatched dozens of investigators charged with searching for the remains of as many as 100 passengers who remain unaccounted for.
But as Kiev stepped up its pursuit of the rebels, the new fighting blocked the Australians’ assess to the site for three days straight.
Kiev accused the rebels of not respecting the exclusion zone; the rebels levelled the same charge at the Ukraine national army. At his hilltop checkpoint a few kilometres short of Shakhtersk, rebel commander Aleksandr Levchenko, told Fairfax Media: “As soon as Kiev stops the fighting it started in this area, the Australians will be able to go in and search for those bodies.”
After making that seemingly reasonable point Levchenko, in other times a truck driver, quickly segued to the rebel script on the cause of the Malaysian aircraft crashing – “that plane was shot down by Kiev with the help of the Americans – the blood of the victims is on their hands”.
A United Nations monitoring mission in Ukraine issued a report putting the death toll in the east of the country at 1129 and it warned of more to come, in what it described as an alarming build-up of heavy weapons in built-up areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, a second rebel stronghold which now is under constant Ukrainian attack.
Warning that the use of artillery, tanks, rockets and missiles in such conditions could be a violation of international humanitarian law, it complained: “People trapped in areas controlled by the armed groups continue to be killed as the heavy shelling continues from both sides.”
The warning coincided with a telephone plea by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko for the government to call off its fighting in the crash site area. “We want to get to the crash site as quickly as possible to get the victims and bring them home," a government spokesman in The Hague said.
Kiev is casting its stepped up combat as an attempt to open a secure corridor to the crash site – but that ignores the fact that the rebels were already doing that.