After shelling ended overnight in a suburb of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, Konstantin Luchkin emerged from his cellar to find his beehives smashed, the facade of his house blown off and his car burnt and puckered with shrapnel holes. "Call that a targeted strike?" asked the coal miner Saturday, holding his four-year-old daughter Masha as she played on a tablet computer.
AFP journalists heard the rumble of shelling roll across the besieged rebel-held city from around 2:00 to 5:00 am as a fierce battle raged between the separatist insurgents and government forces.
Mortar bombardments hit a number of streets in northern Donetsk and the nearby city of Makiyivka around 2:00 am. The artillery fire tore off roofs, set several homes alight, and left deep craters in the ground. "This was a mass strike," Luchkin said. His house, with its grapevines and beehives in the garden, had one north-facing facade ripped off. The garage roof lay in the street, his car burnt out, its charred body peppered with shrapnel.
"I could still live here, but what's the use?" he said. "How can you hide from this shrapnel?" Residents of this semi-rural suburb in the shadow of the slagheap of a local mine blamed the Ukrainian government for the attack. "They hide behind honest people and make them fight each other," Luchkin said of the pro-Western authorities in Kiev, expressing his frustration at the spiralling conflict.