The Russian war against Ukraine has entered its sixth month, and in the eastern Donbas region – scene to some of the heaviest fighting – the missiles are still falling.
On Sunday morning it was school number six in the city of Kostiantynivka, 30km from the frontline. Two rockets made huge craters flush against a three-storey building that was gutted by the blast.
In her fifth-floor flat about 100 metres away, Tamara, 85, was awake and boiling potatoes at 4.30am when the rockets struck.
“I sleep in my clothes so I can get out quickly if there is an airstrike,” the former nurse explained as she walked past the site a few hours later, walking her dogs on the way to collect water.
“The explosion shook my flat. I can’t describe the noise. It was insane. It was like an earthquake. I’m so scared,” she said, close to tears. “I hate it! I hate it! I just want this war to end.”
Although people living in Kostiantynivka, Kramatorsk, Sloviansk – all visited by the Guardian on Sunday – said the intensity of the shelling had diminished in the last two weeks, the violence continues and the sound of shelling and rocket fire was audible in the distance.
On the northern outskirts of Sloviansk, the closest of the three cities to the frontline, Olga was shaking apricots out of a tree on a country lane to collect in a shopping bag.
Not far from where she was gathering the fruit, the sound of outgoing fire from a Ukrainian gun could be heard, hidden among the trees.
“The last few days have been more quiet,” said the 55-year-old, who like Tamara was too scared to give her surname. “I have been here since the first day of the war. It has been like hell. I don’t understand why Russia attacked Ukraine.”
The cities, all in Donetsk province, are seen as key targets in the attempt by Russian forces to occupy all of the Donbas region, which encompasses Donetsk and neighbouring Luhansk. Few here imagined that the war that began on 24 February would drag on this long. Many see little prospect of an end being in sight and are fearful of what winter will bring.
Confirming the anecdotal evidence of residents, satellite imaging by Nasa of fires burning along the frontline suggests that Russian artillery shelling has recently diminished. Some analysts suggest that this may be the result of Ukrainian strikes – using newly supplied western artillery systems – on ammunition dumps and command posts, which have degraded Russian capabilities.
Still residents are not yet willing to believe that it is more than a temporary respite.
Before the war, Mykola Pushkaruk, 43, was a children’s football coach in Kramatorsk. With the schools shut he has no children to coach, although he still plays football every evening with men from the town.
“After 24 February my life was turned upside down,” he said. “The city turned into a military base. The development of the city stopped. Since then there’s been no work. People are just surviving with savings and humanitarian aid.”
“During the first week of the war, I evacuated my parents to Dnipro. I tried to start a new life there, get a different kind of job. But I failed. So I came back. I volunteer in exchange for food.”
His friend Olena Kolisnyk, 36, runs a flower business.
“Life in this city is dangerous,” she said. “We realise that Russia is trying to capture this city. It is OK for now but I don’t want to wait for Russian troops to come here. If I think they are coming, I will leave for Dnipro.”
She told a story from earlier in the war of how a Russian missile flew over her head and exploded in a street. “I survived,” she said wryly. “And it made me feel stronger.”
Where the war goes from here, and for how long, few are willing to hazard a guess.
Amid evidence that on the southern front Ukrainian forces are winding up for a long-promised offensive – whose principal target appears to be the occupied city of Kherson, on the eastern front in the Donbas – western intelligence agencies are suggesting that the grinding Russian offensive may be running out of steam.
For now, however, the biggest threat to civilians is missile strikes on cities that have turned into garrison towns, full of soldiers, with armour moving on the main roads through the surrounding countryside.
At another school on the outskirts of Kramatorsk, hit by a missile strike on Thursday which badly damaged nearby houses, locals were already scavenging for materials to use for repairs, piling up recovered doors and pieces of timber.
For many, however, more immediate than the problem of the missile strikes is the lack of water in many homes and problems with gas and electricity supplies. Walking from a water collection point in a park in Kramatorsk, Natalya Zukerman, 64, and her neighbour, Lyudmyla Yurko, 74, complained about the conditions.
“There’s no water. No ice and I can’t afford vodka. And vodka is the only thing that helps me get through this,” Zukerman said.
“Look at my dress,” said Yurko, tugging the hem to show how loosely it hung on her. “Before the war I was plump. This is what it has done to me.”
Olena Kolisnyk summed up many people’s feelings. “I feel there is huge tension in Kramatorsk,” she said. “The war is continuing. And that makes me frightened.”
