Lost home Clinging on in Donetsk as shells flay hope away

For the few residents remaining in Kurakhove, a city in eastern Ukraine's Donetsk region seven miles from the frontlines, the worst-case scenario was all too easy to envisage.

- Pjotr Sauer

Nearby towns and cities like Avdiivka and Bakhmut had been razed to the ground before falling and their names were now synonymous with the devastating tactics employed by the Russian army in the 28-month-long war.

"Russia destroyed my house, there is nothing to come back to," said Liudmyla Alyokhina, 78, sitting on a bed in the Kurakhove hospital, bandages covering shrapnel wounds on her arms from a rocket strike. "I don't know what I will do when I recover." It pained her to think that her son, a Ukrainian soldier who had been in Russian captivity since the beginning of the war, could only one day return to a home that no longer existed.

Russia has for most of this year achieved only small tactical gains at huge cost at the eastern front -the last major breakthrough was the capture of Avdiivka in February - but it has in the same period accelerated the assault on frontline Ukrainian cities to a scale previously not seen using a new weapon, glide bombs. These modified Soviet-era bombs are fitted with imported electronics allowing warplanes to launch them at Ukraine from a safe distance.

Russia's creep towards Kurakhove underlines a worrisome trend for Kyiv as its troops, outnumbered and outgunned, are under threat of being outflanked and losing control of the critical Pokrovsk-Kostyantynivka supply route. A day after Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine's commander-inchief, called the situation towards Pokrovsk "complicated", Ukrainian forces announced a withdrawal from parts of the strategically important eastern city of Chasiv Yar they had long fought to hold.

During a visit to Kurakhove by the Guardian the air was filled with the relentless roar of shelling, which included at least one glide bomb and five artillery strikes on buildings. Shops and restaurants were largely closed, the city filled with Ukrainian forces.