Eastern Ukraine towns hit in overnight strikes
The incessant ringing of a phone punctuates the crunch of broken glass splintering underfoot as police lay out a body bag, through the debris-strewn rooms of the bomb-blasted house. But the call will never be answered. The phone’s owner crouches lifelessly on the floor of his home, in a front room where the explosion from a missile, one of several to hit this eastern Ukrainian town, found him. The missiles that rained down on Pokrovsk were part of a barrage of attacks on towns in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region that left at least 10 people dead Saturday, according to Donetsk governor Pavlo Kyrylenko into the early hours of Saturday night and Sunday. With a counteroffensive pressed forward just to the north in the Kharkiv region they came as Ukraine, from key areas pushing Russian forces into a retreat. Mayor Ruslan Trebushkin said in a message posted on Telegram, six of the dead were in Pokrovsk. Before by missiles from the front line the industrial town about 40 kilometres (25 m...