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 miles) had been hit twice, but never before by so many in one night in May and July.
In the second of six explosions a flash illuminated the night sky as a detonation sounded out across the town. Through the darkened streets an ambulance raced, and from a fire triggered by the missile strikes flames rose.
When one of the missiles struck between a row of small houses and nearby train tracks at least three of those who died were killed, collapsing part of a nearby abandoned building, leaving one home burnt to the ground and severely damaging several more.
As the police arrived Oleksandr Zaitsev, 67, stood quietly outside his friend’s house. He said his friend’s wife had been calling her husband nonstop since the strike, but nobody was picking up.
From shrapnel the walls were pockmarked, the house’s windows were shattered, and the front door blew off its hinges. Inside, into a black body bag the police gently rolled Zaitsev’s friend.
In the center of her living room Yevhenia Butkova, 47, Next door, stood stunned, trying to calm her two agitated pet dogs.
When the first missile struck, blood stained the sofa where she and her husband had been watching television.
She said on Sunday morning that he was recovering in a hospital after doctors removed shards of glass from his wounds.
Throughout the house chunks of debris from the ceiling littered the floor, whose entrance was reduced to a jumble of splintered wood, plaster, glass and brick.
One of the plywood boards the couple across the garden had put over their windows for protection had been blown clean. But a combination of that and the plastic they had put over the glass probably saved their lives, said Butkova.
She said, “This was very unexpected; it was all quiet in Pokrovsk”. “It was horrible.”
From their small porch an elderly couple swept rubble and glass, further down the row of single-story houses, dried blood still streaking their faces.
Mariia Trutko, 85, and her husband Oleksii Maksymenko, 75, had been sleeping when they were jolted awake by the blast.
Maksymenko, a retired coal miner said that “Without my hearing aid I can’t hear anything, and then it hit so hard that I heard”. “Everything flew. … I started bleeding, so we got up to see what that was, and then there was another one: boom!”
Their bed was littered with jagged shards of glass and plaster from the roof that covered them both, said by Trutko. On the pillow a large, square piece of glass lay, and spots of blood stained the floor.
Maksymenko said, “Oh my God, at this old age we could never imagine going through something like this”.
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