Constant shelling in eastern Ukraine

Olena Makarenko doesn't want to take more than three steps from her apartment bloc. "You never know when the next shelling will start," she says. From the entrance of the gray two-storey building, one staircase leads up to her apartment, another one down into the basement.

"Sometimes, when it's quiet, I do go out,” she says. "It gets too cold in the basement."

But that is where she has spent most of the past four days, in a room with a bare earthen floor and a low ceiling, and a small electric heater that does little to take the chill off the damp cold.

A bed from the apartment upstairs has been carried down to the cellar. An old woman is lying wrapped in blankets, next to a boy who clutches his mobile phone in his sleep.

Olena grabs a plastic bag and goes up to the apartment. Her daughter is busy packing. She wants to spend a few days in a neighboring town believed to be safer. 

"The best thing would be if she would take the grandchildren and go for a few weeks to the Carpathian mountains, more than 1,000 kilometers to the west," Olena says. "By then, it should be clear how this situation here will continue."

She can't make sense of Russia recognizing the two regions held by separatists.  "I don't know what that will mean for us," she says. "I don't even know what I should do next."

More tensions, fewer observers

There has been mounting tension in the past five days along the frontline to the breakaway regions. Hundreds of grenades have rained down on the Ukrainian side. There's no verifiable information on how things look like on the other side.

The Ukrainian government believes the separatists are trying to provoke the army into a reaction and therefore the military has been asked to hold back. Only if the safety of the troops is at risk are they allowed to return fire.

But how exactly the troops on the ground are behaving is hard to tell. The OSCE, which is tasked with recording any breaches of the ceasefire, can barely keep track of the many skirmishes, in part because many OSCE member states have withdrawn their observers at this stage. 

'We are scared'

Vrubivka is not directly on the frontline, but the first positions held by separatists are only 15 kilometers away  — about the range of a howitzer. The village is the only place in the area currently hit by heavy shelling. At the back of Olena's apartment building, the windows are shattered. One grenade exploded directly on the main village street.

Next door in the schoolyard, there's a crater right next to the soccer goal post. The emergency services came by in an old Soviet minibus to fix some of the gas pipes which had been damaged by the shelling. The workers say they had been here earlier but had come under fire.

"We are scared," says one of the school's teachers. She doesn't want to be filmed because she fears she might collapse during an interview.

Vrubivka was spared the worst of the fighting in 2014 and 2015, despite its position between several larger towns where fighting raged. Now the village is constantly under fire, while the neighboring towns remain quiet.

"People always call me and ask why is it that we are seeing so much shelling," says Olena, who ran a cultural center in the days until recently.

"But what can I tell them? I don't know why." She gives a quick wave to the neighbors on the other side of the yard who are busy loading their belongings into a yellow minivan. Then she goes back upstairs to help her daughter pack.

This article was originally written in German.