Ukrainians race to evacuate their homes as fierce fighting rages near eastern city of Pokrovsk

POKROVSK, Ukraine — With Russian forces just 5 miles away, civilians in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk are expecting a heavy fight to come and scrambling to flee while there’s still time.

“We walked around the house saying goodbye, it was a very hard moment,” Oksana Belova, 50, told NBC News on Thursday as she prepared to leave her home with her 75-year old mother, Lyubov Ridanova, and her autistic son, Mykyta, 11, who has problems with his eyesight. 

She packed their bags into an ambulance, aided by a crew from East SOS, a charity which helps people to evacuate and find new accommodation. As tears filled her eyes, she turned to look at their home for one last time, spotting her two dogs yapping on chains in the front yard whom she had to leave behind. 

She said she had asked her neighbor to look after them, while they moved to the Poltava region in central Ukraine, to live at a family vacation camp that has been turned into housing for people displaced by the fighting. 

“Our hope is to come back someday and that our house is not destroyed,” she said.

Roman Matsevko, a member of the East SOS evacuation crew, said there are about 30,000 people still living in Pokrovsk, around half the prewar population. Rescuers said they had been answering daily calls for assistance for the past month.

Based in the nearby city of Dnipro, the ambulance crew races down the highway into town, only slowing to a crawl to skirt around a crater from a missile which had torn through the concrete of a railway bridge days earlier. 

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On the outskirts of the city, Ukrainian forces were digging trenches in a tree line. Further into town, a few military vehicles patrolled the streets, mixed in among the civilian cars and buses.

Pokrovsk, a transport hub, lies on a main road that serves as an important supply route to other embattled Ukrainian-held outposts, such as the towns of Chasiv Yar and Kostiantynivka.

The ferocity of the fight is impossible to miss. Buildings and streets are left in ruins. Artillery booms close by.

“It has become more difficult lately, more incoming, more glide bombs, more of everything,” said Serhii, a 43-year-old Ukrainian soldier driving a vehicle draped in camouflage netting. He asked to be identified only by his first name in keeping with military protocol.

In light of the Russian advance, he remained defiantly optimistic. “We stand still, we hold. Everything will be Ukraine,” he said before driving off.

President Vladimir Putin “is attempting to preserve the Russian drive on Pokrovsk,” according to an analysis Wednesday by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.

It added that he had “thus far avoided redeploying the type of combat effective and experienced frontline units” from the region “that will likely be necessary to push Ukrainian forces from Kursk,” the region of southwest Russia which Ukrainian forces swept into almost a month ago.