"Houses are ruined. It's a horror," he said.
In neighboring Luhansk province, 83-year-old Lida Chuhay left the hard-hit town of Lyman, also near the front line.
"Ashes, ruins. The northern parts, the southern parts, all are ruined," she said Sunday as she sat on a train heading west from the town of Pokrovsk. "Literally everything is on fire: houses, buildings, everything."
Chuhay and others from Lyman said much of the town was reduced to rubble by the bombardment. Anyone still there is hiding in shelters because it is too dangerous to venture out.
"They ruined everything," said Olha Medvedeva, sitting opposite Chuhay on the train. "The five-story building where we were living, everything flew away — the windows, the doors."
In cities farther from the front lines, air raid sirens sound so often that few pay attention and continue about their daily business.
After Russian forces failed to capture Kyiv in the opening weeks of the invasion and withdrew to the east, residents started to flow back into the capital. The nightly curfew has been cut by an hour, and public transportation started running longer to accommodate passengers.
Residents face long lines at gas stations, and the Ukrainian currency, the hryvnya, has weakened from 27 to the dollar at the start of the war to 37.
"Ukraine is being destroyed — not just by Russian bombs and missiles," said Volodymyr Sidenko, an analyst at the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center think tank. "The fall in GDP (gross domestic product) and the sharp reduction in the revenue side of the budget have already been felt by every Ukrainian today. And this is just the beginning."
But the National Opera resumed performances last week in Kyiv, with the audience advised how to reach the air raid shelter. No Russian operas are on the program.
And some restaurants, cafes and shops in cities such as Odesa and Zaporizhzhia have reopened.
Lviv, the city in western Ukraine about 45 miles (70 kilometers) from the Polish border, has been inundated with more than 300,000 people fleeing the war. About 1,000 arrive at its railway station daily.
"We judge the intensity of the fighting in the east not by (what) the news says but by waves of refugees, which have been growing in recent weeks again," said Alina Gushcha, a 35-year-old chemistry teacher who volunteers at the rail station to help arrivals.
Hotels, campgrounds, universities and schools ran out of space long ago, and the city has built temporary housing that resembles shipping containers in city parks.
"In the months of the war, I've learned to be happy about every day without shelling and bombardment," said Halyna Shcherbin, 59, outside her container-like home in Stryiskyi Park, where she lives with her daughter and two granddaughters. That gratitude is perhaps linked to the fact that they left Kramatorsk the day before the deadly missile attack.
Lviv also comes under regular Russian bombardment because it's the gateway for Western military aid. Its Old Town architectural treasures, including the Boim Chapel and the Latin Cathedral, are protected by either metal shielding or sandbags.
In cities and towns of southern Ukraine, not far from the Crimean Peninsula that Moscow annexed in 2014, the war continues to flare with regularity.
Parts of the city of Mykolaiv often come under attack, and its streets are mostly empty and businesses closed. In some neighborhoods, the scars of war are clear, with blast marks on sidewalks, burned-out stores and shrapnel embedded in walls. The Russian-occupied city of Kherson is only 58 kilometers (36 miles) to the east.
In the village of Velyka Kostromka, south of the city of Kryvy Rih, the remaining residents try to go on with life despite the occasional shelling.. At least 20 houses were damaged on a recent morning, including three that were destroyed. A woman and her three children narrowly escaped with their lives.
Hours later, a farmer was back in his potato field, surveying a small crater left behind. With barely a shrug, he raked over it.
