Pokrovsk Lives packed up into bags as Russians close on city

Library books are piled in the street, waiting to be removed in a truck.

-  Dan Sabbagh

Two men across the road take down a supermarket t sign. The modern grocery store shut a couple of weeks ago. Half a mile away an evacuation train waits. People crowd on to the platform and in the station, preparing to flee.

Pokrovsk, a mining city in eastern Ukraine, is packing up fast.

The Russians are seven miles away, already close enough for the city to be struck, after a remorseless advance that has taken the invaders close to a place that had been considered safe. Fearing the worst, Ukrainian officials have given people two weeks to leave.

Maryna, 33, waits outside the station with her three children, Angelina, Maria and Oleksandra, packed bags around them.

Their destination is Rivne, far off in western Ukraine, and she says she has little choice but to abandon the place where she and her family grew up. "Our neighbours' house was hit - and that's when I realised how dangerous it is. We just had to move," she says.

Though Maryna is sure she is doing the right thing, it is not easy to give up what you know - "I just feel pain," she says - and she worries that many other local people have not yet decided to quit.

"Still a lot of people are staying, and they do not understand they could die, she says. "It is too dangerous, especially if you have children."

It is not clear what life awaits them in Rivne, where they will be received as displaced people.

It is hard to count, but there are perhaps a few hundred people waiting or embarking on a 35C summer day. All have been forced here because of a gradual collapse at the centre of the eastern front, starting with the fall of Avdiivka in February, a time when US military aid was blocked by Congress.