Sawt Falasteen - In Bashtanka, Russian forces sow destruction and despair

The town had been torn apart in the month of fierce fighting since Russia invaded Ukraine.

Kyiv's forces were still in control there, but for Vitali and his family, the fighting was still too close for comfort. So they were heading north, he told AFP.

Vitaly, his wife, two children and his mother-in-law had fled the Russian-controlled town of Snihurivka about 60 kilometres (37 miles) east of Mykolaiv, a key coastal city for the Russian forces.

The bombardments there were incessant, he said. "At first it was on the outskirts and now in the centre."

"There's been no water or electricity for 10 days," he said. "People there have started looting.

"The most important thing now is to survive. We've left everything behind."

Despite the icy wind blowing over the plain, he was dressed in a baseball cap and flip-flops, a testament to their hurried departure.

Before their car gave out outside Bashtanka, they had been heading towards Zhytomyr, a town in the centre of the country and west of the capital where they have family.

Eventually they found a way out of the battle zone, leaving the carcasses of burnt-out cars behind them.

- 'No forgiveness' -

Before the war, Bashtanka had a population of around 12,000 people. During Soviet times, it was known as a regional tractor depot.

Now, the city emptied of civilians, it is populated mainly by Ukrainian soldiers.

In the centre, a mural of a smiling cosmonaut still adorns the blackened facade of a building damaged by shelling. It escaped the blast that destroyed part of the ground-floor pharmacy and the building's roof.

But Sergei, a 43-year-old resident who told AFP he had taken part in the fighting there, remained defiant. "We gave these fascists the lesson they deserved," he said.

For a couple of days earlier this month, Russian troops won partial control of the town before Ukrainian troops forced them back out, officials and residents said.

"They took villages around Bashtanka and looted them," said Natasha Gasilina, a middle-aged lady wearing a thick burgundy coat.

In one village the Russian soldiers found photos of members of the Ukrainian forces fighting pro-Kremlin separatists in the east of the country since 2014, she told AFP.

"They looked for them to kill them," she said -- but in vain.

The war came to Bashtanka on March 13, when the city was woken by Russian bombs -- dropped by parachute, say residents -- that left large craters and shook the nearby homes.

Only one injury was reported: a man pulled out alive from under the rubble.

"There were Ukrainian military vehicles there, but they missed them," said one young man, who declined to give his name. But the roof of his parents' home several hundred metres away had been ripped off by the force of the blasts.

Olga Miheikina arrived by bicycle from another neighbourhood to ask after a family friend and survey the damage.

"It's inhuman," she said at the sight of the destruction. "These people who call themselves our brothers, who lie to the whole world and to their own people."

"There'll be no forgiveness nor divine mercy for such people!"

Nearby, 82-year-old Anatoly, dressed in blue overalls and a cap, stood outside what was left of his home: the roof gone, the windows blown out. He had sent his wife away to stay to with friends.

"Before all of this, I wanted to live to be a hundred years old," said the frail old man.

"Not anymore."

B.Mahmoud--SF-PST