Tearful Families Evacuate as Russian Forces Advance Towards Pokrovsk

On a platform near the east Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, Anna Dvoryaninova waited for a train she never wanted to take, leaving her home behind as Russian forces push deeper into her native Donetsk region.

With hundreds of others, the mother-of-six hurried her children onto a train, telling an older child to carry a toddler as late-summer sunshine heated the train station.

She held back tears as she told AFP that, throughout more than two years of war, she had hoped to stay in her village in the Pokrovsk area.

"It's my home. I was born here. I got married here. I got divorced here, had kids here," the 35-year-old said, adding in a trembling voice: "It's my beloved Donbas."

But Russian forces are now advancing towards Pokrovsk and Kyiv has ordered the evacuation of families with children to towns and cities further west.

With Moscow's army several kilometres away, Dvoryaninova decided it was time to go and earlier this week called authorities to ask how she could get her family out.

She wheeled suitcases up to the train -- painted in Ukraine's blue and yellow national colours -- and rushed her children on.

Others on the platform clutched suitcases, plastic bags and pets, with some elderly people brought on wheelchairs -- waiting for trains headed westwards away from the fighting.

- 'We will come back' -

Klavdiya Skupeyko, too, had until the last moment hoped to stay in her home in Selydove, south of Pokrovsk.

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But Russian forces are now at the gates of Selydove, heavily shelled for months, and the 65-year-old was one of the few residents left.

"You go outside and there is not a single soul. It's scary when you're alone... Such depression, such horror," she said, her long grey hair held up by a pin.

It is impossible to know when -- or even if -- the evacuees can return to their homes.

But, with a spark in her eyes, Skupeyko defiantly said she is not leaving forever.

"We hope that this wave will pass and we will go back and rebuild it (Selydove)," she said, with a smile, adding: "That's what I think and that's how it should be."

- 'Goosebumps' -

At 16, Maksym Starovskyi waited to board the train in the hope of saving his education.

Heavy shelling had forced his class to study remotely.

"It hit my school, my local school. I entered the first year of college and that was also bombed, so now I study only online," he said.

The teenager worried about his future "because I need an education."

With the Russian army claiming another hamlet almost every day, evacuations were also underway in nearby Myrnograd, a frequent target for Moscow's forces.

As he helped people leave, 32-year-old Kirill Kozoriz struggled to believe that his native city could fall to Russia.

Signs of war are everywhere in Myrnograd, which has many destroyed buildings, and Kozoriz said "few people" have stayed because of frequent shelling and "flying drones."

"I will be honest, tears do come. In the night, I dream about it."

Kozoriz said he had "goosebumps" thinking what could happen to Myrnograd, fearing that it could be flattened like the towns of Bakhmut or Avdiivka.

"I do not want to imagine that this could happen to our city," he said.

- Packing up lives -

His mother had told him not to take all their possessions from the family home, persuaded that she will be back soon and that "all will be well."

Many held on to the same hope.

Nadezhda and Andrei Levchenko, a couple in their 50s, were packing up their life's work in Myrnograd: a clock and watch shop that they opened in the early 1990s.

"We were students and it was our dream to open a watch shop," Nadezhda said, wearing a yellow dress and standing in the now half-empty shop.

"We made it come true," she said, adding that it was "all fine" until war broke out.

The couple rushed to wrap each clock in brown paper, taking them from behind a counter that was decorated with plastic flowers.

"We have to go and take with us what we can," Nadezhda said.

The couple slept in the shop for several days to pack up during curfew hours.

They said they might return to their shop one day.

"We are hopeful," Nadezhda said.