Eastern Ukraine towns hit in overnight strikes

By ELENA BECATOROS
Associated Press

POKROVSK, Ukraine (AP) — Through the debris-strewn rooms of the bomb-blasted house, the incessant ringing of a phone punctuates the crunch of broken glass splintering underfoot as police lay out a body bag. But the call will never be answered. The phone’s owner crouches lifeless on the floor of his home, in a front room where the explosion from a missile, one of several to hit the eastern Ukrainian town of Pokrovsk, found him. The missiles that rained down Saturday night and into the early hours of Sunday were part of a barrage of attacks on towns in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region Saturday, killing at least 10 people, officials said. They came as Ukraine pressed forward with a counteroffensive to the north in the Kharkiv region, pushing Russian forces into retreat from key areas.