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Svetlana Karpenko had just moved her mother Nina to the television room when a Grad rocket slammed down outside her window, raking the elderly woman’s bedroom with fire and shrapnel.

“Two steps closer and it would have got us,” said Karpenko’s husband, Oleg Gostrenko, as the three of them cleaned up debris and artillery boomed in the distance. Along with a church and a preschool, their two-storey block of flats was one of more than 100 buildings damaged last week as at least 40 rockets rained down on the town of Novoluhanske, kilometres from Russia-backed separatist territory in eastern Ukraine.

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With no money to replace their windows, Gostrenko and Karpenko were covering the yawning holes with plastic sheets. By a stroke of luck, many residents of Novoluhanske were at a concert when the rockets landed, and only eight were injured in the attack. But more than 10,300 people have been killed since war broke out between the Ukrainian government and separatists heavily backed by Russia in 2014. Last Wednesday it surpassed the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia as the longest violent conflict in Europe since the Second World War. And despite an armistice and peace process agreed in Minsk in 2015, this war of attrition has been heating up.