Intense battles have raged around the airport in the main stronghold of pro-Kremlin insurgents as Ukraine's new leader laid out tough terms for a ceasefire demanded by his European allies and Russia.
A news team outside Donetsk International Airport - a gleaming hub shuttered since coming under a bloody rebel attack at the end of May - saw exchanges of fire on Friday and an anti-aircraft missile being shot at a Ukrainian military jet.
"Here we go again. This is just like yesterday," said one vendor from a nearby outdoor market as dozens of people looked nervously up at the cloudy sky.
"Everything is shutting down," said another man in his fifties who was preparing to escape across the border to Russia with his daughters and grandchildren.
"There is nothing to do here. No work - and it is getting too dangerous," he said.
Pro-Kiev authorities in Lugansk also said four miners were killed and 16 injured when their bus came under artillery fire on Thursday.
But government forces reported making significant progress in their attempts to choke the encircled pro-Russian gunmen off from what they allege are vast quantities of Russian weapons supplies.
"At least 50 rebels were wiped out in the past 24 hours," a Ukrainian military spokesman Vladyslav Seleznyov wrote in a Facebook post.
A spokesman for Ukraine's national security and defence council added that at least four servicemen were killed and 25 wounded in a barrage of rebel attacks.
The tide in Ukraine's worst crisis since its 1991 independence turned last weekend when resurgent government forces managed to flush out the separatists from a string of eastern towns and cities they had seized in early April.
Most of the militias have since retreated to Donetsk and the neighbouring industrial city of Lugansk - both capitals of their own "People's Republics" that refuse to recognise Kiev's new West-leaning government and are seeking annexation by Russia.
The conflict has claimed the lives of more than 500 people, while Amnesty International also said there had been "hundreds" of abductions and acts of torture committed by the separatists.
An Amnesty report published Friday also said that "excessive force may have been used... by Ukrainian forces" on several occasions - a charge repeatedly made by Moscow.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko now finds himself trapped between European pressure to agree an immediate truce and massive domestic support for his troops to finish off an insurgency that has threatened the 45-million-strong nation with disintegration and economic collapse.
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