Two days after more than 50 people were killed on its platforms by a missile strike, the only sounds at the Kramatorsk railway station on Sunday morning were a distant air-raid siren and the rhythmic sweeping of broken glass.

“The town is dead now,” said Tetiana, 50, a shopkeeper who was working next to the station when it was attacked as thousands of people tried to board trains to evacuate the eastern city, fearing it would soon be besieged by Russian forces.

Friday’s strike was a gruesome turn for the city after nearly eight years of being near the front line of the country’s struggle against Russia-backed separatists in the region known as Donbas.

The station’s main hall was still filled with blood and luggage on Sunday morning, with the burned-out hulks of two sedans lying in the parking area outside.

Tetiana, who declined to provide her last name, recalled ducking inside the market next to the station to take cover when the missile struck. A family that took shelter with her was almost crushed by a piece of a falling roof that was sheared off in the blast.

“There were screams everywhere,” she said. “Nobody could understand anything, cars were burning and people were running.”

She estimated that about 2,000 people were at the station when it was hit. With Moscow’s decision to shift the focus of its war to eastern Ukraine, the people who remain in Kramatorsk fear that they will soon be shelled into oblivion, like the residents of Kharkiv and Mariupol, two other cities that have been surrounded by Russian forces.

“We are being encircled. We understand that,” said Tetiana, who has lived in Kramatorsk for 10 years. She said she would not leave the city because she must look after her 82-year-old mother, who is ailing. But she knows more than ever the danger that brings.

“We think we will be swept off the face of the earth,” she said.

(New York Times News Service)