DEBALTSEVE, Ukraine — While the Ukrainian government accused Russia of sending more tanks and troops into the country despite a cease-fire agreement, the few residents who remained in the fiercely contested town of Debaltseve emerged from basements and other refuges on Friday to a Dickensian scene of destruction and gloom.
Only about 1,000 of the town’s prewar population of 27,000 remained, most of them elderly people too infirm or too stubborn to leave. Out for the first time after a week of shelling and street fighting, they moved about in groups, with blackened faces and gritty clothes, busily scavenging for food in the ruins.
“The last week was just horrible,” said Vasily G. Yegelsky, 77, a retiree who was limping along in the morning sunshine, grasping an empty nylon bag, headed to the outskirts of town.
Out there, where Ukrainian soldiers were dug in for months before retreating in haste on Wednesday before an assault by Russian-backed separatists, Mr. Yegelsky and others wandered through abandoned trenches, looking for something to eat. Bloody shreds of mattress hung from tree limbs, and stray dogs skulked nearby. But also strewn about were canned foods and much prized bags of macaroni.
As they picked through the detritus of war, they talked darkly of bodies lying uncollected in the streets through the fighting, of the sick and wounded stranded in basements.
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“We would go out on reconnaissance to give them a little nightmare, and fired 50 grenades, and they shot back with only four,” Valery Y. Shtoba, a soldier and a former miner, said in an interview beside a charred, mangled Ukrainian tracked armored personnel carrier in Vulehirsk, a town near Debaltseve.
“This is a small victory for us. The big victory will come when we drink beer in Lviv,” a vehemently anti-Russian city in western Ukraine, on the Polish border.
By Friday afternoon in Debaltseve, a separatist aid convoy had pulled into town and was distributing bread and bacon to a waiting crowd.
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