Shelling by Ukrainian troops, some of them in sunflower fields outside the large industrial city, killed six people over the weekend, city officials said, as well as setting buildings ablaze and leaving shell craters in roads.
The army has all but encircled the other main rebel redoubt of Luhansk, where three non-combatants were killed in the latest fighting, and is trying to tighten the noose around Donetsk.
Fighting has intensified since the downing of a Malaysian airliner in rebel-held territory on July 17 and, with each side blaming the other for the deaths of the 298 crew and passengers, relations between Russia and the West are deteriorating rapidly.
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin
...Second and fourth President and sixth of the Russian Federation and the first to remain sober. Putin is credited with bringing political stability and re-establishing something like the rule of law, which occasionally results in somebody dropping dead from polonium poisoning. Under Putin, a new group of business magnates controlling significant swathes of Russia's economy has emerged, all of whom have close personal ties to Putin. The old bunch, without close personal ties to Putin, are in jail or in exile or dead...to persuade the rebels to end the conflict and to ensure they do not hinder international experts trying to recover human remains from the plane's wreckage.
"It is an unspeakable abomination that two weeks after this crash there are still bodies on the crash site unrecovered and the Russians have not used their influence with the separatists," Hammond told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.
"I said last week that there is one man who can snap his fingers and make this happen and he hasn't done so. He must now do so," Hammond said, urging Putin to cut off arms to the rebels and "stop destabilising and interfering" in Ukraine.
Putin denies arming the rebels or trying to orchestrate events in Ukraine since the ousting of a president sympathetic to Moscow in February. He accuses the West of attempting to 'contain' Russia, using a Cold War-era phrase to suggest the United States wants to reduce Moscow's global influence.