Prolonged artillery shelling rocked residential apartment blocks yesterday in Donetsk, casting doubts over renewed talk of a ceasefire and an end to Ukraine’s six-month-old conflict.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he and his Ukrainian counterpart Petro Poroshenko were “very close” in their views on how to end the fighting between Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian separatists and a peace deal could be reached this week.

But in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine’s largest city with a pre-war population of about one million, the separatists who have made it the capital of their self-proclaimed “people’s republic” were sceptical about the latest peace drive.

“A ceasefire is always good but our main condition still stands – the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from our territory. That’s the only reasonable way,” said Vladimir Antyufeyev, deputy prime minister of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”.

A leader of one of the armed rebel units, who declined to give his name, said the separatists would agree to nothing less than full independence from Kiev.

“Three months ago they might have offered us autonomy. But we have made our stand now, we have taken everything for ourselves. There is no going back,” he said, sitting in a cafe in the city centre where distant shelling could be heard.

The centre of Donetsk, a major industrial city, has seen little shelling in recent days as the separatists – backed, says Kiev, by Russian troops – launched a new offensive further south. But fighting raged yesterday on the northern and western outskirts, around Donetsk’s airport – still in the hands of government forces – and some surrounding villages.

The sound of the shelling prompted residents in one north-western district of Donetsk to seek shelter in the dark and humid cellar of an office building.

Not everybody blamed Poroshenko for conditions in Donetsk, which like most of eastern Ukraine is mainly Russian-speaking, has close economic and other ties to nearby Russia and is distrustful of the government in distant Kiev.

“I would leave the city but I am a pensioner, I have no money and all my wealth is my flat, which is here,” said Lidia, 75. “No government should have allowed such bloodshed, that goes for Kiev and the Donetsk People’s Republic too,” she said as she saw off a neighbour on a bus leaving for Kiev.

Elsewhere, several small mortars hit free-standing houses, shattering the window panes and damaging gates with shrapnel.