Donetsk, Ukraine: At 11, Nastia Dankovtseva is too familiar with the weapons of war.

On Tuesday her family was evacuated as intense fighting flared in the industrial city of Shakhtersk, 45 kilometres east of here. On Wednesday she and her family were holed up in emergency dormitories in Donetsk – destination unknown.

Deadpan and too adult-like, she reported the view in the rear-view mirror as they fled – “I could seen the dark smoke from shelling near our home.” Told that Fairfax Media had been on the outskirts of Shakhtersk during the fighting, she added matter-of-factly: “You know they are using phosphorous.”

Shakhtersk is a rebel stronghold and in the child’s account “they” are Ukrainian government forces.

But in this war both sides, the Ukranian national army and its paramilitary accomplices on one side and the separatist rebels on the other, stand accused of indiscriminately using weapons in populated areas, causing many civilian deaths in a conflict in which the United Nations estimates that more than 1100 people have died – apart from the 298 innocents who died in the MH17 crash on July 17.

The latest allegation, levelled by a government security spokesman in Kiev on Wednesday, is that the rebels have land-mined the MH17 crash site that this week became the setting for a pitched battle for control between the Ukrainian army and the rebels.

If true, the claim is a complication for the dozens of Australian and Dutch investigators pinned down in Donetsk. Since arriving here on the weekend, their daily efforts to reach the site where the remains of as many as 100 passengers might still be strewn, have been stymied by the fighting.

But the landmines claim by Ukrainian National Security Defence Council spokesman Andriy Lysenko was met with caution, in part because it could not be confirmed and because of the frequency with which all factions in this conflict make unsubstantiated allegations that are intended to cast the others in a bad light.

Unlike Kiev’s charge that rebels fired the missile that brought down MH17, which was substantiated with voice intercepts and social media messages, and its claim that a Russian-provided missile was used, for which it provided photographic evidence of the missile system being spirited back to Russia, Mr Lysenko provided no evidence to support his landmines claim.

Members of the Australian Federal Police team in Donetsk were unfazed by the charge, to the extent that they were preparing for another attempt to get to the crash site on Thursday.

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which facilitates the investigators’ efforts to travel to the site, said that in three months monitoring the conflict, it had not encountered such activity – “even in the hot spots and we have accessed quite a few of them'', OSCE spokesman Michael Bociurkiw said.

Human Rights Watch said that there were ''quite credible'' reports of rebel forces using anti-vehicle and anti-personnel landmines – “but we have nothing credible on their use at the crash site'', HRW’s senior emergencies researcher in Donetsk, Ole Solvang told Fairfax Media.

The New York-based HRW has, however, charged that both sides might be guilty of war crimes in their indiscriminate use of missiles in populated areas.

Last week it issued a report on its investigation of four attacks in which the Ukrainian Army had fired unguided Grad missiles into the Donetsk suburbs, in which civilians died.  It is currently investigating similar charges against the rebel forces.

The Russian-built Grads are used by both sides and are especially problematic because in a matter of seconds they can be fired 40 at a time from a multiple, truck-based launcher and each missile has a targeting error of as much as 200 metres in either direction, Mr Solvang said.

“Both sides use them frequently in populated areas, but they can’t be used for a precision strike, so people get hit.”

Mr Solvang cited a case this week, in the town of Olenivka, south of Donetsk, in which he said the townspeople were furious because a Ukrainian army Grad unit had driven into the town, fired off a salvo of the 20-kilometre-range missiles in the direction of Donetsk and then had departed – leaving the town at the mercy of return fire 30 minutes later, from rebel positions in or near Donetsk.

On other excesses, he said there were credible reports that on July 11, a week before MH17 was downed, Ukrainian aircraft had dropped bombs on civilian areas of Snizhne, the town from which the missile that hit the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 is believed to have been fired.

On the charge by 11-year-old Nastia Dankovtseva that phosphorous incendiary weapons were being used, there is video evidence that experts say might constitute proof and also that other incendiary weapons might have been used in the conflict.

Phosphorous weapons unleash the chemical in such a way that it ignites fires that are ''virtually impossible'' to extinguish, including in the flesh of humans exposed to it.

Such is the learning curve of a child at war.