When Nazar and his fellow soldiers came to the village outside the key city of Bakhmut that they had been ordered to attack, they thought they would be there for a single day. They arrived without sleeping bags or extra rations, as snow lay on the ground.

Instead of the 15 Russians they had been warned to expect, they encountered 50 of them, dug into the tree line, triggering a fight that lasted several days. “In places we were only 100 metres apart,” recalls Nazar. “We were on one low hill and they were on another. Sometimes, we could even hear their laughter.”