Continuing our eastern Ukrainian road trip, from Kharkiv we headed to the frontline town of Kupiansk. We travelled with two volunteers, Sasha and Dima, who had arranged to evacuate a woman from a village in the area.
Kim and I had visited Kupiansk a year before and were curious to see how things had changed. The town, which sits astride an important railway line, is one of the most hotly-contested in eastern Ukraine.
It was seized and occupied by the Russians in February 2022. Then in September that year the Ukrainian military took the town back in a lightning offensive. There was heavy fighting and the central market and nearly all the shops in the main street were smashed or burned.
Now the Russians are once again pressing in from the east.
Off to the right were the Russian forward positions. Around us were freshly-dug Ukrainian bunkers and trenches, well-made and reinforced with wooden beams.
As we drove we heard four small explosions. Three seemed to be outgoing fire. The other one came back our way, but was thankfully distant.
In a beaten-up silver 4x4 Sasha and Dima, two slightly-built men from Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv, bounced along the dirt road ahead of us.
Today’s mission was to evacuate a woman from a village near Kupiansk, a frontline town that is coming under increasing pressure from advancing Russian forces.
For us - flak jackets on and helmets tightened - driving along such an exposed road on an active part of the frontline certainly kept our attention.
But for Sasha and Dima it was all in a day’s work. In the last two years they have carried out hundreds of such missions.
Sasha and Dima are what are known in Ukraine as ‘volunteers’.
They are among an estimated two million men and women who give their time for free to help those suffering from the war.
Some are medics, some are carpenters, some are psychologists, some are cooks. And others – like Sasha and Dima – are drivers. They take supplies in to communities near the frontline, and bring scared civilians out.
I asked Sasha, who is a tiler by profession, why he became a volunteer.
“When the war started taxi drivers in Kharkiv were charging $70 to take a family from the edge of town to the railway station,” he said. “So I started taking people for free. I have been helping move people around ever since.”
Dima, until the war broke out, owned a business selling perfume on the internet. When the Russians attacked Kharkiv his warehouse was hit and his stock destroyed.
“I lost $150,000 that day,” he said. “Everything I had invested was gone. So I became a flower delivery boy.”
Only a few weeks ago Sasha and Dima had a lucky escape when the Jeep they were driving was blown apart by a Russian missile just after they had parked up and entered a house to collect an old man.
But even that didn’t stop them.
“Such a shame,” Dima said as he showed us a photo of the wrecked car. “It was a Honda.”
When we reached Kupiansk there were markedly fewer civilians on the streets than there had been a year ago.
From a higher part of the town we could see thick grey smoke where the Russian were dug in just to the east.
A roadside market that had sold all manner of goods and paraphernalia had shrunk to a couple of stalls.
I asked Anya, 33, why she had stayed. “This is my home,” she said. “Where am I supposed to go? If the Russians come back then so be it.”
North of the town we headed towards Vasylivka. We found hamlets ravaged by war. In one we saw a dozen discarded rocket launchers.
In the end the evacuation did not turn out quite as expected. We had imagined plucking a desperate young woman from a destroyed building, but the truth was to be more prosaic.
Karina, 21, had simply decided that life in a farming village near the frontline was no longer for her.
“Of course it’s hard on my Mum, but I am happy to go,” she said. “I’ve had enough of being here. There are no opportunities.”
At first Karina was chatty. She seemed excited about her new life ahead. But as we drove she became quieter. And by the time we arrived at a processing centre for refugees – a converted school – she was silent.
Sasha and Dima helped carry her possessions – three plastic bags and a small hold-all with UNICEF written on it - to her allocated room.
It was clean, and freshly-painted, but basic. We each in turn said good-bye. And then, without warning, tears began to run down Karina’s cheeks. She crumpled into Kim’s arms.
“We’ll do what we can for her,” Dima said as we walked back down the corridor. “We may be able to get her a job in a bakery. But this is war. And nothing is easy.”
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IMPRESSIONS, INSIGHTS, PHOTOS & VIDEO
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A short report from the road just after we met Sasha and Dima and set out for Kupiansk.
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Logistical problems began to catch up with us as we headed to Kupiansk. We had to change a tyre after hitting a pothole hard and bending the rim of a wheel. And then the company that rented us the car caught on to where we were. (They apparently had a GPS tracker on the car.)
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The frontline is just beyond Kupiansk but the town itself is frequently targeted.
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At one point our search for Karina descended into farce. There were two villages with almost the same name, both near Kupiansk. Here, as we sit in an uncomfortably exposed position, Sasha and Dima try to unravel the mess.