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“It’s fine, don’t worry about mines,” says Anatoly, our military escort, as he leads us around trenches and fortifications that were occupied by Russian soldiers only days ago. It’s not a reassuring statement with the sound of heavy artillery and tank shells being exchanged a little more than a mile away. All around is the detritus of war—crumpled water bottles, twisted shrapnel and spent shells, abandoned clothing, ammunition boxes, food tins and gas masks all litter the ground, a single Russian book lying next to a dug-out mound of dirt that provided shelter from blasts. A few burned Russian military vehicles, one a tank and the other an armored personnel carrier, are poorly hidden in a thin growth of trees. “They stayed here from the 24th of February,” the very first day of the Russian invasion, says Anatoly of the Russian soldiers. “They came here without any fighting but now we’ve pushed them already in this direction to the border.” For months, positions like these were used to relentlessly shell Ukraine’s second-biggest city of Kharkiv with heavy artillery, rockets, and all manner of explosives that rained down death indiscriminately from above. It is hard to describe the amount of destruction that has been visited on the northern and eastern neighborhoods of this city that once held 1.5 million people, and one can only wonder what the point was of obliterating so many residential buildings and shops....

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