A Russian warlord’s savagery is sending a loud message to Moscow

THE LINE between life and death on the muddy hillocks south of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, is thin. For Yaroslav Hervolsky, a soldier in a Ukrainian evacuation brigade, it can be indistinguishable. For two-and-a-half months now, Mr Hervolsky has headed under artillery fire into the mud to retrieve colleagues, dead or alive. The job has offered little respite. In mid-December a successful Ukrainian surge pushed Russian forces back a kilometre beyond the boundaries of the town. But it made little difference to Mr Hervolsky’s workload, with Ukrainian losses continuing at the level of dozens daily. Now the Russians are attacking again, and the bodies are piling up. “It’s hard to describe the feeling,” he says. “Forty bodies stacked up on top of one another. Diesel, blood and rotting flesh. It’s a fucking mess, and you never know if you will be next.”

The front line near Bakhmut, a small and tired town 70km (43 miles) north of the city of Donetsk, is currently the most fiercely contested section in Ukraine. It offers little justification for the deaths of so many, which have been running at hundreds daily when Russian losses are included. The town has only limited strategic value, offering little but a source of water and a road-transport hub.