A grinding, difficult war on Ukraine’s southern front

A RUSSIAN SOLDIER pops up beside his infantry fighting vehicle which was hit, but not destroyed along with two others the day before. He makes a ten-second dash for one of the other ones and then appears to start digging beside it. He is 15km away, close to Robotyne, where there has been fierce fighting since the fall of the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka on February 17th. The man’s every movement is being scrutinised on screens in the basement of a block in Orikhiv. Now an attack drone moves over the soldier and, from its live feed, a shell can be watched plummeting straight down towards him. When the smoke clears there is no body. Maybe the soldier heard the drone and scrambled under the vehicle just in time to save his life.