About 12,000 people used to live in Chasiv Yar, a forest-fringed hilltop town in eastern Ukraine. But it lies just 10 kilometres west of Bakhmut, the benighted epicentre of Russia’s brutal invasion, so now just a few hundred of the town’s inhabitants reportedly still linger there, hunkered down in the battered, broken remains of their homes.

Worse may yet lie in store for Chasiv Yar. Massed in its vicinity are some 20,000 Russian troops, moving in from Bakhmut and readying for what could become one of the decisive battles of the Ukraine war.