It was here, early in the war, that Russian shelling killed dozens of fleeing civilians, turning the crossing into a symbol of human suffering.
The men, who did not wish to reveal their full names, called their ad hoc unit the Hedgehogs as a nod to their strategy of making their neighbourhood too difficult for the Russians to touch. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, has warned the fate of the entire Donbas region hangs on victory in the fight over the embattled city.
Beard, 36, a truck driver, also forced his wife to flee to safety with their seven-year-old son and two-month-old daughter after their apartment building was hit by a mortar. Konrad Muzyka, founder of Rochan Consulting, an independent defence consulting firm, told The Economist the number of would-be recruits for the armed forces is so high that there is a month-long waiting list to be inducted.
“They have big shopping lists of everything they need. It’s horrifying. I look at these men and think ‘a third of you are not going to live’,” he said. “It seems that we were underestimated, and they were overestimated,” said Ruslan Kavatsiuk, a Ukrainian adviser for Spirit of America , a US non-profit that is one of several groups distributing non-lethal military gear to Ukrainian front lines.