Last week, I visited Ukraine – Lviv, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kramatorsk. Impressions crowded in. Here are a few:

• Air-raid sirens sound every night at present. Almost no one goes to the shelters until actual explosions start. It is the repeated disturbance of sleep, more than risk of death, which frays people’s nerves. And not only people’s. A woman I met for breakfast brought along her poor toy poodle, frightened after a noisy night.

• Courage is visible in so many one meets; but a notable branch of it is those who admit they are scared of fighting. I met two such men, so far not summoned. Both have family responsibilities and do valuable work for their country and yet, they tell me, they feel ashamed.

• A friend showed me the result of his online Airbnb searches in Kharkiv. One displayed a picture of how it had been smashed by artillery. Another advertised the bed, complete with bomb-proof surround. He chose the latter.

• The Soviets used to label a military vehicle carrying the dead as ‘Cargo 200’. The Ukrainians inherited this notation, but they prefer a more romantic description now. Dead men return ‘on their shields’.
• A slogan warns the Russians: ‘You cannot take our land, but you are welcome to lie under our soil.’
• A poster I passed in Kyiv depicted the imagined war-crimes trial of Vladimir Putin. The judges wore full British wigs, although any trial would take place in the Hague. Similarly incongruous, near the front, was the sight of a NHS ambulance.

When the Russians attacked Kharkiv last year, they strafed a Holocaust memorial on the way into town. It is particularly poignant to see the monument’s large seven-branch candlestick reduced to five branches.

Across the road is Kharkiv’s vast municipal cemetery. The war dead are immediately visible among the acres of graves. They lie together, in a square. Above each tomb flutters the Ukrainian flag, as if the dead are mustered for battle. I counted more than a thousand of them, and I am afraid the numbers are fast growing elsewhere. That night, I talked to a medic just back from Bakhmut. He reckoned 500 Ukrainian soldiers were dying there daily. As the battle reshapes, those losses diminish but are still grim. For the Russians, they are twice as bad.

We met Vitali, the sexton. He asked to be photographed next to the grave of the soldier who had guarded the cemetery and was killed doing so.

I found several women soldiers buried there. In Kyiv, I had visited Veteranka, the women’s veterans’ organisation (roughly 60,000 women serve). I was shown volunteers making camouflage, and tried on their elegant, all-embracing camouflage coat designed for snipers. Veteranka campaigns for uniforms and flak jackets that fit female soldiers. A few days later, the news came that its leader, Andriana Arekhta, had been severely wounded at the front after nine months of continuous fighting. I pray the injuries were not made worse by kit that protects men better than women.

Most Ukrainians preserve the traditional attitude to women in combat. ‘We try to keep women away from the fighting,’ said one officer as he drove us towards it, ‘because we love them and want to save them. And because, after victory, they have another mission.’ For Ukraine’s future, its low birth rate is almost as serious an anxiety as its high death rate.

Boris Johnson remains the most popular foreign politician among Ukrainians. Some call him ‘Johnsoniuk’, making him an honorary Ukrainian. I discussed him with ‘Kolya’, a firearms instructor, who, though Ukrainian-born, previously served in the Israeli Defence Forces. He helps train the Ukrainian army. After giving me a lesson with an AR-15 rifle, in which the paper target was Putin’s head (I got him in the end, though the first shot merely hit his shoulder), Kolya explained Boris’s status. He got there first among world leaders in seeing and saying why Ukraine must win. His character also appeals. ‘I know he’s not a regular guy who follows the rules,’ said Kolya, ‘but I like that.’

When the Russians were approaching Kyiv in February last year, Kolya’s band of 15 snipers joined the regulars preparing to defend the city centre. Soon realising the Russians would not get that far, Kolya and his friend ‘Dima’, a veteran of Putin’s 2014 invasion, moved towards the outskirts in search of the enemy, and there sniped at them successfully. Eventually, however, Dima was shot in the head. As Kolya vividly described it, with his friend listening as he did so, the bullet’s impact made his eyes start from his head, and some of his brain spilled out (‘And his brain wasn’t too big anyway’). Comrades rescued Dima. Kolya stayed put, hoping to hit Russians he could see advancing. Suddenly, he went blind and deaf: ‘I thought I was dead, but then I realised that if I thought I was, I probably wasn’t. Gradually my hearing returned and I realised that my eyes were covered by skin and bone hanging from my skull and by fast-flowing blood from a shot.’ Weakened by blood loss, Kolya crawled back to the others. Today a third of his skull is artificial. He claims to be fine. Dima required rather more rebuilding but recovered enough to fight in Bakhmut quite recently. There he killed two Wagner Group adversaries but that night suffered one of the epileptic fits his injuries cause.

Before setting off from England, I had heard of these two remarkable men. I asked Boris Johnson if he would mind writing to them. He kindly agreed. I presented his letters. It was something to see their reaction. High colour flushed the white scar on Dima’s skull as he read. ‘Oh,’ he said repeatedly, ‘that is cool.’

At the stabilisation point near the front where the wounded are treated, a young surgeon proudly produced a translation of King Lear by a family friend, the poet Yuri Andrukhovych. I hoped he could find comfort in ‘that fierce dispute betwixt damnation and impassioned clay’ as he tended the maimed and the dying.