“I didn’t want him to go. I was very scared. He was scared too. He was crying. In my dream he told me he was coming back. He didn’t come back.” We meet a sobbing woman on the Field of Mars in Lviv. She can’t cope with the fact that her beloved is gone.

The cemetery-monument to the Red Army soldiers is next to Lychakiv cemetery. Until recently, a square commemorating times justly past. Crude, empty. Now it is becoming a vivid, painful and heartrending burial place for the men from Bakhmut, Izium, Liman, the whole of the now blood-stained east of Ukraine.

Ukrainian state and military flags flutter over the graves. There are parents, girlfriends, friends, inconsolable, bitter, weeping over the graves. Victims of man’s hatred at the helm of the machine of destruction. The average age is twenty-something. Wladek, 22, in uniform, woollen cap, with a child’s gaze. Over Andrija’s grave, his parents. They are watching as if by a hospital bed. They would like to hope that Andriy will recover and all will be well. It won’t. He had a girlfriend, a school and dreams. He did everything for Ukraine to win. But the heroism wasn’t necessary at all.

The sight of the Fields of Mars makes you gasp with bitterness. Here one wants to howl. It is not the graves of the fallen, it is the despair of the living. In a week’s time there will be more graves. They are shooting again in Bakhmut.