KYIV, Ukraine—The trench lines of Europe’s only ongoing land war are six hours away by train from Ukraine’s capital city of Kyiv. But you can hardly tell.
Businesses and bars and universities and protests and politics—in other words, life—all go on and on despite the war.
Yet, the war is always there. Distant and unseen to the physical senses, perhaps, but never truly gone for those who’ve served or for the families of fallen soldiers.
“My war is still going on, and I don’t know when it will finish,” said Ivan Kharkiv, a 24-year-old Ukrainian combat veteran who served from 2014 to 2016 in some of the war’s deadliest battles.
“I was in the war for two years, but I’ve lived four years with the war in my head,” Kharkiv said. “It’s hard to read that your friends who are still in the army are dying. Hard to understand that not all of them came back from war. Hard to know that you can’t help them.”
Today, after four and a half years of constant combat, Ukrainian troops remain hunkered down in trenches and ad hoc forts along a 250-mile-long front line in the country’s embattled, southeastern Donbas region. There, Ukraine’s military continues to fight a grinding, static war against a combined force of pro-Russian separatists and Russian regulars that began in April 2014.
It’s become a long-range battle not unlike World War I trench warfare (albeit on a much smaller scale) in which soldiers hardly ever see at whom they’re shooting. At some places, no man’s land can be several kilometers wide. At others, the Ukrainians and their enemies are close enough to shout insults at each other.
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