Unaided, the young soldier walks from the Humvee ambulance to the door of the casualty station.
His comrades believe he’s suffered only a slight ear wound, in what has otherwise been the unit’s massacre.
What they didn’t see in the confusion of battle – what I can’t see in this dusk, and what won’t be discovered by a surgeon until several minutes later – is that a piece of the soldier’s brain is hanging from his beard. He’s very close to death.
A week later in another casualty station. This time the victim is on a blood-soaked gurney. He is younger still, bearded, unconscious, naked save for shorts, his arms thrown above his shoulders.
Shellfire has pierced his body. Again, he is very near to his last breath. The crucial minutes are near. ‘Hold on!’ the surgeons tell him.
What will happen next? Over a number of nights during the autumn of 2024 and this winter of 2025, Mail photographer Jamie Wiseman and I were given exclusive access by the Ukrainian army to casualty stabilisation points on the bloody Chasiv Yar frontline.
We never knew what to expect, what we would witness on any given night. Only that we would see casualties. That was always guaranteed.
Functioning, fully equipped hospitals are some distance from the trenches and dugouts here.
Even without Russian interference, it might take hours for an injured Ukrainian soldier to reach a purpose-built emergency room; hours that the badly wounded don’t have if they are to survive.
Which is where a casualty stabilisation point comes in. These small medical facilities, set up in abandoned cottages and cellars just behind the front line, act as emergency staging posts.
They are where the so-called ‘golden hour’ – the 60 minutes after a traumatic injury when emergency medical treatment has the best chance of success – can save a life.
But the golden hour is also skewed by local circumstance. Dusk is when Ukraine’s casualty stabilisation points start to work. During daylight hours the threat posed by Russian kamikaze drones and artillery is severe.
Only when darkness falls can military evacuation teams try to move the wounded in vehicles from the front line to these medical posts with any degree of safety.
Some casualties will have to wait in agony for hours before they reach a doctor. Others wait for days, or never reach them at all, as we shall see.
We arrive at the 5th Assault Brigade’s casualty stabilisation point less than an hour before a golden sunset. Yet, with dusk, comes the horror show.
The station’s action will revolve around a small silver bell. Rather like the one you saw in school that rings to announce play time.
An elderly soldier sitting at the entrance sounds the bell when, on his monitor, he sees a vehicle approaching. Any vehicle can only be one carrying casualties in this red zone.
Nearby, on a plyboard wall, are photographs of five members of the medical team who were killed in Chasiv Yar in May last year, when an Iranian-made Shaheed drone hit their accommodation.
The moon is rising. Almost full. Sunset is five minutes away. The doctor in charge is called Denys; a young anaesthetist with a Cossack haircut who hasn’t seen his wife and teenage child for nine months.
Before the full invasion, he worked in a paediatric department in Kyiv. Before that even, he was taken prisoner by the Russians while doing his army service in 2014. By his theatre-room bedside here he has Boris Johnson’s biography of Churchill.
We talk, then the lights go out. Russian shelling has cut the electricity supply. For several minutes his ‘hideaway’ as Denys calls it, is plunged into darkness before a generator rattles to life. Fortunately it is during a lull in casualties.
At 10.20pm, the theatre becomes active. The two most seriously wounded of the night arrive – bloodied stretcher cases dressed only in their boots and underwear – one after the other.
The first, a blond youth, has shrapnel wounds all over his torso. He groans in pain and his toes wiggle, until he is sedated. One lung is punctured and his thorax must be drained of blood.
The second is a young man with a beard, blood running along his body, unconscious. He is stretched out in a Christ-like pose on a bloodied gurney.
Denys begins to work on him. The soldier regains consciousness and groans piteously with each laboured breath.
Eventually they find that a large piece of artillery shrapnel had struck him high on the torso, above the body armour, breaking his clavicle and puncturing both lungs before exiting through his back. He is five minutes away from death. In agony.
Like a choreographed ballet, Denys and his deputy Oleks, who had been laughing and joking with us just before the bell rang, are now a study in efficient movement and concentrated expertise.
At this crisis point, life hangs in the balance. There is no dignity nor ceremony for that matter. Catheters are inserted.
One can tell a corner is turned when the team says something that makes the others laugh.
The tension has eased. A gurney is called for. Blondie will soon be on his way, his successful golden hour promising golden years ahead.
But in the far corner there are no smiles. Denys the joker is a study in grim determination as he leads his team. The casualty is turned on his side, the entry and exit wound exposed.
The evacuation team waits at the door, not knowing if they could be transporting a casualty or a corpse.
Late on Friday afternoon the news comes through: multiple casualties incoming to the small stabilisation point run by 56th Brigade. As we approach the battlefront, palls of smoke are rising all along the horizon in the direction of Chasiv Yar.
Dr Kostya is in charge of the medical post – another abandoned cottage in a farming hamlet.
It’s well within Russian artillery and kamikaze drone range. Which is why there are sandbags in the emergency room windows and camouflage netting outside.
Dr Kostya used to teach general surgery at a university in his home city of Odesa. Most days then, he would swim in the sea before starting work. That was in another life.
He and his small team of nurses and combat medics are expecting nine casualties, all from the same unit, he tells me.
The first two were wounded as long ago as 10am, ‘one very seriously. He’s dying from blood loss. The seven others were wounded trying to rescue them. The Russians kept trying to kill them as they did so. If they come all at the same time it will be quite a mess’, he remarks wryly.
Violence is being returned in kind. There’s a shattering crash as a nearby Ukrainian artillery battery opens fire. The pack of stray dogs on the casualty station’s doorstep bark and howl in protest. Then a grinding sound grows louder until, with a horrific clatter, a mobile anti-aircraft gun rushes past.
Yet the nurses still sit and smoke on the step. Nor does the surgeon, who has not slept for 72 hours, take much notice as he pushes cold beans around a paper plate.
Is it his breakfast, lunch or dinner? ‘All in one,’ suggests a nurse. ‘No. It’s a lunch-dinner,’ Dr Kostya decides, wearily.
The long wait continues. Each vehicle approaching from the front line jangles the nerves. But each passes at high speed – none is carrying casualties and the Russian kamikaze drone threat is always high here. Ten and a half hours have passed now since the first expected casualty was wounded.
To the west, the sun has already set in a Walt Disney peach and pink. In contrast, the east is looking and sounding more like Tolkien’s Mordor.
At 7.08pm a Humvee comes powering through the front gate to disgorge the first three wounded. All are able to walk.
The medics snap into action. ‘Give me your ammo, give me your helmets,’ a nurse tells the wounded.
‘We have shell shock and a bullet wound.’
‘Give me all the family names.’
The soldiers are helped from the vehicle and into the station. One of the ‘walking wounded’ is the soldier with his own brain matter in his beard.
Six out of the nine to go? No longer. Now Kostya is told to expect several more than that. The tragedy is turning into a disaster.
One of the next incoming will be very badly wounded. Possibly by phosphorous ammunition. It’s not clear how they are going to get them out of the front line to here.
Darkness falls. It’s 7.41pm and bin bags of bloodied uniform are brought out into the cottage garden to be burned after sunrise. There are so many fires around here the Russians won’t notice.
Two minutes later a Humvee ambulance reverses slowly into the station. The rear doors are swung open and light floods out. But no casualties. This is the evacuation vehicle that will take the previous arrivals on the next leg of their journey to hospital.
A casualty completely swathed in foil is brought out in a stretcher. This is the recently diagnosed catastrophic brain injury. Two others walk to the vehicle. The doors are shut. The ambulance disappears into the blackout.
It’s proving something of a rush hour. Eleven minutes later, another Humvee arrives from the front with three more casualties.
The first staggers out and is helped up the stairs. The second collapses on to his knees, wheezing, before he can get that far.
‘I have asthma,’ he croaks. ‘I’ve medicine in my pack I have to take.’ He is handed his inhaler, uses it, is lifted by the elbows and hustled inside.
As they are treated the soldiers talk about what happened. ‘There was a drop from a drone and I jumped…’ says one.
Another: ‘At first it was Mavic (a bomb dropping drone) then FPVs (kamikazes) and after that mortars started working on us.’
At 8.10pm another ambulance delivers a serious casualty wrapped in foil. He has an open skull wound, but is still talking.
The asthmatic is helped off one of the operating tables, moving like an old man. Stripped of his ruined battle fatigues, he is put into a red sleeveless vest that bears the name of the rapper Eminem.
Once down on his feet he staggers and is about to faint, it seems. A bottle of water is placed to his lips.
‘This tastes like ambrosia,’ he mumbles before being escorted out to an ambulance.
What hell they have all been through. Touched by death. A succession of disasters that stemmed from a single soldier’s wounding. They would not leave their friend to die and so were picked off one by one.
By 8.33pm the last tranche of wounded are on their way to hospital. But the soldier who was first wounded eleven hours before is still out on the battlefield.
By the following evening he still hasn’t reached the casualty station. But at 7.15pm, ten fresh wounded are expected from three different units.
Again, they don’t arrive. Still trapped where they fell. By 11pm Dr Kostya is napping in his stockinged feet on one of the operating tables. He’s curled up, like a cat on a chaise longue.
Later, he will tell me: ‘Psychologically we are broken. In 20 or 30 years it’ll be OK in Ukraine. But my generation has never had the chance to live normally. First we endured the aftermath of the Soviet Union. Now this war.
‘I will have to start again at 40 and it’s not nice. I want to make a fresh start somewhere else. But only when this is over.’
Meanwhile, the stabilisation points continue to work overtime – fighting night and day to breathe life into the men Putin’s malign forces have tried so hard to destroy.