Stanislav Aseyev overcame his fear and took up arms in January to fight the Russian invaders. "It's not the fear of death that grips me, it's the fear of being taken prisoner by the Russians again. Because the second time will be worse than the first," said the 34-year-old man with a pale complexion and slender fingers. Rescued from Russian detention and wounded several times on the front, he has once again taken up the fight in the town of Pokrovsk, now the epicenter of Russian attacks.

He has already been close to death twice this year. When Le Monde met him in mid-July in a Kyiv café, his body bore the scars of hell. Under the bandage covering his neck, two fresh scars bear witness to the shrapnel that grazed his carotid artery. Another piece of shrapnel hit his ribs, but did not touch any vital organs. "It was July 1 in New York [name of a town in the Donbas, conquered and razed to the ground by the Russian army on August 18], and the situation was critical. With my comrades from the 109^th Territorial Defense Brigade, we said we'd only get out of there as '200' or '300'," he recalled, using these numbers to mean "dead" and "wounded," in Soviet military jargon. The first time Aseyev was wounded was on April 13, when he suffered a concussion at the end of a week of continuous shelling.

In the meantime, Aseyev's wounds have healed and he's been called back to the furnace of the Donbas. "I've returned to my 109^th brigade in Pokrovsk, but our battalion is being disbanded because of the losses we've suffered," he explained. As a result, and as is the case for many wounded soldiers, his function is now officially that of an instructor. He recounted that the main danger in Pokrovsk comes from the S-300 missiles: "The Russians bombard all the administrative buildings in town with these missiles, from kindergartens and schools to the military commissariat."

The only positive point, notes Aseyev, is the reduction in the number of extremely destructive strikes by guided glide bombs. They are the dread of the Ukrainian military at the front, as even the strongest bunkers cannot withstand them. "This is the result of our forces destroying a number of airfields and ammunition depots on Russian territory," he enthused. Pokrovsk, a city of 60,000 inhabitants before the war, is the primary objective of the Russian push into the Donetsk region. Moscow's forces are now only 10 kilometers away, and the Ukrainian offensive in Russia's Kursk region has done nothing to slow their advance.

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