FOR OLEKSANDR SIKALCHUK it was a routine mission, far from the front line. The 39-year-old draft officer had been escorting a group of conscripts when, during a midnight petrol-station stop in Poltava province, a man with a hunting rifle stepped out from the dark. He asked for Mr Sikalchuk’s weapons. The soldier refused, and then the man shot him dead. The killer escaped with one of the conscripts, someone he seemed to know. The incident was the first in a shocking spate of attacks on draft officers in the first week of February. Ukraine’s security services blamed the events on Russian infiltrators. Soldiers suspect the Poltava attack was homegrown. “It’d be nice to blame Russia,” said Roman Istomin, a colleague of the slain soldier. “But perhaps it’s something far worse.”