In the line of fire Perilous evacuation from town under attack by Russians

Evacuating the last remaining residents of Vovchansk, the town at the centre of Russia's recent offensive in the Kharkiv region, becomes more dangerous with every passing day.

- Shaun Walker

As fierce street battles between Russian and Ukrainian forces continue in the northern part of the town, a band of local police and volunteers has been travelling in daily to pull out the last terrified residents of a place that was once home to 18,000 people.

"We don't know how many people are left now, but we hope it's not more than 200," said Oleksiy Kharkivskyi, the head of the Vovchansk police force, speaking yesterday in a village a few miles south of the town.

The road into Vovchansk was under artillery fire at that very moment, he said, and it was possible that his latest mission would have to be called off. The previous day, six people had been wounded in a Russian strike on an evacuation point, including a doctor and the head of the Vovchansk administration.

In the end, yesterday's evacuations went ahead, and although Kharkivskyi's car came under fire, he managed to make it out with an elderly couple in tow. Dressed in military-style fatigues and with a pistol tucked into his body armour, Kharkivskyi's years of experience as a beat cop can hardly have prepared him for rescue missions that require dodging drones and artillery fire. "We barely made it out of there," he said, in a shaky Instagram story filmed later in the day.