The evacuees who can't take Russian shelling any more

Antonina Sanina's last two nights in Kupiansk were spent hiding in the base. ment of her apartment block. She survived six and a half months of Russian occupation last year, but the renewed shelling of the Ukrainian town finally prompted her to abandon home. "I couldn't take it any more," she explained simply after volunteers drove her to safety

- Dan Sabbagh

Eight neighbours had been hiding in the cellar with her as the Russians targeted what they thought, wrongly, was a barracks nearby. "You could barely sleep," she said. "Then you'd just wake up and you wouldn't know - was that an actual hit or was it a dream?" 

Ukraine's counteroffensive, beginning in June, was intended to put Russia on the defensive. But, at the beginning of August around Kupiansk, more than 100km east of Kharkiv, Russian forces launched their own attack; the strategy was grimly familiar with shells raining down from about 10km away into the town itself.

In response, local authorities announced the civilian evacuation of Kupiansk and territories to the east, encompassing a little more than 10,000 people in a region that had been liberated last September. Col-Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s land forces, visited the sector and acknowledged the situation had become, in his word, complicated.

Members of a volunteer group, called Rose on the Arm (the name describes a tattoo on the first person they rescued at the start of the war), drive daily from Kharkiv city to the eerily quiet Kupiansk and across the River Oskil, evacuating people without their own means of escape.

Oleksander Gamanyuk, who was leading the team joined by the Guardian, said his group had evacuated 70 people in the past 10 days. “When we are on the western side of Kupiansk, it is maybe 30% likely we will get shelled. On the other side? It’s 80%.”