The cities of Donbas have turned into fortresses—battered, besieged, others reduced to ash and rubble under Russia’s grinding advance that devours territory inch by inch, house by house. Yet Ukraine’s Armed Forces fight and hold what remains. Among those on the line is Mykhailo “Malina” Malinovskyi, a 45-year-old combat medic from Zhytomyr who volunteered the moment Russia’s full-scale invasion began.

His reason was simple: stop the enemy before they reach home.

During brief pauses in the fighting, Malinovskyi records his thoughts in a war diary. What emerges is a raw account of survival at the zero line, where death hovers one drone strike away.

“I thought Bakhmut was the darkest. I was wrong.”

Here I am — 45 years old and working as a combat medic. Who’d have imagined it? But life keeps teaching, and I keep learning.

Bakhmut, Chasiv Yar, Vovchansk. I thought those were the darkest days I’d face. I was wrong.

Now I’m back in the Donbas: Chasiv Yar again, Toretsk, Kostiantynivka. Each time I return, it feels like fate has raised the difficulty level. Only now, I’m not just responsible for myself. I’m responsible for every man next to me.

Not even in my worst nightmares did I expect to dig my comrades out of a collapsed dugout. To treat the wounded in the open while enemy drones carrying grenades swarm above. FPVs flying over us one by one, shredding the last of our cover. Flash. Explosion. Silence.

A fog invades the brain. Then nothing. For a second, everything vanishes. Voices sound distant, muffled, like they’re coming from deep underground. And then, realization — I’m still alive. I still have a little time to do something that matters.

I drag the wounded guy into the ruins of the burning blindage — a reinforced shelter where I can shield him, at least from sight. Survival instincts shut down. Emotions go dark. You work on autopilot. You do what you were taught.

One chance in a hundred

And when you survive ten attacks, a thought creeps in — you can’t die. Not yet. God has more plans for you. You grow more confident, and that confidence spreads to those around you. You grow hard, tough-skinned. But when the job’s done, that hardness starts to scare you.

After weeks underground, your legs stop working. They’re stiff, numb. Permanent soreness. But now, you have to move. Walk. Run. Drag. Hide. Then run again. You hesitate at the mouth of the shelter. The sky hums with drones. You wait for the next wave, but you don’t hear the FPVs yet. So, you venture out. First steps, heavy with doubt.

Out now. Emotions vanish again. All you see is the distant goal — you gotta get the group 250 meters to the next cover. You move carefully, watching every step for mines, live drones, and dropped explosives. Your head spins. Ears scan the air like radars. You calculate as your eyes scan the gray sky: the seconds before impact, drone trajectory, distance.

Vision blurs. But you keep your eyes fixed on that one patch of cover up ahead. Exhausted, you crawl into the hole. You can’t breathe properly. Each breath scrapes your throat raw, followed by desperate gasps for air. Shortness of breath keeps your lungs half-empty.

“Relief comes, but only briefly — evacuations are still ahead”

You lie there, body tensed, ears ringing, sky buzzing. Something tells you — now. “Move!” you scream.

Your body nearly empty, you force yourself across scorched ground to reach the last bit of cover before the evac point. Your body threatens to collapse. You drop, gasping. Then, a car horn. The vehicle’s here to take the wounded. You have one minute.

You push yourself once more. You’re on the edge of blacking out, watching from the sidelines through blurry eyes. You override the exhaustion. Just for a moment.

Everyone’s loaded in. You slump over, almost unconscious. But there’s one thought keeping you conscious — you made it. You breathe out, relief washing over the fear of what tomorrow might bring.

“What if you can’t handle it one more time?”

Because this isn’t a one-time test. Tomorrow, it starts again. And you’re afraid — what if you can’t handle it one more time?

You don’t really sleep. You drop off in short bursts. You live in a constant state of tension. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month.

Back on the zero line — the front-line combat position — you’re slowly rotting away. But you’re grateful for a 1.5-liter bottle of water dropped by drone — no vehicle can reach you here. You haven’t had more than a few sips in days. You save some water — for coffee. Just a mouthful. You can’t waste it. But you brew it anyway. Sip it slowly. You light a cigarette. Inhale. Exhale. Quiet.

Because maybe this-this tiny, bitter moment — is the most peace you’ll get in the next few months.

“They will kill us and our children without hesitation,” says Ukraine’s former chief mufti, watching Russian soldiers crawling over their dead.

The man who once led interfaith prayers for peace in Donetsk’s central square — now under Russian grip for over a decade — serves as a combat medic, wondering what transforms a human being into something that devours everything in its path: your home, your bed, your children’s future, simply because their government said they could.

In the ruins of Vovchansk, once a bustling city now reduced to rubble, Said Ismagilov asks what drives men to die for nothing — only to find his answer in an ancient prophecy about gold and the ninety-nine percent who die reaching for it.

“They will eat from your plate and wear your shirt without a second thought”

They run and crawl in hordes — like locusts. Their raison d’être is to move forward at any cost and seize our homes and new territory.

Every day in Vovchansk, they attack in small groups of three to five. They trample and climb over the corpses of their comrades who stormed the same position just hours earlier. There is no logic, no meaning, no success — only the relentless throwing of bodies at us.

The difference from Marshal Zhukov’s meat-grinder assaults is that now they come in small waves, and the goal is not kilometers but a single position, mere square meters.

My philosophical education stops me from viewing this daily carnage through the eyes of a mathematician, simply recording: minus one, minus five, minus forty. My background in philosophy and theology compels me to try to understand why this conditional Homo erectus and I say “upright man” because I cannot, in good conscience, call them Homo sapiens, as I see no rationality in their actions — why he climbs over the corpses of his swarm mates toward certain death, across the ruins of a city that now resembles a Martian landscape.

What for? What is your motivation? What do you hope to gain?

Did you come to kill our children so you could raise your own? He is silent. He lowers his eyes. But that’s the truth.

They will eat from your plate and wear your shirt without a second thought, because their king and their church have blessed them to do so.

The Prophet Muhammad once gave a striking description of human stupidity and greed:
“The Hour will not come to pass before the River Euphrates dries up to reveal a mountain of gold, for which people will fight. Ninety-nine out of one hundred will die, and every man among them will say, ‘Perhaps I will be the one who survives.’”

I look at them and wonder — maybe each one advancing, charging at us, believes he will survive, he will get rich.

But then our guys get to work.

And the statistician in me says:

Minus five more.

The mufti who lost everything — twice

Said Ismagilov, former mufti of Ukraine’s Umma (Muslim community) has twice lost his home to Russia’s invasions. A Volga Tatar, Ismagilov’s ancestors fled Soviet collectivization in central Russia.

He studied in Donetsk and Moscow before becoming an imam and helping build Islamic religious life in the Donbas, which by 2014 had Ukraine’s largest Muslim population outside Crimea — including Crimean Tatars illegally deported from their homelans during the Second World War, ethnic Tatars from Russia like hiw own family, and Meskhetian Turks  — a Muslim group forcibly relocated during the Soviet times.

On 12 April 2014, a group of Russian saboteurs led by Igor Girkin (Strelkov) entered Sloviansk in Donetsk Oblast.  Protests against the disguised Russian takeover erupted across the Donbas. That same year, Ismagilov helped lead a five-month Interreligious Prayer Marathon, where believers of different faiths gathered daily in central Donetsk to pray for peace in Ukraine.

However, the peaceful interfaith action was seen as a threat by the occupation forces. In September 2014, the marathon was forcibly disbanded and the prayer site destroyed; sixteen participants were detained and tortured. Warned of danger, Ismagilov fled Donetsk with his family.

From interfaith prayers to frontline service

He resettled in Bucha, outside Kyiv. When Russia invaded again in February 2022, Bucha was quickly occupied. Ismagilov evacuated his family and volunteered as a paramedic after being rejected for military service due to inexperience. He helped evacuate the wounded from Bucha and later from the eastern front lines.

“Our main weapons were our hands… to save the wounded,” he said in an interview.

In October 2023, he was formally drafted, serving in Kyiv’s air defense forces, then with the 57th Brigade’s drone unit near Kharkiv, and later along the Donetsk line. Though he stepped down as mufti in late 2022, Ismagilov continued to lead prayers when possible, including in front-line mosques and even amid the ruins of Bakhmut.

Some Muslim observances are impossible during active duty, but Ismagilov emphasizes the integration of Muslims in Ukrainian society:

“We fight together, build together, and defend together, and this is because there’s a normal attitude toward Muslims in Ukraine. They’re not seen as aliens or enemies or immigrants, but as an integral part of the Ukrainian nation.”