Ukraine: One year on

It had been dubbed Checkpoint Stalingrad. As our car slowed to a halt and the soldiers wearing black ski-masks and carrying Kalashnikov rifles examined our passports, I looked around me and began to realise why.

On either side of the road most of the tall birch trees had been ripped and scarred by shrapnel.

Here and there, fortified emplacements lined with razor wire and sandbags were deeply dug into the muddy earth while the detritus of the fierce fighting that had gripped this area around the town of Stanitsa Luhanska was scattered everywhere.

As the soldiers waved us through we swept past the charred carapace of a tank, its turret lying decapitated from what could only have been a direct hit and massive explosion.

The road itself had obviously seen the passing of many armoured vehicles the ground scarred by the trails of their tracks like the wakes of passing ships.

In the bone chilling damp air the smell of burning lingered and a shroud of drizzle and mist hung ominously across the highway and surrounding forests.

It was all a far cry from that day almost exactly a year earlier, when the first sunshine of spring warmed those of us sitting at the outdoor tables of cafés on Pushkin Boulevard in the city of Donetsk.

Yet looking back now even those times were quiet surreal. One moment I would be having a quiet lunchtime borscht or evening beer with my Ukrainian translator, fixer and now good friend Rodion Aznaurov. The next, we would find ourselves tentatively navigating the increasingly volatile street politics that were inexorably dragging eastern Ukraine into the conflict in which it is now mired.

A few weeks earlier I had found myself gazing out from the window of a Ukrainian Airlines Boeing-737 at the flat steppe landscape of eastern Ukraine that lay below.

From thousands of feet up, the ground beneath was a patchwork montage of wheat fields and forests. Tranquil from this altitude, it was hard to believe that I was about to enter a place rapidly tipping into the abyss of war.

Even harder to imagine then would have been the terrible last moments of passengers aboard Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, who some months later were blown from the sky by an anti-aircraft missile.

This was not their war, but the 283 passengers and fifteen crew were to become victims just as much as the 6,000 or more Ukrainians who have lost their lives in the last year alone. This all started of course after gunmen in February of last year seized buildings in Ukraine's Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. With Moscow's support it was only a matter of time before this was repeated in towns and cities across the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine.

Arriving that day at Donetsk airport's gleaming terminal building named after the composer Sergei Prokofiev, a native of eastern Ukraine, I could not have imagined too that a few months later its shell smashed ruins would come to stand as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.

Upgraded at a cost of £530 million for the European football championships, the airport was the most expensive item on the Euro 2012 budget.

Little did most Ukrainians know back then that the fighting for this 'jewel' in the crown of that event would take on a near mythological status with a garrison of its troops holding off pro-Russian separatist fighters for eight months turning it into a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.

Like many correspondents during my first days in Donetsk, I was to stay at the Liverpool Hotel in the heart of the city.

Replete with red telephone boxes, 1960s' period posters on the walls and seemingly constant music in its corridors and from the basement nightclub, it had been designed as a theme hotel devoted to British pop music and homage to The Beatles.

It was an incongruous place and the suggestion by Rodion, that I stay there seemed odd at first. Within minutes of checking in however, it became apparent that the hotel was just a few minutes walk from the barricades around the city's regional administration building.

This in effect had become the epicentre of the violent standoff between the Ukrainian authorities and those pro-Russian separatists who had declared the building headquarters of the "People's Republic of Donetsk".

The young, mainly teenagers who manned these barricades had a menacing swagger.

Wearing the ski masks that have since become de-rigueur here and wielding clubs or iron bars, they patrolled the surrounding streets almost as if they were looking for a fight. As it turned out, they would not need to wait long.

Kitted out in tracksuits and protective knee and arm pads, they cut a very different dash from their elderly pro-Russian grey-haired comrades and old communists who ambled about wearing black caps and red star lapel badges.

"Russia come to us," rallied the words of a song blaring out from the loudspeakers on the steps outside this 'HQ' behind three fortified redoubts piled high with tyres, barbed wire and sandbags.

"It's our struggle for towns, cities and freedom," one of the young men 18-year-old Constantine told me one afternoon as we spoke on the barricades.

"We are normal people who struggle for our rights - not terrorists as the Kiev government say."

Like so many activists then, Constantine wanted only his first name used. "I will not leave until we have what we want," he continued, his face blackened and grimy from the smoke of the brazier fires the activists used at night to keep them warm.

What if the Ukrainian army comes with tanks and infantry I asked him? "Then we will fight and use these," he replied nodding in the direction of a crate of beer bottles converted into Molotov cocktails, their petrol-soaked rag fuses sticking from the bottle necks and giving off a powerful reek.

With hindsight of course Constantine need not have worried about their limited arsenal, Moscow in the months ahead would see to that. As if answering the call of the song that played endlessly from the barricades loudspeakers, Russia did come in response, complete with tanks, rocket launchers, men and material.

The first signs of this were already appearing on the ground in the town of Sloviansk just a few hours drive from Donetsk. There the real war was gearing up in earnest.

"Why didn't you say they were journalists?" barked a masked gunman at Rodion the first day we arrived on the outskirts of Sloviansk.

Just moments earlier our car in which I was travelling with a Swedish colleague had been flagged down at a checkpoint manned by separatists.

The leader of the group, a burly, aggressive man in camouflage fatigues, was evidently incensed that, having stopped us, Rodion had not immediately declared that we were reporters.

For a few tense moments it seemed inevitable we would be prevented from travelling further or perhaps even detained, before the man brusquely waved us through.

Three more checkpoints lay ahead before we reached the centre of

this down-at-heel industrial town that now lay at the heart of the separatist insurgency.

The last of these roadblocks was at a roundabout alongside the Seversky Donets River. It was in this river just a few days before that the bodies of local politician, Volodymyr Rybak, and a 19-year-old Kiev Polytechnic Institute student, Yuriy Popravko, were found dumped following torture and murder.

Abductions, disappearances, torture, intimidation, paranoia and the rule of the gun had become the order of the day in Sloviansk. It was an ominous potent of what was to come across much of eastern Ukraine.

Inside Sloviansk on the main square sat the town hall, its entrance heavily sandbagged and armed sentries keeping watch from the roof.

Beneath a giant statue of Lenin the townsfolk congregated

"It will only be better here when these people leave," a student, 17-year-old Valentin told me speaking of the "outsiders" he said had come to Sloviansk of late.

Asked if he meant Russians, his reply was unequivocal.

"This is a fairly small community, we notice when outsiders come, especially those carrying guns. Of course they are Russians."

Walking around Sloviansk during those tense and violent times it was impossible to ignore the unwelcoming looks some locals gave other outsiders like western journalists.

As in other places where the separatists held sway, you would hear the common refrains: "provocateurs" and "provocations".

At times in Sloviansk, a near-paranoia gripped the gunmen on the streets.

"No, no," I recall one of them ordering as he twisted the neck strap on my camera to ensure it faced inwards on my chest in an attempt to prevent me from taking any pictures on the town's Karl Marx Street.

Many locals were said to have little truck with the separatists, and Sloviansk was known to have been something of a one-party town where criminal gangs with strong pro-Moscow leanings have often ruled.

For many, Viktor Yanukovych was still their man. To some, the former Moscow-backed Ukrainian president who was brought down by the Euromaidan uprising in Kiev was nothing short of a hero.

"When they forced president Yanukovych out of Kiev, I decided to leave Russia and return here to help those who want him back," insisted a 31-year-old man I spoke with in Sloviansk who would only give his name as Artyom.

Artyom had been working in Vladivostok as an electrician but decided to return to Sloviansk as the separatist uprising gained momentum.

"I have had enough of the government in Kiev," Artyom insisted.

"Donetsk region works hard for all of Ukraine but we receive nothing in return, so I would now like to see it part of Russia - even if it means picking up an AK [rifle]".

Since that conversation with Artyom, gun rule has been the order of the day across swathes of eastern Ukraine. In the process the human cost has been enormous.

Journeying across the region last month, I slowly began to comprehend where all this had led and the scale of the human cost and humanitarian crises the war has created.

In the frontline village of Triokhizbenka, I was to meet Nadezhda Kalashnikova.

It was in November last year on the village's quaint streets that the spectre of war came to visit Nadezhda and her nine-year-old daughter Valentina.

"They had been for a vaccination at a nearby hospital and were on their way back a short distance from home when the shelling started," recalls Nadezhda's husband, Anatoliy, his wife sitting listening close by.

What Anatoliy described next was something that will haunt both their lives forever. It was the moment when a shell fell from the sky thumping into the ground barely three yards from Nadezhda and Valentina scattering its lethal red-hot razor-edged shrapnel in all directions. The little girl was killed instantly and her mother torn apart by the deadly flying metal resulting in the loss of her left leg.

Asked if he was angry at those responsible for the death of his daughter and maiming of his wife, Anatoliy gave a resigned reply that I will never forget.

"No daughter can be restored, no leg can be replaced," he told me.

In this bitter conflict that for most of a year rarely made headlines but viciously crept up on Ukraine and the world, Nadezhda Kalashnikova, her family and many others like them are the real faces behind the statistics of 6,000 dead and more than a million people left without homes.

It was while last month too that I passed through 'Checkpoint Stalingrad' into the badly damaged frontline town of Stanitsa Luhanska.

From the town's centre the last government checkpoint and emplacements sit barely 800 yards away from a short buffer of no-man's land between the opposing side's positions.

There I was to meet 72-year-old Anna Dmitriienko who was at home last August when rockets rained down on her neighbourhood

"I lost consciousness and was bleeding badly," Anna explains as she shows me around her yard and outhouse that was flattened.

Even now a huge crater sits in the middle of the ruined building and Anna points to the grey metal remains of the casing from one of the Grad missiles that landed as part of the barrage decimating the area.

The conditions under which Anna now lives are appalling.

"I spent all my pension paying for electricity and getting my yard cleared

up so I can continue to live here," she says, limping heavily from the still excruciatingly painful shrapnel wounds to her legs.

As prices soar because of the war people like Anna already among some of the poorest Ukrainians are struggling to survive.

It is those like Nadezhda Kalashnikova and Anna Dmitriienko that the humanitarian agency

Mercy Corps, whose European headquarters are in Edinburgh, have set up programmes inside eastern Ukraine in order to help.

Among these schemes will be the provision of cash and vouchers to help with shelter for those displaced and help host families. Cash transfer programmes will also enable people to buy food and help protect livelihoods, while food parcels will be distributed in those non-government controlled areas in the self proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic (LPR) which lie under the administration of the pro-Russian separatists. For just as the displaced know no boundaries in wartime, so too must any humanitarian response where the needs of civilian victims comes first.

As I made my way out of Ukraine after my last visit, I made a point of meeting up with my former translator and friend Radion Aznaurov.

"I'll meet you in front of the National Opera House", Radion instructed the day I called him on my arrival in the city.

Even before we embraced and shook hands that afternoon I knew I was looking at a different person. Pale and drawn the stresses and worries the war had inflicted were etched on his face and body language.

He told me how in the end the fighting in and around Donetsk had forced him like thousands of others to leave his home city.

He recalled how he had tried to return in search of his grandparents only to find the city under bombardment and overrun by gunmen who could turn on anyone at a moments notice.

A talented singer whose band had just begun to have success as the war started, its members had now been scattered because of the war from Kharkiv to Moscow.

Rodion himself was now living in Kiev struggling to make a living as was his former girlfriend from Donetsk, Svitlana.

"Everything has broken up, my family, my relationship, the band and of course my country," he told me.

As I listened I couldn't help thinking of the words of the great French writer Antoine de Saint Exupery who once wrote that 'in civil war the firing line is invisible; it passes through the hearts of men'.

While a ceasefire continues for now to hold in eastern Ukraine, the threat of a return to all out fighting is never far away.

That afternoon before I left Kiev, Rodion and I drank a few beers and reminisced about our experiences together, our "moment of war", as we call it.

Here's hoping that when we next meet, our friendship can flourish in a fully peaceful Ukraine.