Mariana Zhaglo has never kept a war diary. She once said she did not want her children to read the details of what she has seen and done.
She would not wish its pages to describe how the original 100 volunteers in her infantry company were whittled down to ten survivors; how the Ukrainian dead lie unclaimed among the shattered trench lines; and how newly mobilised men die in such haste and confusion that they are often unknown even to those they fight beside.
“Too often, we were used as meat,” she reflected with cold disdain. “Recently, the freshly mobilised were being sent to the front without us ever having time to learn their names, and with so little proper training they couldn’t even shoot
