BAKHMUTSKE, Ukraine: As he drove through Ukraine’s only link with the beleaguered east, the injured coal miner gazed through his shrapnel-strewn windscreen and tried to ignore the flapping noises emanating from his ruptured tyres.

A startling blast of fire from someplace in the overhanging trees had brought the automobiles around him to a standstill.

After being bombarded on his way back to the frontline village of Zolote to rescue his stranded neighbours, Sergiy Tokarev looked unconcerned about the risk.

The 60-year-old was forced to turn back and spend the night on an open road that has become the newest target of Russian soldiers moving from the east.

The burnt structures smoking behind him were enveloped in white smoke from burning fields.

Tokarev looked out his window, grumbling about the hassle of buying new tyres over three months after Russia invaded its pro-Western neighbour.

He slowed his vehicle down the road, saying, “There are grandparents and grandfathers trapped back there.”

His damaged and screaming rims appeared to be well past the point when they should have come off.

His right thigh was bandaged after being grazed by shrapnel that flew at him on the outskirts of his village.

“If I am fated to die here, I will die here,” the coal miner shrugged.

“But if not, I will keep pulling people out.”

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