Hugh Barnes

Also queuing at the border post was Alex Sokol, a 46-year-old human resources manager at a Ukrainian bank. He’d been skiing in the Pyrenees when the Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, and he cut short his holiday to return home, even though he had no military background. ‘I have only seen weapons on TV,’ he said. ‘It’s better to give weapons to people who are experienced. But there’s lots of other things I know how to do. So I will do them, to help my country.’ One of the things he knew how to do was bulk purchasing. He’d left his skis in Andorra and flown to Poland with body armour in his luggage.

One evening in February, as Ivan Gorlovko was burying his dog in the frozen yard behind his house in Chuhuiv, 25 miles south-east of Kharkiv, he heard a screech of tyres and looked up to see a convoy of Ukrainian army trucks on the bridge over the Siverskyi Donets. The link between Laika’s death and the military vehicles on the bridge was not accidental as far as Gorlovko was concerned. He was sure the trucks belonged to the Security Service of Ukraine and were transporting dangerous pathogens from the Chuhuiv Bacteriological Institute to a place of safety in the west of Ukraine in case of a Russian invasion.