NOVOLUHANSK, Ukraine — At the first bang of the artillery shell, the troops scattered. Some sprinted inside a dilapidated tractor repair depot nearby. Mikhail, a 25-year-old Ukrainian soldier, crouched beside a wall. He paused for a moment, waiting for the thud of another shell to subside before he raced to a bunker, leaped down the stairs and slammed a heavy metal door shut behind him.
“It happened again,” he said, wrenching off his helmet and panting with an adrenaline-fueled mix of fear and exertion. Sitting at a desk with a phone to his ear was 20-year-old Sasha, a baby-faced soldier who flinched at the sound of the rounds smacking into the ground.
It was the second fusillade of the day, fired with the waning sun just before 4 p.m. by Russian-backed separatists, an enemy unseen but close enough to have upended life in this small industrial village a few hundred yards from the line that divides eastern Ukraine’s disputed Donbas region.
