Frontline dispatches The vital postal service keeping Ukraine going

Nova Poshta brings a taste of normality to a country under fire, as Charlotte Higgins and Mariana Matveichuk discover in Kharkiv and Kyiv

- Charlotte Higgins and Mariana Matveichuk

In a post office 10 miles from Ukraine's frontline, in a suburb of the eastern city of Kharkiv, business is brisk on a chilly autumn morning despite the ballistic missiles that had shaken the city at midnight, lighting up the sky with a false dawn of flames.

The customer area is fitted out with phone-charging stations and "a small co-working space, which people can use during blackouts, since we have generators", says the branch manager, Yaroslav Dobronos, 30. There is also a changing room, where a young woman tries on a new pair of jeans, before repacking them and sending them straight back.

Behind the counters, miscellaneous parcels are waiting for collection. Each is a fragment of life lived in all its normality and fragility in a frontline community.

There are winter tyres, widescreen TVs, boxes marked Roshen (a chocolate brand owned by the former president Petro Poroshenko), a folding bed, a car bumper, a package from an upmarket Ukrainian skincare brand, a bare-root tree, a set of rucksacks, a pram, a vacuum cleaner, a Russell Hobbs multicooker, and Starlink parts (a satellite internet provider for use in remote locations). Out of one enormous, bulbous parcel pokes a fistful of camouflage net.

Ukraine's main postal service is, like the country's rail network, one of its most vital, reliable arteries: a matter of national pride for Ukrainians and incredulity for visiting foreigners.

Nova Poshta, founded 25 years ago, is one of the chief reasons Ukraine continues to function during a time of extraordinary violence and peril. It is affordable - it costs the equivalent of between £1.50 and £2.20 to send packages of between 5kg and 10kg within Ukraine - and it connects citizens across the nation and beyond, including those at the country's most precarious, threatened edges.