'Life goes on' People enjoy calm between bombardments in frontline Sloviansk

On a sunny afternoon this week the beach in the frontline Ukrainian city of Sloviansk was busy.

- Luke Harding

Bathers paddled in a lake, sunbathed and sipped tea. At 3.30pm there was a sudden thunderclap. An artillery shell had crashed noisily nearby, sending up a plume of twisting grey smoke. Ducks took off in panic. The swimmers glanced nonchalantly upwards and carried on bobbing in the salty water.

"After three years of fighting we've got used to booms. They don’t bother us any more," Alyona, a pensioner in a swimsuit, explained. She pointed to a concrete box beyond a row of wooden changing cabins and outdoor showers. “If the bombs are close, we’ve got a shelter,” she said. Alyona and her friend waded into the shallows. A man selling grapes sat engrossed reading a book.

Sloviansk’s residents have lived with explosions since 2014, when Vladimir Putin first began his imperial campaign to conquer Ukraine. Recently the war has become harder to ignore. This month, Russian kamikaze drones reached the M-03 highway, 2km outside the city, for the first time. They have swooped on buses and cars. One person has been killed and 10 injured.

Yesterday workmen were hanging nets between slender pine trunks and installing electronic warfare systems. This anti-drone corridor will cover the road connecting four cities in the northern part of Donetsk region: Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka. If Ukraine were to lose this hilly fortress belt, Russian forces could race across a flat steppe landscape, north to Kharkiv and west to Kyiv.

Sloviansk’s mayor, Vadym Liakh, said those who predicted a Kremlin breakthrough in eastern Ukraine were wrong. In August, Russian soldiers seized villages around the town of Dobropillia, advancing 15km in two perpendicular lines. Ukrainian forces have retaken most of the villages, killing and capturing enemy troops - proof, Volodymyr Zelenskyy says, that Moscow isn't winning. Elsewhere on the frontline Russia is making gains.