Still the injured pour in as Russia's barbarous war grinds endlessly on

With peace negotiations faltering, battalions — and the medics treating them — are resigned to playing the long game, they tell Dan Sabbagh on the Pokrovsk frontline

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It is 11.20pm, and in an instant the emergency centre comes alive. Doctors and medics are conjured up from somewhere nearby to treat two wounded Ukrainian soldiers who have arrived together - one with serious shrapnel injuries to his right eye, the other who had a pile of bricks fall on his chest after a drone strike.

Yet it is the third, who arrives on a stretcher shortly after, who is the worst affected. The dark "panda eyes" signify a brain injury, while his back is also studded with bloody red wounds from drone or mortar fire. He has to be stabilised by half a dozen medics before being transported to a hospital in the rear.

Though the US is trying to broker a ceasefire to end the full-scale war that has run on for more than three years, there is no sign of a slackening of Russian aggression on the ground as the steady stream of night-time arrivals demonstrates. At around 2am, half a dozen lightly wounded appear, their hands and faces dirty and their eyes wide in an exhausted look only possessed by those who have spent days at the front.

Oleskii, who immediately prior to becoming a combat medic last spring had a spell working in the digital department of Ukraine's public broadcaster doing "all the Facebook, YouTube shit", says that on a typical night this facility, a mid-point on a wounded soldier's journey to safety deep in the rear, might treat "five or seven" heavy casualties spread over the night.

If that does not sound excessively busy, consider that the centre has been relocated back and is nominally intended only to treat members of a single unit, the Da Vinci Wolves' battalion. Its fighters have spent the past 10 months defending the strategic town of Pokrovsk in Ukraine's east, perhaps the hottest front in the war.