Frontline legend to a war within: A Ukrainian soldier’s other battle

I met Roman Trokhymets in Kramatorsk, a front-line city in eastern Ukraine. He had just come off a rotation in Bakhmut, exhausted but steady. A sniper with the Azov Brigade, he recorded his experiences at the front so others could see what the war demanded of the people fighting it.

Two weeks later, he was in a hospital bed with another concussion his fourth. The pressure wave from an explosion had taken him down.

Concussions dont add up; they compound. The damage is invisible, but constant.

He would later tell me, Its some kind of curse to have so much invisible damage.

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He would return to the frontlines. Then came the night the war followed him to dinner. A Russian missile tore thr