Mark Kupchenenko lives alone in a big deserted home within the war-hit Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, aside from the troops he serves. “So as not to get too close,” he says.

Every day, the 26-year-old navy chaplain visits the frontline military positions to attempt to deliver succour to the troops.

Officially, his job is to take care of “the very high morale” of troopers serving at some of the harmful factors on Ukraine’s jap entrance.

The actuality he describes could be very completely different. 

The troopers combating in Bakhmut are subjected to “incredible moral fatigue” in addition to the psychological selection, says Kupchenenko.

In this endless warfare of attrition, he says, some fighters see themselves diminished to items of “meat, good only for sending to their death.

“These are fighters who don’t rotate — that’s, they continuously struggle actively on the entrance with out relaxation.

“They miss their relatives, they don’t see them for a long time.”

Some, he says, have “panic attacks, when a person’s hands shake, when he becomes restless, when he cannot force himself to go on a mission”.

Rest, given the situations on the entrance, is nearly as good as not possible.

Some “feel abandoned,” he says. “They have the feeling nobody needs them.

– ‘Human shields’ –

Before joining up, the young priest was a prison chaplain, and he has also worked with Covid sufferers and sick children.

Those previous jobs helped prepare him for the trials of his current work in the grisly conditions at Bakhmut, the scene of months of fierce fighting since the start of the Russian invasion last February. 

“I talk, pray, communicate in regards to the phrase of God, I reply tough questions that come up for troopers in such situations. And there are lots of,” he says.

For more than six months, Russian forces and paramilitaries from the Russian Wagner group — whose founder has called the fight for the city the “Bakhmut meat grinder” — have fought, so far in vain, to capture it.

Both sides have suffered heavy casualties amid the destruction of much of the city, most of whose pre-war population of some 70,000 has left.

“My function as chaplain is to remind them why they’re right here.”

They may well be there because they were ordered to the front by their superiors, he says. But that does not change the importance of their role.

“They are primarily right here as a result of they’re a human protect between the enemy and our households, our individuals.”

Without them, says Kupchenenko, “the Orcs can be in our houses, they’d rape, reduce, kill, destroy”.

Ukrainians often refer to the Russian troop as orcs, a reference to the savage, goblin-like monsters from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”.

Of the troops he serves, he says: “They are giving their souls for us, for his or her individuals, their households. I can’t assure them that they may return.

“But I tell them that if we believe sufficiently in God then He will receive us into his Kingdom.”

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