No answer. He was probably writing.

People were spouting all kinds of nonsense around that time. And it was all, apparently, ending up on his walls.

The driver of a food delivery truck was killed in crossfire right at the entrance to the city. The burnt-out truck stood for a long time next to those large letters marking its name. Snipers used them as a firing position and soon the metal letters had, like the truck, come to resemble a colander.

Our terrible summer siege had begun. The war was gaining momentum and the front had crept closer to the city. Soldiers barrelled into the flat downstairs and tried to set up a machine gun position there. The neighbours called up the military HQ and the soldiers left swearing. They put the machine gun on the roof and took pot-shots at planes. Fighter jets and combat helicopters spat out bursts of gunfire as they flew over the city. Howitzers were positioned on the TV tower hilltop. The shelling grew more regular, and the sound of battle evolved from a distant rubble into distinct gunshots and bursts of fire of recognisable calibres: machine guns and mortars. They stopped sounding the siren. Burning homes were no longer only something that glowed and billowed smoke in the distance. You could now see them directly from our window. They burned long and bright, casting their smoke into the cloudless summer sky. But the worst had yet to come. The fighting was still mainly on the outskirts, around the defensive positions and where the offensives were being focused. Fire engines stopped going to the shelled areas, but one small ambulance from the city hospital drove forwards and backwards until nightfall, collecting the wounded.

The Ukrainian army targeted the Artyom neighbourhood, the houses near the city council and the separatist HQ, which had been installed in the former offices of the security services. That was where Number One planned his partisan sorties, signed execution orders, and worked on his Facebook scribblings. On the day the new Ukrainian president was inaugurated, a woman’s head was torn off by a Howitzer shell about five hundred metres from the central square. It’s funny, over the entire duration of the war, they never managed to hit the HQ once.

There were daily death bulletins. The cannon fire would start at dawn as though the mortars and machine guns were the first thing soldiers reached for upon waking. Before having breakfast or brushing their teeth, this was how they exchanged morning greetings. The city soon became used to waking with them. Opening our eyes in the half-light, we would listen to where the shells were coming from and where they were going. If we heard the explosions, but the glass didn’t shudder, it meant there was no need to take cover and that they weren’t firing at us. Then, like everyone else on earth, we had our morning coffee, when it was still possible to get any, we’d make calls to relatives—the living ones—have a quick scroll through social media and swap rumours with neighbours: what had been shelled overnight, how many people had been killed, and when was this offensive going to come. Every protracted artillery battle felt like the prelude to a Ukrainian army offensive that never arrived.