Signs of the anticipated Ukrainian strike are unmistakable now – to strategists and residents
• Russia-Ukraine war – live updates
The price of liberation is high. In the village of Posad-Pokrovske in southern Ukraine, a place once on the very frontline of the war, almost every house is damaged by shell fire.
Outside a blue-painted church, Father Viktor Kravchuk, 61, has laid out the sheets, quilts and clothes he has rescued from his ruined house to air in front a little cemetery that is a tangle of blossoming lilac.
