The Halo Trust, a landmine clearance charity, says Ukraine faces “the heaviest landmine contamination the world has seen since the second world war”. The area of Ukraine exposed to conflict and therefore potentially mined is up to 25m hectares, the size of the UK.

The Kharkiv regional mine-clearing team helped to screen the buildings and courtyards, but they and the international organisations supporting them are stretched far too thin to clear everyone’s farmland this spring. Until the devices are cleared, crops cannot be planted and the 230 surviving cattle cannot be put out to pasture. The buildings are wrecked and the land is sown with mines. The Russians are long gone, but the occupation continues to hobble the Husarivka farm. Serhii Vorobyov with some of his surviving cattle. The Russian soldiers, most of them teenagers, invited some of the farm workers to milk the cows, and six of the labourers never returned. “They were shooting at people on the streets, yelling and screaming, so people were scared and stayed at home after that.” You can see madness in their eyes,” said Yurii Vovchenko, the farm manager. “They looked like the same people but they behaved totally differently. All that changed after the Russians took heavy losses in an engagement with Ukrainian forces. When the Russians – a motorised rifle regiment all the way from Kaliningrad and another from just across the border in Valuiki – first took over the farm on 3 March last year, relations between occupiers and occupied were initially terse but civil. The surviving farm workers in this village near Balakliia, in Kharkiv oblast, are every bit as damaged.

They are scared if you just go near them.” “They are just like soldiers who’ve been on the frontline. “The cows are terrified after what they went through,” said Serhii Vorobyov, the farm’s deputy manager.

Remote control military tank