Standing on the roadside at sunset, medics have snapped on their latex gloves, waiting for the arrival of wounded Ukrainian soldiers.
Based in a front-line village, their job is to collect injured troops who have been evacuated by military paramedics from Bakhmut, the center of the war's bloodiest fighting.
The medical team members give lifesaving treatment such as stitches, tracheotomies and draining blood from lungs as they rush the soldiers to a clinic where they get stabilizing care and then go on to a larger hospital in the hub of Kramatorsk.
When the call comes, they speed along dusty roads to a meeting point near the battle-scarred town of Chasiv Yar. Ukrainian troops are stationed all around amid regular shelling.
After expletive-laden exchanges on walkie-talkies with the military bringing out the injured, an armored vehicle is waved down by the medics and unloads casualties. Another arrives soon afterward. They bring four in total.
One dark-haired man is pale but able to walk, dragging one leg. Another lies on a stretcher. He grimaces in pain but raises up his fingers in a V-sign.
But when the next delivery arrives minutes later, a man has to be moved in a black body bag: He did not survive the journey from the front.
Alongside him is a man who is walking injured, with a concussion.
The medics in nonarmored vehicles converted into ambulances accelerate, at times riding through fields, throwing up clouds of dust. They take the men to a small clinic where they are quickly stabilized and evacuated to a hospital.
Medic Andriy, 30, was a civilian maxillofacial surgeon before joining up in March last year.
'He was young'
He is visibly upset as he talks about the man who did not make it, dying from "critical bleeding" from a leg injury.
"I don't know him, but he was young. The wound was very serious," Andriy says.
"This is our typical day - not typical that the guy died, but all the rest was a typical day."
Andriy has also worked in other areas of severe fighting, including Lysychansk and Kherson, but he said the battle to control Bakhmut was the worst.
"A lot of amputations. Skull damage. Wounded in the abdominal area," he said, listing common injuries, adding that amputations were almost always of arms.
This is the medical service of the well-known nationalist Da Vinci battalion, whose young commander was buried this month after he was killed by shelling, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine's commander-in-chief attending.
The young medics spend days and nights in a small cottage. During downtime, they rest in a back room and listen to music, clean their ambulances and drink green tea.
They have posted a TikTok video showing their day that has more than 3,000 views.
When the call comes, they spring into action, running out to ambulances parked outside.
Nurse Liana, 25, said she deals with fighters' deaths by keeping "my head cool."
She joined up in 2019, fresh from medical school. "Our team spirit is very high," she added.
An anesthetist, who gives his call sign as Marik, said the two most seriously injured men just brought in had shrapnel wounds, and his team was able to remove tourniquets from their limbs — restoring blood supply so they wouldn't require amputation.
Earlier in the day, AFP journalists saw a Da Vinci artillery unit fire an M119 105mm howitzer about a dozen times at Russian positions near Bakhmut, using U.S.-issued ammunition that dates to 1945.
