To live in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv is to make a bargain with your own mortality. Every day artillery and missile strikes fall on the city, each night residents awake to the sound of air raid sirens followed by explosions.

The front line is 10km from the city’s outskirts and the old Russian border, 20km away. Half the population left in the opening month of the war when the Russian army nearly captured the city. Those that remain carry on, a certain defiance in attempting to live a semi-normal life. The bars and nice cafes are open in the late summer weather, shops selling fashionable clothing and beautiful things. People come to work to have something to do.

It is a surreal life. Nearly every day someone else does not make it. Luck of the draw that it is not you, like a giant game of survivor. And so you lie in bed at night in the blacked out city, listen to the sirens and the explosions and think, if not them, if not me, then who.