A stone’s throw from advancing Russian troops, Volodymyr refuses to leave his eastern Ukrainian town.

The daily Russian pummelling has killed some of his neighbours and destroyed buildings around his house, but the 34-year-old does not want to move to a safer area because he would be forcibly conscripted.

“I’ll be herded back home but with a gun in my hands,” he told Al Jazeera as fighting raged just 10km (6 miles) away.

He has no qualms about what Ukrainian generals might call unpatriotic behaviour.

“Way too many guys” he knows have been killed, wounded and incapacitated since 2014 when Russia-backed separatists sparked a conflict in eastern Ukraine that killed more than 13,000 people, about a quarter of them civilians, and displaced millions.