Leave the eastern Ukrainian city of Izium and turn west onto rougher roads, where dead trees and twisted power lines give way to a string of shattered villages.
These enclaves, once the backbone of Ukraine’s agricultural eastern steppe, were reduced to ruin as the war passed over them like a flood tide.
Despite being recaptured by Ukraine’s military last fall, the villages of Sulyhivka, Virnopillia and Kamianka are now at risk of being lost — not to artillery or pitched battles, but to overgrown weeds, wildflowers and minefields. They are another kind of casualty in a war that has claimed many.