Referring to the Soviet puzzle video game, Alla says her husband kills Russian soldiers as though he is playing “human Tetris”.

“A drone hangs in the sky, and he watches [them] crawl across the forest,” she told Al Jazeera. “And he kills them. And then they crawl again.”

The war in Ukraine has turned Avdiivka, where Alla’s husband is stationed, into a maze of ruins, trenches and tunnels surrounded by burned-down fields and patches of forest studded with landmines, explosion craters and remnants of Russian soldiers and armoured vehicles.