A vast cobweb of spent fibre-optic cable hangs over buildings in Lyman, a small Ukrainian city in the Donbas.
Used to control drones deployed by both Russia and Ukraine, the cable has accumulated so densely that fresh drones struggle to fly through it, their rotors tangling in the mass.
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Birds pluck it out to make their nests.
Beneath the glistening strands, residential blocks lie shattered from shellfire as Moscow's forces continue to push daily to take a city they briefly occupied until Ukraine's 2022 counteroffensive drove them out.
The roughly 1,000 civilians who remain live in cellars without electricity, gas, or running water.
Lyman is the northern outpost of the "fortress belt"—a string of towns and cities crucial to Ukraine's defence in the Donbas.
It has come to epitomise Kyiv's long-term strategy to tie down and exhaust Russian forces in an urban landscape ringed by trees and rivers.
The Human Cost of the Fortress Belt
Oleksandr Pavlovych, a vegetable seller, fled Lyman the day before arriving at an evacuation centre in nearby Sloviansk.
His 78-year-old mother had been hit in the stomach by shrapnel. Over a long day, she died slowly and without help.
He buried her in the garden and then cycled 19 miles to relative safety, surviving an encounter with a Russian FPV drone that exploded on an anti-drone net covering the road, the battery striking his ankle.
"The city is so badly damaged," he said. "You have to go to the central park for the chance of mobile phone signal.
