Wiktor Lazar shares his war-side balcony with a pair of opera glasses and a tiny orange snake, his only companion in an apartment that seems to sit at the edge of the world.
The opera glasses, more of a joke, are hardly needed - the front line is visible without them. The rumbling of Russian and Ukrainian shelling is audible even now, although Lazar claims not to notice. Below his balcony is a crater, one of many. On the nearby street, a Grad rocket launcher rolls by.
Lazar estimates the Russians are just 10 kilometers (6 miles) away.
As the war grinds into its fifth month along deadly fault lines in Ukraine's east and south, Lazar and his few neighbours in Kharkiv's vast and shattered neighbourhood of Saltivka represent a life without resolution in which many are trapped. New communities are being told to flee. Not all do.
While towns and villages around the capital of Kyiv have begun to rebuild after the Russians withdrew months ago and world powers discuss long-term recovery, others in eastern Ukraine still cannot sleep soundly.
The Soviet-era apartment blocks in Saltivka once housed a half-million people, one of the largest neighbourhoods in Europe. Now perhaps only dozens remain. Some of the buildings are blackened, while others are crumbling slab by slab.
"This is my home," says the 37-year-old Lazar, who is shirtless in the soaring summer heat, revealing a machine gun tattoo on his right arm. He proclaims he's ready to fight the Russians, but his only weapons are kitchen knives.
A broken guitar hangs on the wall of his apartment. Lazar, a musician, dreams of holding a defiant concert in Saltivka's echoing, cat-roamed streets. In better days, he played for crowds in the plazas of Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, which is showing signs of rebounding from the war - even though it's only a short distance from the border with Russia.
Saltivka, by comparison, is almost dead. Past a final subway station dedicated to heroes, all activity sputters out. Shops are closed and apartment blocks gape with broken windows. In one, a table-sized chunk of concrete twists slowly on a shred of rebar, waiting to fall.
Tall grass overtakes abandoned playgrounds scattered with fallen and ripened cherries. Soldiers' trenches are bare. In a few apartments now ripped open, laundry still hangs on the line.
From time to time, a car crunches along the debris. It might bring movers trying to salvage some furniture or volunteers bringing assistance.
Outside Lazar's building, people have assembled a modest kitchen with a mounted bell to ring when the day's food arrives. Near the teapot on a wood stove, ammunition boxes now hold bread slowly going stale.