Footage has emerged showing a Ukrainian soldier forced to take an icy dip to rescue ammunition from a flooded trench amid the spring thaw.
The video shows a topless man wearing blue trunks dive into a freezing stream and wading through the trench to retrieve two boxes of ammunition.
In a 30-second video shared on social media, the man, who appears to be a Ukrainian soldier, jumps into the trench with sandals on and rapidly swims to find the ammunition.
He secures the container, safely deposits it on the side, before retrieving the second box.
It is not clear where in Ukraine the video, posted on Twitter by the photojournalist Pierre Crom, was filmed.
It comes as the “rasputitsa” spring thaw comes early to Ukraine.
Once frozen battlefields and snow-covered forests have transformed into impenetrable quagmires of thick sinking sludge as a result of the suddenly warmer weather.
The scenes around the Donetsk city of Bakhmut show roads turned into rivers and carefully cut trenches now full of knee-deep mud.
The conditions, a nightmare for most, will likely benefit Ukrainian troops hunkered down in their trenches defending the salt-mining town, the scene of some of the fiercest fighting.
On Wednesday, Volodymr Zelensky praised Ukrainians for surviving a winter marked by systematic Russian strikes on energy facilities, which plunged millions into darkness and cold.
The Ukrainian president said: “We have overcome this winter. It was a very difficult period, and every Ukrainian experienced this difficulty, but we were still able to provide Ukraine with power and heat.”
Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, hailed the first day of spring as another “major defeat” for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
“We survived the most difficult winter in our history. It was cold and dark, but we were unbreakable,” Mr Kuleba said in a statement.