Every morning Igor Smelyansky looks at a vast map of Ukraine on his office wall and decides where he should put his people in harm's way. His aides provide him with live intelligence about Russian attacks and he deploys his teams, balancing their potential operational success against risk to life or limb. But Smelyansky is no military commander.
He is the head of Ukraine's state postal service, Ukrposhta. And every day he must decide how far to send his postmen and women into the deadly "kill zone" along the front lines where the threat of drone attack is ever present. "If it's too dangerous to go today, we won't go," Smelyansky told us.
"We'll go tomorrow, or we'll go somewhere else. The key is to be as agile as you can." Ukrposhta does more than just collect letters and parcels. It pays out pensions in hard cash, it takes payment for utility bills.
And it delivers vital food and medicine to people on the margins of society. As such, it offers a lifeline to millions of poor and elderly Ukrainians living in remote villages where shops are rare and trips to the city are expensive and dangerous. In a vast rural nation wracked by war, Ukrposhta is part of the glue that holds the country together.
That has made the service a target for Russia - which in recent months has stepped up not only its attacks on postmen and women but also sorting offices and logistical hubs. The Kremlin has claimed strikes like this are retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on Russian online retailers like Wildberries. Speaking in his imposing Soviet-era office building that overlooks Kyiv's famous Maidan square, Smelyansky said: "If we don't go [to a village], we don't have basic supply.
If we do go, they may delay a decision to evacuate from the areas they probably should have evacuated." There are many risks. If a post van turns up unannounced, a crowd can form, creating a target for an opportunistic Russian drone operator. But if they call ahead, information could leak.
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