It’s time to go, says Makar, the Deputy Commander of the 1st Battalion of 65 Brigade, coming back into the shop. We need to hurry, says the 30ish-year-old Ukrainian soldier, and I am not disposed to argue.

There is an enticing smell of roast chicken from the counter, but when Makar says it is time to go, it’s time to go.

We are in a grocery store in southern Ukraine, somewhere to the east of the regional capital of Zaporizhzhia and the daily existence of the villagers has been getting more than slightly hairy.

The café opposite was blammed two weeks ago; the flats next door have been shattered by a blast. A saloon car down the road – I can no longer make out which marque – has been twisted and scalded into a skeleton of metal; apparently only a few days ago.

God knows what happened to the occupants, but it doesn’t look promising.

Driving down the main road through Komyshuvakha is a crapshoot with death, and most drivers just ignore the crater-like potholes and floor it. The Russians want to take this village, and they want it so badly that they are sending drone after drone – in their barbaric way – to try to intimidate the inhabitants.

Which is why I am so excited to see a shop that is still open, and why we have stopped. I want to talk to the shopkeepers, and find out what life is like under Russian attack.

So we park the car on the sludgy black kerb and put on our helmets and prepare to cross the road. ‘Be careful,’ says an old woman, one of the few people who seems to be about; and naively I look up at the lowering grey sky. Seems OK to me.

The shop is surprisingly cheerful and warm, with some appetising stuff laid out on the counters – it’s clearly a last pit stop for hungry soldiers on the way to the front. There are two women waiting and watching, but before I can place our order we have to flee.

Makar says some sort of warning has come in over the radio, and nowhere around here – obviously – is safe. So we put our helmets back on and scuttle back over the road, and into the car, and the Ukrainian accelerates away.

He gives it some welly, and as we head back north I am looking up with eyes peeled at the strange netting that covers the whole road like an aviary – acres of green mesh originally designed, I am told, to keep the birds off the cucumbers and which is now intended to keep off the drones.

But the winter has been hard and blowy, and the netting is now full of holes, and the Russian drone operators can see the holes, which are easily big enough for their purposes.

Welcome to what is called the Kill Zone, and welcome back to the war the west is in danger of forgetting. This is the conflict, remember, where the rights and wrongs are achingly obvious, where an innocent democratic European population is trying to fight off an autocratic regime.

This is the war where the tragedy is not that the West has used Tomahawks against defenceless schoolchildren.

This is the war where the West refuses to allow defenceless schoolchildren to be protected with Tomahawks.

This is the four-year struggle for Ukrainian freedom – a struggle in which everyone in Europe and Washington is supposedly agreed on that simple objective.

And yet no leader in any of those western capitals is currently prepared to do enough to bring that objective about.

I have come to the frontline of Ukraine’s fight with Vladimir Putin, at a time when Putin’s intelligence network is allegedly being used to target American ships in the Persian Gulf, and when Russian drones – originally designed in Iran – are exploding in the capitals of some of our most important friends and allies in the Middle East.

We all need urgently to wake up to the reality, that these are two fronts of the same war, and that Putin and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) are – at the risk of being vulgar – two cheeks of the same arse.

The West is facing a tyrannical alliance of Russia and Iran, both of them bankrolled by China; but there is a difference between the two fronts. The war in Ukraine is not just morally simpler, with simpler western objectives.

It is also simpler to win. After talking to frontline Ukrainian soldiers, I can see their exhaustion and their obvious human desire for the war to end. I have been filled with fury – as you would be – at the inadequacy of western support.

But after 48 hours at the front I am more convinced than ever that the Ukrainians are going to succeed, and that one day they will be shot of Putin’s orc-like armies, and that this beautiful bountiful country will be free.

The reason I have come to Zaporizhzhia is that Putin is so desperately trying – and failing – to take it. He wants it because it is an important regional capital, a large and elegant city on the Dnieper, with a huge and currently disabled hydro-electric dam.

When you drive the broad art deco boulevards of Zaporizhzhia, you are struck by the potential of the city, the wealth that is waiting to return. Chevrolet used to have a factory here in the 1930s, and the dam is the creation of the same American engineers who built the great Hoover dam in Colorado.

One day, I hope and believe, that US-Ukrainian partnership will be renewed, and that is why Putin is so hungry to claw the city back, if he possibly can, and rule it once again from Moscow.

Our day begins at about 3.50am when I am woken in the small flat that has been rented, in some grungy commie block, by the Daily Mail’s intrepid Ukraine reporting team, Richard Pendlebury and photographer Jamie Wiseman.

It’s some sort of noise. At first I think it’s Jamie snoring, because he has warned me about it: but he is blameless.

Then I hear it again. This time it’s clearer. It sounds like gunfire, and then a loud thump, an explosion. I check the time: 4.07am.

It sounds like some missile or bomb, and in the morning we discover that indeed it was. Putin has killed a civilian and injured eight more with two big Shahed-style drones crashing into some nearby flats and a supermarket. It is a measure of the indifference of the Ukrainians that by breakfast time, as we drive past, the rubble is already being bulldozed away and the glass swept up.

We have now met up with Makar, who is going to drive me in his unmarked car, with the Daily Mail team following in Daisy, their trusty Toyota. The idea is to give me a high-speed tour of the Zaporizhzhia front, and an understanding of this new and terrifying type of warfare, in which death comes buzzing from the skies.

The film we made on this visit to the front will be the subject of a remarkable TV documentary coming soon to Channel 5. A full-length version, 100 per cent raw and uncut, will be available on the Daily Mail’s app and World YouTube channel.

There are the Shaheds, with their heavy payloads and their moped engines – the doodlebugs of the modern era - and then there are the little ones, so innocuous looking and yet so lethal; and all of them with the advantage of knowing exactly where you are.

The Russians themselves are about 10 to 15 kilometres south east, down the road; but it’s the drones that count. Once you can hear them, it’s probably too late.

As Makar drives – fast, rally-driver style, weaving round the potholes - he relies on Dasha, 24, the battalion’s communications officer, because Dasha has her eyes fixed on a strange-looking Geiger counter called a Chuika.

Chuika is the Ukrainian word for intuition or sixth sense, and the machine is designed to tune into the radio frequencies of the drones themselves. As she looks at that little green screen, Dasha can pick up the presence of the drones, and once they get close enough she can actually see what the Russian drone operator can see himself.

So if she sees our vehicle – well, as I say, it’s probably too late; but it’s time to leap out and into the ditch and preferably find a tree to hug, on the basis that the drone operator might conceivably mistake your cowering form for part of the tree.

As you can imagine, I am keeping a pretty leery eye, from the back seat, both on the sky and on the Chuika screen. Occasionally it seems to chirrup, and I see a wavy line; but today we are in luck.

It’s cold, with a damp chill that goes through to your bones, but it’s also very grey, and the drones don’t like it when it’s overcast. So we drive unmolested from outpost to outpost, and I get a sense of the indomitability of the Ukrainian army.

We come to a seemingly deserted village, and in one anonymous house I meet the brigade priest and his ordinand, defenders not just of their country but of a religion and culture that Putin would like to exterminate.

We light candles in the makeshift shrine, with its glimmering gold icons – hastily moved from another front-line house. I pray silently (for peace and freedom, what else?).

I ask the priest what help his battalion needs most – what type of equipment for instance. ‘Nuclear weapons,’ he says loudly, without apparent irony.

Which perhaps illustrates the difference in spirit between Ukrainian orthodoxy, under current circumstances, and the modern Church of England.

And then we are off quickly to another ramshackle settlement – war takes its toll, and none of these places are going to win a village of the year competition. We drive down a pitted road past camouflaged military vehicles and a couple of blown up houses, and find ourselves in another abandoned front room.

Here two men are sitting by a wood-burning stove, wrapping big wodges of yellow cheese and sausage in plastic bin-liner material, ready to be dropped by drone on to their comrades further forward. There’s no way of victualling them by road any more.

The walls of the room are already cracked from a nearby Shahed explosion, and they know they can’t stay long. As soon as the Russians twig that this is the battalion food factory, those drones will come.

We don’t want to linger either, in case we call attention to the operation, and soon we are on our way to another semi-abandoned village where Vassily, 51, a former cement manufacturer, is putting plastic explosive into little bomblets, ready to be dropped from Ukrainian drones.

The casings are surprisingly light, and made by a 3D printer. He gives me one to heft.

‘Don’t drop it,’ he says, unnecessarily. What does he need? 'More explosive, obviously', he adds, 'more 3D printers'.

Then we’re off again, bumping fast in Makar’s car, to a drone factory and repair shop, where we meet the Ukrainian equivalent of Douglas Bader, the World War 2 Spitfire ace.

He is called Konstantinos, call sign Kokos, and he is spectacularly skilful at getting these little black spider-like drones to drop their deadly packages exactly where he wants. He has killed 434 Russians, he says, and he is going to keep going until his country is free.

He shows me some shocking footage from his mobile of the moment he was hit by a tank round, causing the hideous slicing wound to his leg. Kokos explains that it was only his comrades who stopped the medics from performing a battlefield amputation.

Now he walks well, though with a slight limp, and it strikes me that if a man can come through something like that, and fight on with such ruthless effectiveness, then nothing is going to break these Ukrainians.

It is just nuts for the diplomats to think that they will willingly give up their territory, as Putin is absurdly demanding. As it happens young Dasha – the press officer – actually comes from Kramatorsk, the embattled town in the Donetsk region that Putin wants, allegedly as his price for considering a ceasefire.

‘How can we say that we will give up Kramatorsk, or Sloviansk?’ she says scornfully. ‘I went into the army to protect Kramatorsk.’

She talks contemptuously of the Russians, and the way they behave in the towns that they capture; how cities occupied by the Russians have turned into slums, with no industry, no jobs, no running water.

Nothing and no one will induce her to accept an accommodation with Putin. The Russian leader should meet her, and hear her point of view.

So should Starmer. So should Trump.

These Ukrainians are tired, after four years of hell. Many of them have been plainly injured in the past, and have come back to battle with shrapnel scars visible on their heads and hands. But Putin’s progress is glacial, and exorbitantly expensive in money and blood.

You can see the Ukrainian determination to resist everywhere, not least in the huge new defences they are carving in the black earth, deep, many-layered trenches and coils of shiny barbed wire snaking for miles across the land.

Putin can try to push on to Zaporizhzhia but every Ukrainian general I talk to – and they are a pretty realistic bunch – says he will fail. The cost in manpower would be just too high.

The real question is not whether Putin can capture all of Ukraine – because he can’t – but whether we are doing enough to help the Ukrainians to push him back, and force him to the negotiating table.

To judge by what I have seen the answer is that we are not. We are not doing anything like enough.

We are not giving the Ukrainians the kit they need – the long range missiles – to take out the drone factories, or the bases from which the Russians launch their bomber planes. Why not?

It’s no use just blaming Trump, and the US' refusal to give Tomahawks. The UK has its own long-range missiles, and so do the Germans.

It’s no use any of us Europeans blaming Trump when we are collectively sitting on hundreds of billions of Putin’s frozen assets, which should obviously be unfrozen and used to help Ukraine.

Just outside Kyiv I go very late at night to meet the last line of defence for the Ukrainian capital – an anti-aircraft battery manned by volunteers. The unit is led by Yuri, who in civilian life is a ping pong coach and referee.

Every night Yuri and his friends come out and point their guns at the sky, watching over a vast snowy field to where the Shaheds emerge like game birds over the trees.

They do an amazing job, considering. They shoot down perhaps 50 per cent of the drones. But that means half of them buzz on through the night, to attack the energy network, to kill or maim the innocent.

As I watch Yuri and co, I marvel at the antiquity of their weapons. They are using 50 cal Brownings, a gun designed in 1917.

If the Brownings fail, and the drones are in range, they blaze away with their Ak-47s, one of which I see was made in 1964. We are asking the Ukrainians to defend their families with guns that are as old as me.

Compare this kit with the anti-aircraft and anti-drone technology that is now being rushed to the Gulf. The discrepancy is shameful.

The Ukrainians are fighting the same war, against the same drones, that are being sent against civilians by the same alliance of tyrannies.

We have spent four years psalming platitudes, and telling them that their fight is our fight. On the basis of what I have seen, we are risibly failing to live up to our pledges, and to give them the help they need.

The Ukrainians can win, and will win. But our delay and our timidity continue to cause unimaginable human suffering.

We are right to say that the Ukrainians are fighting for all of us – so why the hell are we still short-changing them?