Oleksandr fled the front line in eastern Ukraine after watching his fellow servicemen being killed under intense Russian bombardments for six months. Then, those remaining were ordered to counter attack. It was the final straw. "We wanted to live. We had no combat experience, we were just ordinary working people from the village," he says. Oleksandr's decision is just one example in a dangerous trend plaguing the Ukrainian military, which has already suffered at least 43,000 losses in nearly three years of fighting and is also struggling to recruit new troops. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES