The phone connection from my living room to the eastern Ukraine battlefield couldn't have been better. First Lieutenant Alexei Chaban of the Ukrainian 17th Tank Brigade came in clear amid sounds of gunfire in the distance.
"There's some shelling going on," he said. "If the line cuts out, it's a mortar attack." Chaban spoke in the same matter-of-fact voice of his Facebook posts from the front. Chaban, 50, has become an Internet sensation since he posted an open letter to the mother of a Russian tank commander whose life he had spared during a skirmish last week.
When I told him last week that his letter had already been "shared" 17,000 times and "liked" by 8,000 Facebook users, Chaban was taken aback. His mobile Internet connection is excruciatingly slow, he said, so he had had no idea how popular he had become.