Shadow's war: A Canadian veteran describes weeks under fire in Ukraine

It happened in a split-second.

About 10 days ago, a Russian tank that Shadow and a fellow Canadian — the sniper known as Wali — had been quietly stalking in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine turned and fired on them.

Two Ukrainian soldiers who were with them had ignored Wali's advice a moment before by stepping outside the cover of their observation post — nothing more than a trench — for a cigarette.

Shadow — the nom de guerre of a former Canadian soldier from Sherbrooke, a member of the Royal 22nd Regiment who later served as a meteorological technician with the navy — had been about to join his Ukrainian friends when the tank opened up, landing a shell right between the two Ukrainians.

Shadow was blown back to the trench, his ears ringing from the explosion. He crawled up, poked his head outside and was greeted by a scene of utter carnage.

One of the men had died instantly. The second Ukrainian soldier was still alive, but barely.

"He was, like, just a couple of feet from me and still breathing, but no legs," Shadow told CBC News Thursday in an interview in Lviv in western Ukraine. "And then we made eye contact. I looked at him; he looked at me."

It took a couple of moments for the soldier to die.

"So, he just, like, passed away in front of my eyes," he said. "So I was like, alright, so yeah, just two of my friends died in front of my eyes."

WATCH | The 'hell' of battle in Donbas region:

The brutal, capricious nature of war — the way ordinary moments can suddenly turn lethal — seems to have settled on Shadow in the days since he left the front in the embattled Donbas region, where Ukraine is holding back the weight of the Russian army.

Two among the thousands of volunteers who flocked to Ukraine after President Voldomyr Zelensky's appeal for foreign fighters, Shadow and Wali were paired up almost from the start.

On that day in late April, they had been helping to hunt a Russian tank regiment that had clawed itself into one side of a scorched valley.

Wali, a fellow Van Doo and sniper with combat experience in Afghanistan, was manoeuvring around to get a clean shot at one of the Russian iron monsters with an American-made Javelin anti-armour missile.