Less than 20 miles from the Russian border is Harkiv.

It is Ukraine's most bombarded city and has suffered great trauma from Russia's four-year onslaught.

Special correspondent Jack Houston was one of the few international reporters inside the city at the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

And he reports now that despite great loss among the city's soldiers and citizens, its holiday

culture lives on.

Now enduring its fourth Christmas at war, Harkiv has learned to live with its scars.

Some are obvious, shattered buildings, the strike points of missiles, shells and drones.

Others are carried on the bodies and in the minds of its people.

We first met Nikita Rogenko in the first weeks of the war,

a formerly pro-Russian city councillor whose politics flipped in an instant

when Russia invaded and he signed up to fight for Ukraine.

Russians, please come here if you dare.

We'll send you back in plastic bags.

Later he was deployed across Ternetsk and Harkiv provinces,

working in logistics, fearing ammunition and equipment to the front.

But on a fateful day in 2003, the car he was traveling in en route to a position near Izzyum was hit.

They found me crawling along the road.

My car was wrecked somewhere in the bushes.

At that moment, it seems I recognized everyone and reported to them that I had no eye.

A local doctor there said, why did you even bring him here?

He's practically a corpse. There's nothing we can do.

Nikita remembers none of this.

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