I'm Lucy Ash and for assignment on the BBC World Service I'm in Marinka a town on the front line in eastern Ukraine. A pensioner buys vegetables in an almost deserted market.

A pensioner buys vegetables in an almost deserted market.

Marinka was once a bustling town of more than 10,000 people in Ukraine's eastern Donbass region, famous for coal mining.

In the park, there are Soviet era portraits of heroic workers, medals pinned to their

chests. Now mines and factories lie idle. Half the population has left for jobs in safer parts of the country.

But I want you to meet someone still working here. I first came to Marinka in 2014, three days after it was liberated.

I was with two other humanitarian aid workers and it was like a ghost town.

Aliyakkachenko is a tall man in a leather jacket with a page boy haircut.

He arrived here at the beginning of the war.

Marinka was first captured by pro-Russian separatists, then retaken by the Ukrainian army

four months later, or as he puts it liberated.

To actually come to a town which didn't exist. No people, no cars, no birds, no cats. It was a terrible situation.

Marinka is still on the edge of a war zone in the area the Ukrainian government calls the anti-terrorist

operation zone.

Allegg, a company boss turned pastor, who always seems to have one ear glued to his mobile phone,

had the skills and money to leave this area, but he decided to stay. Even more than that, he decided to do something

that in its small way is quite remarkable. He's set up a little business in Marinka, the first in the town since the war began.

He takes me into a battlesguard building, once a supermarket, where customers line up for fresh

bread, buns and little pies stuffed with cabbage.

It came to me in a flash.

We have to open a bakery right here in Marinka. In the town people were saying the smell of fresh

bread normal life has returned. Life is very far from normal here. The fighting is in its fourth year and there's no end in

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