“I grew up in the Soviet Union so I feel that we are one country,” he said, sitting in the camp’s sick bay where he is recovering from a bullet wound in his arm.

It is this neo-imperialist ideology, famously expounded by President Putin in a 7,000-word essay, that the camp authorities are trying to deprogramme from their charges before they are returned home.

“Russians have been subjected to propaganda their whole lives,” said Petro Yatsenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s co-ordination headquarters for the treatment of PoWs, during a tour of the camp at an undisclosed location in western Ukraine. “It’s like trying to pull someone out of a religious sect.”

To get from their living quarters to the canteen, prisoners must pass along an alleyway lined with photographs of figures from Ukraine’s past, such as Stepan Bandera, the divisive and controversial leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during and after the Second World War, and Taras Shevchenko, the 19th-century national bard.

Another day, another banger. They were one country deepshits, and saying bandera is controversial is some shit