ARTEMIVSK, Ukraine — When Natalia Nazar got the call that she was needed at Donetsk Airport to tend to Ukrainian soldiers wounded in battle last month, she raced to the heart of the hottest fight this nine-month-long war has seen.

"I didn’t think about anything other than the guys who need my help," she says.

There, amid the smoldering rubble and a raging tank battle, Nazar found a soldier who had been so badly maimed she was sure she would have to perform a battlefield amputation of his butchered right arm in order to save his life — all the while dodging shrapnel from exploding artillery shells.

"He begged me not to cut it off," she said. "It was remarkable that we managed to save him and his arm, and get him out."

Ukrainian medic Natalia Nazar inside her base camp in Artemivsk, eastern Ukraine on Feb. 4, 2015.

It wouldn’t have been the first operation of that sort. Nazar, a petite 41-year-old mother of two and previously a teacher of medicine at a medical university in Lviv, western Ukraine, has carried out several while under heavy fire.

For six months, she has crisscrossed the fiercest battlefields in eastern Ukraine, risking life and limbs for her fellow countrymen. Her fellow medics say she is "tough as nails" and "just one of the guys."

"She goes where many of us won’t dare," says Igor, another medic from Lviv.

When I meet Nazar this week in Artemivsk, she is dressed in camouflage fatigues and combat boots. Her dark hair is perfectly straightened and her eyeliner applied with the utmost care. ("I wake up at 5 a.m. everyday so I have enough time to paint it on," she tells me.)

Natalia Nazar, a Ukrainian frontline medic, readies in Artemivsk for a trip to the battlefield in Debaltseve, eastern Ukraine on Feb. 4, 2015.

A Ukrainian nationalist at heart, Nazar volunteered at Kiev’s Independence Square during the Maidan revolution that ousted the country’s pro-Russian president last winter. There, she treated the gunshot wounds of anti-government protesters cut down by sniper fire that killed more than 100 people.

With her eyes welling up when she recalls the "Heavenly Hundred," as those killed at the square are known, she says she now fears nothing but God.

That courage has helped her in recent work in Debaltseve, a strategic transportation hub 25 miles southeast of Artemivsk, where some 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been nearly encircled by Russian-backed rebel fighters. The ring of artillery and rocket fire they have created is wreaking havoc on the town and its civilians who are trapped in basements without basic amenities, as well as the government troops.

Between 30 and 80 wounded soldiers are transported from the frontline each day by medics in rickety, decades-old ambulances and donated Soviet-made sedans with vanity license plates that read "Putin, fuck off." That’s more than three times the figures released by the central government in Kiev, which allegedly is underreporting its casualties.

Ukrainian soldiers stand outside the hospital in Artemivsk, eastern Ukraine, some 25 miles from the front line on Feb. 4, 2015.

Ruslan Fedonyuk, the director of Artemivsk’s morgue, said in an interview this week that he’s seen the corpses of 160 soldiers come through his facility since the New Year. On Monday alone, he received 40 bodies. (During more peaceful times, an average of about 120 bodies would arrive at the morgue.)

Alexey Reva, the Artemivsk mayor, said in an interview on Wednesday that he had appealed to the Ministry of Health for more resources, but that he was still waiting for a reply.

Aleksey Reva, the mayor of Artemivsk, Ukraine, places a phone call to the Ministry of Health on Feb. 4, 2015.

The corpses, many with grisly battle wounds that make them impossible to identify, are coming in at such a fast rate these days that Fedonyuk and his staff of nine people can hardly keep up. "It’s like a conveyor belt," he said.

The uptick in fighting and deaths, however, has also brought new volunteers to the ranks of the medics.

Ambulances carrying wounded Ukrainian soldiers wait at a football field in Artemivsk, Ukraine for a transport helicopter on Feb. 4, 2015.

A volunteer medic who goes by the nom de guerre Tyler, after Tyler Durden from the film and novel 'Fight Club,' says he joined the medical unit in Artemivsk because he was tired of sitting on his hands.

Puffing Marlboro reds, the 20-year-old Artemivsk resident is a former student who I taught English when I lived here between 2010 and 2012.

Since fleeing university in Luhansk in May, after gun-toting rebels threatened him and more than a hundred other students, he has traded in his school uniform for military fatigues and gone from baby-faced teenager to a grizzled young man.

A Ukrainian volunteer medic who goes by the nom de guerre Tyler stands outside the hospital in Artemivsk, Ukraine on Feb. 4, 2015.

On Monday, while he carried the stretcher of one soldier to an operating room, another died on a stretcher in the back of an ambulance. Most young people would react by pulling away. But Tyler only wants to get closer to it all.

"I want to go there," he said, referring to the battlefield in Debaltseve. His mother, who lost her husband just over a year ago, is less keen on the idea. "She told me if I die that she will have no man in her life."

But doing so would mean putting himself squarely in the line of fire.

Medics coming from Artemivsk hospital say Russia-backed rebels are aiming for the red medical crosses painted on their ambulances.

Ukrainian medics reunite after a hairy morning transporting wounded troops from the frontline in Debaltseve to Artemivsk's central hospital on Feb. 2, 2015.

On Monday, an ambulance was returning from the frontline in Debaltseve when it was bombarded by rocket fire. Pasha, a medic who makes regular runs to the frontline, said his crew had just scraped by and were lucky to be alive after the attack. "I feel like I’ve had a second birthday," he told Tyler as he gave him a bear hug.

Later that day, medics evacuating wounded soldiers from the front line near Debaltseve came under sniper fire that struck the gas tank of their ambulance, causing the vehicle to explode in a ball of fire. Three medics were injured and left stranded until others could reach them.

A Ukrainian soldier wounded in the battle for Debaltseve is helped inside the Artemivsk hospital on Feb. 2, 2015.

Inside the medics' bunk house on Wednesday afternoon, Nazar had her clothes and medical gear splayed out on her bed so she could be ready at a moment’s notice.

When a call came for her and her team to evacuate troops wounded in action in Debaltseve, it only took a moment for them to be on their way, speeding down perhaps the most precarious road in Europe.

"I need to be there," she said. "If you take a soldier's hand when he's bleeding, he doesn't fear death. He knows someone is there with him and, whatever happens, he will be at peace."