But the truth is that the war is not going very well for Ukraine.  After sending them lots of shiny new vehicles and enormous mountains of military equipment in recent months, U.S. officials pressured the Ukrainians to launch an ill-advised "counter-offensive" so that the public could see that some "progress" was being made.

Unfortunately for the Ukrainians, the Russian defensive positions are extremely well prepared at this stage, and thousands upon thousands of young Ukrainians have been needlessly slaughtered.  An Irish volunteer that recently returned home told Sky News what life is really like on the front lines at this point…

Sky News international correspondent John Sparks spoke to an Irish volunteer, Rhys Byrne, who has been fighting on the frontline in the east of Ukraine for 17 months and is now leaving Ukraine "due to witnessing atrocities," Sparks reports. Byrne called the fighting he witnessed "horrific."

"On 'Zero Line' it's horror. It's horror. There is just a genocide. It's slaughter", says Rhys Byrne, codename 'Rambo', a 28-year-old from Dublin. Byrne fought for the 59th brigade in the Ukrainian territorial army, where he operated a heavy machine gun, Sparks reports.

"There are dead people everywhere. Russians dead. Ukrainian people dead…. the biggest problem we get when we're going into trenches is stepping over all the dead bodies that are already there from the last people [who] went in – that kind of stuff really haunts you."