Look,’ Maxym tells me: ‘We got another of those orcs.’ He holds up a Russian passport open at the ID page and the face of Ensign Andrei M stares out at me.

Orcs – the humanoid monsters in JRR Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings – is the name often given by Ukrainian soldiers to their Russian invaders.

Andrei M (we are not publishing his full name in case his family has not yet been notified) appears to be unremarkable. However, he is now a face from the grave.

The Kremlin declared on Tuesday that it will ‘dramatically curtail military activities in the Kyiv and Chernihiv districts… in order to enhance mutual confidence’ during peace talks.

That is one way of describing humiliating retreats and the necessary regrouping and replenishment of damaged forces. The act of licking one’s wounds.

Because, as these photographs – exclusive to the Daily Mail – demonstrate, Russia is placing itself on the frontlines around this city. And it’s primarily due to Ukraine’s surprising war victories.

We also have firsthand proof that when Russian soldiers retreat from towns and villages, they are burning, robbing, and leaving a terrible legacy of mines and booby traps behind them.

And in their wake, they leave their dead.

For about a month, I’ve been in contact with Maxym, a lieutenant in Ukraine’s territorial defence troops.

He is one of a number of Irish volunteers who have returned to their homeland to fight. He worked as a forklift truck operator at a meat-packing business in rural County Laois prior to the war.

The recapture of the satellite towns of Irpin and Makariv, to the north and west of Kyiv, has received a lot of attention.

However, Maxym, 27, and other volunteers from the Emerald Isle – who wear the green, white, and gold tricolour on their military fatigues – have been taking part in a less publicly publicised Ukrainian counter-attack to the east of Kiev.

They have driven the Russians back a long way along that frontline.

According to a fresh set of photos and videos supplied to us by Maxym, his battalion, the Bratstvo [Brotherhood] Battalion, was in the forefront of a Ukrainian push that recovered the village of Rudnyts’ke on Sunday.

It is around 40 miles from central Kyiv and 30 miles east of Brovary, a former frontline village where a column of Russian tanks was shelled by Ukrainian artillery three weeks ago.

A drone caught the catastrophic onslaught, which was broadcast across the world.

Maxym can be seen checking a tripwire that the retreating Russians had tied to a hand grenade near a track on the outskirts of the settlement in one piece of film supplied to the Mail yesterday.

‘Brothers, we seized Rudnyts’ke, but the (Russians) placed up a number of tripwires and booby traps before they went,’ he explains. ‘They’re all over here. ‘Of course, everything has been burned and destroyed.’

He also films discarded Russian ration and ammo boxes and investigates a rudimentary Russian dugout, which he compares to a henhouse for all the shelter it would provide.

‘They were defeated once more,’ he claims. ‘This is simply another minor win,’ says the author. But

One of the photos shows Maxym holding a Panzerfaust 3 anti-tank weapon, the sort of which the German and Dutch governments have been supplying to the Ukrainians since the invasion.

Maxym’s battalion assisted in the destruction of a Russian armoured column and position in the neighbouring town of Lukyanivka, allowing the capture of Rudnyts’ke. That’s where Ensign Andrei M died. The soldier was born in a little town of a few hundred people under the shadow of the Ural Mountains. He was most likely an Udmurt, an ethnic group that accounts up a disproportionately significant part of Russia’s military personnel.

He was assassinated recently more than 1,000 kilometres away in another hamlet in northern Ukraine.

Aside from the video of Maxym carrying Ensign Andrei’s passport, he submitted a number of additional films shot at the fight site, in which he and his friends can be seen strolling through the smouldering ruins of armoured vehicles, including at least one main battle tank.

In another video of the aftermath, one of Maxym’s teammates says to the camera in English, ‘Hi folks, here you see the former Russian checkpoint that our battalion’s Irish unit demolished.’

‘So, as you can see, there was a battle 48 hours ago, and our guys destroyed numerous tanks and other military equipment here, killing roughly 20 people.’