Covering the start of Kyiv’s counter-offensive last month, the nearest I got to Bakhmut was a Ukrainian artillery position 10 miles away. Had I been any closer, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference: after a year of being fought over, there is very little of the town left.

Like every group of soldiers I met out there, the artillery unit I was with griped that the West hadn’t given them enough weapons: rather than fancy computer-guided Himars systems, they were using a Soviet-era Howitzer, where missile trajectories had to be worked out by protractor. It still did the job, though: as I write, Ukrainian are celebrating retaking parts of Bakhmut, even if it will take years to rebuild.

Yet like many places wiped off the map during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Bakhmut was never really on the map in the first place. Not much bigger than Scunthorpe – or more glamourous – its only claim to fame was for making sickly-sweet champagne. Despite a year in the headlines, it remains as anonymous as the no-man’s land around it – “a flashpoint town”, or at best a “21st century Ypres”.

One journalist with rather more vivid memories of Bakhmut is Christopher Miller, a former local newspaper reporter from Portland, Oregon. Bored of writing about craft beer and indie music in America’s hipster capital, the then 25-year-old Miller volunteered for America’s Peace Corps in 2009. He wanted a placement in Africa, but got Ukraine – teaching English at Bakhmut’s School No 11, and living in a grimy Soviet apartment block next door to a drunk who sang Eminem loudly.

What might have seemed like a dead-end career move proved anything but. While in Bakhmut, Miller began moonlighting for local media outlets, whose feisty exposes of corrupt oligarchs were far more exciting than anything he’d done back in Portland. In 2012 he took a job at the Kyiv Post, spending the next decade as Ukraine correspondent for Buzzfeed, Politico and, since October, the FT.

As such, he brings a seasoned, personal perspective to his book The War Came to Us, an account of both the 16-month conflict and its wider roots. Returning to Bakhmut last January – this time in flak jacket – he sees his old school flattened by bombs, and a town he’d grown fond of steeped in blood. A despondent Ukrainian commander makes him photograph a large box of khaki footwear in a base. “It is all the shoes that our guys won’t need anymore because they don’t have the legs and feet for them,” he tells Miller.

Miller’s book opens with a commendably unswashbuckling account of the outbreak of the war on February 24 last year, when he is part of a press pack at a hotel in the eastern city of Kramatorsk. At 5am, when Russian missiles land less than a mile away, journalists emerge panicking from their rooms in their underwear, and have to be calmed down by the hotel’s seen-it-all receptionist. Their alarm is understandable. Russia’s war machine was presumed invincible, and at the time, many foreign media outlets called their crews back to Lviv on Ukraine’s Polish border.

Miller, to his credit, holes up in Kyiv instead, aware the capital’s siege will be the big story. “People were staring at the sky, fearing what the Russians might unleash on them from above,” he writes. A contact in President Zelensky’s office texts him the following unhelpful comment: “Do not quote me, we don’t want to cause panic. But this is very bad. Total war.”

As a “total war”, it is hard for any one reporter to give a panoramic account, not least because of neither side wants journalists getting too close. At one point, when trying to cover a missile attack on an airfield, Miller is held at gunpoint by Ukrainian forces who suspect him of being a Russian saboteur.