Back in April 2018, when the war in eastern Ukraine was a little over four years in, Father Sergey Dmitriev was standing behind the front lines near the city of Maryinka telling a joke. It was Easter Sunday - a calm day in a calm stretch of weeks along that part of the front - and the mood was good. The priest was planning to lead a service for the troops.   But as Father Dmitriev was finishing his joke, the calm was broken by a gunshot - too loud and too close to be a bullet whistling over from the separatist side of the lines. In the building next to where the priest was standing, a young engineer had taken his gun and turned it on himself. According to Father Dmitriev and Andrii Kozinchuk, a military psychologist who was also there that day, a group of officers came over at the sound of the shot and, seeing the dead man, mocked him ruthlessly. "The officers came and they said, 'What a moron, he shot himself,'" the priest recalled. "I said, 'We have a psychologist, maybe other fighters should talk to him?'. "They said 'No, why?' They treated it casually, as if nothing happened. The guy was a drunk, they said, there's nothing more to it." Father Dmitriev travels to the front lines in the east from Kyiv every few weeks, to act as a military chaplain to the troops. He is not necessarily the person you imagine when you think of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine - he has a pierced ear, swears a lot, wears jeans and a hoodie and has a passion for cars. He has heard about so many military suicides now that the story of the engineer in Maryinka no longer really stands out from the rest. But he was reminded of the man this past December when he received a message saying the officer who had mocked him was dead. "That officer was the most ardent critic of the engineer," Father Dmitriev said. "And he shot himself too." As the grinding war in eastern Ukraine enters its ninth year, and Russia masses invasion-size forces along its borders, the country is yet to reckon with the toll of suicide on its troops and veterans. Suicides are filed under so-called "non-combat" deaths, but the Ministry of Defence has previously refused to make the numbers public. Families of the victims cannot claim the honour of a combat death, nor the financial support. In 2018, then-chief military prosecutor Anatoliy Matios said 554 active service members had taken their own lives in the first four years of war, but the number was not corroborated by the Ministry of Defence. Another anecdotal figure from 2018 put the number at over 1,000. Military sources told the BBC that any official numbers were almost certainly undercounts because many suicides were simply not recorded as such. "As long as the war lasts, they will never publish those numbers," said Volodymyr Voloshin, a military psychologist in Kyiv. "They fear the Russians will use them to damage our morale. A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence told the BBC the numbers had never been hidden, but it would take a week to produce them. The Deputy Minister for Veterans' Affairs, Inna Darahanchuk, said their records showed about 700 veterans had died by suicide since 2014. But she said it was difficult to know the real number because it was not always clear who was a veteran or how someone had died. A veteran's family is only entitled to financial and social support if they can prove the suicide was related to the war, Ms Darahanchuk said. But "knowing that it is impossible to prove that suicide is related to the hostilities, relatives try to hide the fact that the veteran committed suicide because of their religious beliefs", she said - a striking admission that loved ones are left caught between an unforgiving government bureaucracy and an unforgiving faith. Suicide remains a crime in Ukraine, and the Orthodox Church - the predominant faith - generally opposes the use of consecrated ground and the presence of priests for the burials of those who take their own lives. "A priest cannot read the funeral service for somebody who committed suicide, he cannot even attend the funeral," said Father Dmitriev. "Especially if it is a small town. The family simply refuses to bury them." Father Dmitiriev does not share this view. Before the war, he worked in a hospital and he insisted on funeral rites for anyone who took their own life, he said. "I never refused, not a single time, to bury them." Because he was attached to the brigade of the engineer who shot himself and the officer who followed, both men were afforded a proper burial attended by fellow soldiers and marked by prayers.