The Kyiv unit patrolling the streets as law and order cracks under war

The call came around midnight. There was a suspicious man poking around a rundown complex of garages and workshops, police had heard a gunshot and so they wanted backup.

The men of the Maidan group rolled out of the bodyshop that served as their headquarters, into a couple of vans with personalised Maidan numberplates and their own ambulance, and set off into the eerie quiet of curfew-hours Kyiv.

Far from the frontlines, the war is straining society. There has been extraordinary solidarity across Ukraine, with ordinary people risking, and often giving, their lives to help others simply make it through the day, taking food and fuel to vulnerable and elderly people, or driving evacuation vehicles to pick up those stranded at the frontline.

But a minority have taken advantage of the chaos of fighting, the flight of many neighbours into exile, and authorities distracted by an existential threat.

And cities are awash with guns, after the government started handing them out to almost anyone who promised to fight, during the early days of the war.

In over two months since the first missiles hit Kyiv, Maidan patrols have picked up opportunists on looting raids, desperate residents driven to steal as the economy collapsed, and Russian spies trying to scope potential targets, gather information or just prepare for orders to come.

Four days earlier, they had picked up a Russian security service (FSB) agent using a fake Ukrainian passport, he said, because the man was acting like a bad spy from a B-list film, driving around slowly, taking photos of sensitive sites and then calling numbers in Russia.

Some policemen from the area fled with their families in the first days of the war, and have not come back, the group said, making it harder to enforce order. And the new demographics of this largely working-class neighbourhood in eastern Kyiv, across the Dnieper River, have also made crime more of a risk.

The problem is not restricted to the big city. Elsewhere, including the suburban town of Irpin, badly shelled then occupied by Russians and now infamous for atrocities, the invading troops were mocked for a rampage of theft. But in their wake, some Ukrainians took advantage of the abandoned houses.

Cars that have been recovered are kept at the police station for owners to collect; for other items it can be hard to prove ownership. However, no one is under suspicion for taking food, he added, because during the occupation people were starving.

Not the anti-tank defences set up to stop invading forces, but the small prickly animals. They have taken advantage of the suddenly empty streets to roam more widely than they used to, forcing the animal-loving patrol car drivers to swerve wildly or slam on the brakes, if they want to avoid squashing the little curfew breakers.