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Big plumes of smoke are visible on a screen that's providing a live feed from Ukrainian drones hovering over the outskirts of the eastern city of Pokrovsk, one of the most intense front lines in Ukraine.A few seconds earlier, Ukrainian artillery strikes Russian positions, places where we'd seen Russian soldiers moving about as they try to advance towards a key road going into Pokrovsk.At least one Russian soldier is injured, possibly dead after the strike.

It's chilling to watch the live footage. It drives home the bloody consequences of the war that Russia started, in which hundreds of thousands have so far been killed, a "never-ending bloodbath" as US President Donald Trump calls it.We are in a rural house converted into a command centre for the 155th mechanised brigade of the Ukrainian army. It's a few miles from front-line artillery positions.

The scale of the devastation that we see on the screens, homes and buildings completely flattened, is far greater than what we saw six months ago.

It is evidence of the fierce battle that has been fought over the past several months to defend Pokrovsk, a crucial transport hub in the Donetsk region.Wearing a laboratory coat and thin silver gloves, production specialist Jose Barrientos is painstakingly piecing together a white-framed goggle-like headset.

It includes multiple cameras, eye-tracking technologies and electronics that work together to simulate scenarios from high stakes military operations."Everything has to be perfect," says the production specialist. "So many different things can affect other things that can affect the final product in such a massive, massive way."

Mr Barrientos works for Varjo, one of a growing number of companies in Finland developing innovations that can assist military forces and governments in preparing for or reacting to conflict.The Nordic nation, with a population of just five million, has 368 defence tech companies, according to research for Tesi, a state-funded venture capital company,