Ms. Roshchyna was known as a brave, stubborn and driven journalist. Soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, she joined a humanitarian convoy and tried to cross into the besieged southeastern port city of Mariupol, as almost everyone else was trying to leave. Russian forces captured her in March. They released her a week later, after beating her, she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/world/europe/ukraine-journalist-viktoria-roshchyna-dead.html
Amid a new advance by Russian forces, Zelensky faces enormous challenges in marshalling the equipment and the manpower necessary to keep them at bay.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-the-summer-could-be-disastrous-for-ukraine
The Russian leadership is now starting to think of the war like, This is a four-year war and we’re two years into it. So they have come to terms with the fact that this is a long-term, protracted, high-intensity event, and they’re thinking, We have to make decisions accordingly for our defense-industrial base, and how we’re going to prosecute this. And I don’t know that the West is really grappling with the implications of that. ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-the-summer-could-be-disastrous-for-ukraine
An eminent historian envisions a settlement among Russia, Ukraine, and the West.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/how-the-war-in-ukraine-ends
Russia is much bigger; it has many more people. Also, the Russian leadership doesn’t really care about its people. If the Russian leadership throws twenty thousand untrained recruits into the meat grinder and three-quarters of them die, what do they do? Do they go to church on Sunday and ask forgiveness from God? They just do it again. People talk about Stalin and the big sacrifices that the Soviet people made in World War Two, losing twenty-seven million people. They were enslaved collective farmers. He had millions and millions more of them. He threw them into the meat grinder and they died. Then he threw more into the meat grinder!
IN CHIȘINĂU, MOLDOVA, ON THE CRACKED asphalt of the wide but empty central street, a wrinkled old man sold a hammer, a rusty screwdriver, two Soviet
via Orion Magazine: https://orionmagazine.org/article/ukraine-invasion-meaning-in-war/
N CHIȘINĂU, MOLDOVA, ON THE CRACKED asphalt of the wide but empty central street, a wrinkled old man sold a hammer, a rusty screwdriver, two Soviet history textbooks, an old VHS tape, and a bunch of rainbow-colored rubber balls in a crinkled plastic bag. The objects, arranged at an even distance on a red tablecloth, looked like Inquisition torture tools, surgical instruments, or an exhibit of communist artifacts.
The Ukrainian President’s trajectory is often cast as surprising, but what makes him compelling as a political leader is the former comic’s talent for exposing the crux of the matter.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/volodymyr-zelenskys-critical-visit-to-washington-dc
What had made everyone laugh was that the Presidents’ initial responses—and, indeed, the reporter’s question itself—had been obscene: they exposed what is usually hidden. The United States and its allies have not done enough to stop the war in Ukraine. They could, but they have not, and so for ten months Russian troops have tortured and executed Ukrainians, erased entire towns from the face of the earth, and targeted civilian infrastructure in order to deprive civilians of heat, light, and running water in winter.
The more the Kremlin has signalled its readiness to drop a nuclear bomb, the more the rest of the world has sought a reason to believe that it will not.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-vladimir-putin-would-use-nuclear-weapons-in-ukraine
Even some of my smart colleagues had Russian propaganda playing on their televisions all day,” Bondarev, who had been stationed in Geneva, wrote. “It was as if they were trying to indoctrinate themselves
Since the start of the Russian invasion, the Biden Administration has provided valuable intelligence and increasingly powerful weaponry—a risky choice that has paid off in the battle against Putin.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/inside-the-us-effort-to-arm-ukraine
Reznikov is certain that such deliveries are inevitable. “When I was in D.C. in November, before the invasion, and asked for Stingers, they told me it was impossible,” he said. “Now it’s possible. When I asked for 155-millimetre guns, the answer was no. himars, no. harm, no. Now all of that is a yes.” He added, “Therefore, I’m certain that tomorrow there will be tanks and atacms and F-16s.”
After repelling Russia’s assault earlier this year, the city awakens to missile strikes.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/kyivs-peace-is-destroyed
the woman, whose name was Oleksandra, was laughing. “She said that Halloween is coming up and she’s already putting on her scary costume,” the medic said. Then he explained that pieces of shrapnel were still lodged in her head; they would have to be removed at the hospital.
For an unconventional former Marine colonel, Ukraine represents the morally just war that eluded him his entire career. But how much can he and his military start-up help?
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/world/europe/ukraine-war-americans.html
Though Mr. Milburn is not involved in the actual fighting, he is constantly risking his life. On a recent day in Soledar, he and his colleagues were nearly hit by Russian rockets. Minutes after that, as they were changing a flat tire that had been shredded by shrapnel, a fighter jet swooped down on them, shooting more rockets and sending them scurrying into the bushes.
via Los Angeles Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-storykeeper-a-conversation-with-svetlana-alexievich/
I think that war is a measure of human horror. It is the biggest kind of horror that humanity can experience. For example, what’s happening in Ukraine today is an incredible force working upon us. In the first months when I started to write my book about Chornobyl, I realized that I was limited within this frame. People began to fear water, to fear sitting on the ground, to fear giving flowers as gifts. They feared everything, but primarily the earth. Death was all around. Death was no longer unfamiliar. Then I understood that all our previous knowledge about horror turned out to be weak, turned out to be from another life. We have already become caught in a transitional moment, a transition from one world to another, to the world of the future, this horrifying future where civilization and progress bring us war.
In phone calls to friends and relatives at home, Russian soldiers gave damning insider accounts of battlefield failures and civilian executions, excoriating their leaders just weeks into the campaign to take Kyiv.
Russian soldiers made thousands of calls from the battlefield in Ukraine to relatives at home. Here are their conversations
The push to claim new territory and mobilize more troops is unlikely to reverse Russia’s losses on the battlefield—but it could move the war into its most dangerous phase yet.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/putins-escalation-in-ukraine-is-a-losing-strategy
We are fighting alone, whereas Ukraine has many allies. And, as the fight goes on, we will have less and less modern weapons, but Ukraine will only receive more
A New York Times analysis of visual evidence from Ukraine showed widespread use by Russia of cluster weapons banned under certain international treaties.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/19/world/europe/ukraine-munitions-war-crimes.html
The Times examined more than 1,000 pictures taken by its own photojournalists and wire-service photographers working on the ground in Ukraine, as well as visual evidence presented by Ukrainian government and military agencies. Times journalists identified and categorized more than 450 instances in which weapons or groups of weapons were found in Ukraine. All told, there were more than 2,000 identifiable munitions, a vast majority of which were unguided.
From battlefields pockmarked by artillery shells to basements and backyards filled with civilian corpses, the war has exacted a staggering toll in lives lost. New York Times reporters who have covered the war present accounts of the many ways that death a
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/06/18/world/ukraine-russia-news-deaths
As his invasion enters its fourth month, the Russian leader is preparing for the long haul. Meanwhile, the military is chattering about its losses, and putting out calls for supplies on Telegram.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/putins-pivot-to-a-really-big-war-in-ukraine
Yes. Unfortunately, now they accept it. When we first spoke, they were trying to find whom to blame for the way the war started. But now it looks like they have accepted that the war is going on. They accept that it’s going to be a really long war and that they need to adjust and need to find a way to fight it. So they completely switched to this war mentality. Unfortunately.
How the Russian occupation transformed life in Melitopol.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/05/23/a-ukrainian-city-under-a-violent-new-regime
After he came to, he was brought to the former base of the 25th Brigade, in Melitopol. Russian soldiers there were carrying out a process known since the Chechen wars of the nineties as “filtration,” a dark euphemism for separating prisoners into categories, with varying degrees of violence applied to each. As Oleksa remembered, interrogators at the airbase were intent on sniffing out anyone they considered a Ukrainian nationalist. Prisoners from Ukrainian military units such as Azov, which has attracted fighters with far-right sympathies, were subjected to regular beatings and torture. Some were locked in a metal safe until they lost consciousness and had to be revived by Russian Army doctors. Oleksa got off relatively lightly: a Russian officer told his soldiers that Oleksa’s head was already smashed in, and not to hit him too hard.
We documented dozens of killings of civilians and interviewed scores of witnesses to uncover Russian atrocities in Ukraine.
Reporters and photographers for The New York Times spent more than a week with city officials, coroners and scores of witnesses in Bucha, uncovering new details of execution-style atrocities against civilians. The Times documented the bodies of almost three dozen people where they were killed — in their homes, in the woods, set on fire in a vacant parking lot — and learned the story behind many of their deaths. The Times also witnessed more than 100 body bags at a communal grave and the city’s cemetery.
Amid the current crisis, Fiona Hill and other former advisers are connecting President Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine to Jan. 6. And they’re ready to talk.
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/11/magazine/trump-putin-ukraine-fiona-hill.html
Cheney took umbrage at Hill’s assessment. “So, you’re telling me you’re opposed to freedom and democracy,” she says he snapped. According to Hill, he abruptly gathered his materials and walked out of the Oval Office
At a critical strategic juncture, non-state actors threaten to complicate the conflict.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/will-mercenaries-and-foreign-fighters-change-the-course-of-ukraines-war
The infusion of outsiders and “irregular forces” could further complicate an already messy conflict, according to a report released on Monday by the Soufan Center, a nonprofit, global-security research group. “The battlefield in Ukraine is incredibly complex, with a range of violent non-state actors—private military contractors, foreign fighters, volunteers, mercenaries, extremists, and terrorist groups—all in the mix,” it concluded
A team of Ukrainian volunteers say that, since the Russian retreat, they have picked up three hundred corpses.
via The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/collecting-bodies-in-bucha
After three weeks, Cherednichenko approached two soldiers outside her house. “I said to them, ‘I’m asking you as a mother,’ ” she told Havryliuk. “ ‘Is my son alive?’ ” One of the soldiers responded, “You don’t have a son anymore.”