Author: Reporter

In the time since the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson was liberated, residents cannot escape reminders of the terrifying eight months they spent under Russian occupation. People are missing. There are mines everywhere, closed shops and restaurants, a scarcity of electricity and water, and explosions day and night as Russian and Ukrainian forces battle just across the Dnieper River. Despite the hardships, residents are expressing a mix of relief, optimism, and even joy — not least because of their regained freedom to express themselves at all. “Even breathing became easier. Everything is different now,” said Olena Smoliana, a pharmacist...

Diplomats are drumming up money and other support on November 21 for Europe’s poorest country, Moldova, which is suffering massive blackouts, heavy refugee flows and potential security threats from the war in neighboring Ukraine. The international aid conference in Paris was aimed at “concrete and immediate assistance” for the land-locked former Soviet republic, according to the French Foreign Ministry. Two previous conferences for Moldova this year raised hundreds of millions of euros, but as the war drags on, its needs are growing. “This international support is all the more important as Moldova is currently facing an unprecedented energy crisis...

Ukrainian authorities have started evacuating civilians from the recently-liberated areas of the Kherson region and the neighboring province of Mykolaiv, fearing that damage to the infrastructure is too severe for people to endure the upcoming winter, officials said on November 21. Residents of the two southern regions, regularly shelled in the past months by Russian forces, have been advised to move to safer areas in the central and and western parts of the country, said Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk. The government will provide “transportation, accommodation, medical care,” she said. The evacuations come just over a week after...

The long border between Finland and Russia runs through thick forests and is marked only by wooden posts with low fences meant to stop stray cattle. Soon, a stronger, higher fence will be erected on parts of the frontier. Earlier this month, Polish soldiers began laying coils of razor wire on the border with Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave wedged between Poland and Lithuania. Cameras and an electronic monitoring system also will be installed on the area that once was guarded only by occasional patrols of border guards. The fall of the Berlin Wall more than 30 years ago symbolized...

Olga Lehan’s home near the Irpin River was flooded when Ukraine destroyed a dam to prevent Russian forces from storming the capital of Kyiv just days into the war. Weeks later, the water from her tap turned brown from pollution. “It was not safe to drink,” she said of the tap water in her village of Demydiv, about 40 kilometers (24 miles) north of Kyiv on the tributary of the Dnieper River. Visibly upset as she walked through her house, the 71-year-old pointed to where the high water in March had made her kitchen moldy, seeped into her well...

A punishing new barrage of Russian strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure on November 23 caused power outages across large parts of the country as well as neighboring Moldova, piling more damage onto Ukraine’s already battered power network and adding to the misery for civilians as winter begins. Multiple regions reported attacks in quick succession and Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said that “the vast majority of electricity consumers were cut off.” Officials in Kyiv said three people were killed and nine wounded in the capital after a Russian strike hit a two-story building. Russia has been pounding the power grid and other...