Author: Reporter

The U.S. will provide $1.2 billion more in long-term military aid to Ukraine to further bolster its air defenses as Russia continues to pound Ukraine with drones, rockets, and surface-to-air missiles, the Pentagon said. The aid package will be provided under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative. Unlike U.S. equipment, weapons and ammunition sent from Pentagon stocks that can be delivered to Ukraine quickly, this money is to be spent over the coming months or even years to ensure Ukraine’s future security needs. The Pentagon said it will fund air-defense munitions and drones for air defense, and provide equipment to...

As Ukrainian artists Jenya Polosina and Anna Ivanenko watched missiles descend on their country, the two decided to use their creativity to push back against Russia’s invasion. Working in the early days of the war from bunkers or sometimes without electricity and water in Kyiv, they and other artists started drawing. Some of their war posters are now on display in New Hampshire. In the exhibit entitled “Our Fire is Stronger Than Your Bombs,” posters from Ivanenko show children studying in a bomb shelter and Ukrainians fleeing the country soon after the war started. Polosina’s drawings celebrate a female...

When Yekaterina Maksimova cannot afford to be late, the journalist and activist avoids taking the Moscow subway, even though it is probably the most efficient route. That is because she has been detained five times in the past year, thanks to the system’s pervasive security cameras with facial recognition. She says police would tell her the cameras “reacted” to her — although they often seemed not to understand why, and would let her go after a few hours. “It seems like I’m in some kind of a database,” says Maksimova, who was previously arrested twice: in 2019 after taking...

Russia alleges that dozens of Ukrainian militants crossed into one of its border towns in its Belgorod region, striking targets and forcing an evacuation, before over 70 of the attackers were killed or pushed back by what the authorities termed a counterterrorism operation. Ukraine denied any involvement in the skirmishes May 22 and 23, instead blaming two Russian groups that claim to be volunteers fighting alongside Kyiv’s forces in an uprising against the government of President Vladimir Putin. While neither version could be independently verified, whatever happened appears to have sent Moscow scrambling to respond to one of the...

At the conclusion of their previous Council of Europe summit in 2005, the 46 member states solemnly declared they would “bear witness to unprecedented pan-European unity.” Fast-forward 18 years, to May 16, 2023 and Europe’s pre-eminent human rights organization faces a massive war on its own continent, forcing it to gather as many of its leaders as possible in Reykjavik, Iceland, to deal with the epochal crisis in Ukraine, one of its member states. Perhaps more heed should have been paid to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s ominous warning at the summit in Warsaw, Poland that “Russia was, is,...