Author: Reporter

For 10 days, Alesha Babenko was locked in a basement and regularly beaten by Russian soldiers. Bound, blindfolded and threatened with electric shocks, the 27-year-old pleaded for them to stop. “I thought I was going to die,” said Babenko. In September, Babenko and his 14-year-old nephew, Vitaliy Mysharskiy, were arrested by Russian soldiers who occupied his village of Kyselivka in Ukraine’s southern region of Kherson. They had been taking photos of destroyed tanks and sending them to the Ukrainian army. Seated this week on a bench outside his home, Babenko was visibly shaken as he recounted the trauma of...

By mid-March, less than a month into the full-scale invasion by Russia, it was immediately clear that Putin’s ambitious campaign was not going to plan. What was expected to take a mere three days on February 24 is now on day 277 on November 27. In that time Russian forces have faced a series of humiliating retreats, and lost more than half the territory seized at the start of the invasion. When Russia’s top military brass announced in a televised appearance that they were pulling troops out of the key city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, one man missing...

Amid the death and destruction war leaves in its wake, there are powerful dynamics and narratives: domination, besieged populations, occupation and their counterparts, resistance, freedom and liberation. Vast swaths of Western and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union knew this well at various points of the 20th century: Paris, Leningrad, Sarajevo. Iraq and Syria more recently in the 21st century. In Russia’s nearly nine-month war in Ukraine, the names of towns and cities like Mariupol, Bucha, Irpin, Kharkiv, and Kherson have been seared on the global consciousness as they witnessed the full spectrum of wartime horrors and more recently,...

An investigation of a centuries-old monastic complex in Ukraine’s capital and other religious sites has underscored Ukrainian authorities’ suspicions about some Orthodox Christian clergymen they see as loyal to Russia despite Moscow’s nine month-old war on the country. The search by security service and police personnel at the Pechersk Lavra monastery, one of the most revered Orthodox sites in Kyiv, was unusual but did not happen in isolation. The Ukrainian counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism service reported on November 23 that its agents searched more than 350 church buildings in all — also including sites at another monastery and a diocese...

The orders came from on high, from Ukraine’s president and one of his ministers: Get trains running again to the latest city newly retaken by our troops. “So literally: tanks, then trains,” said Ukrainian rail network boss Oleksandr Kamyshin, recalling the presidential instructions he received as the southern city of Kherson was being liberated in early November, ending eight months of Russian occupation. Among bitter lessons that Ukrainians have had to learn in the nearly nine months since Russia invaded is that what is here today can be destroyed tomorrow and that nothing in war can be taken for...

Ukrainian authorities endeavored on Holodomor Memorial Day to restore electricity and water services after recent pummeling by Russian military strikes that vastly damaged infrastructure, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy saying millions have seen their power restored since blackouts swept the war-battered country days earlier. Skirmishes continued in the east and residents from the southern city of Kherson headed north and west to flee after punishing, deadly bombardments by Russian forces in recent days. The strikes have been seen as attempts at Russian retribution against Ukraine’s beleaguered but defiant people, after Ukrainian troops in early November liberated the city that had...