Ukraine

Growing up as a Ukrainian means being acquainted with death when you are too young to know much about life. When I was a teenager, I saw dozens of coffins being brought to my hometown from Vladimir Putin’s war in the Donbas. Now, I am seeing my friends go to war – and, like so many thousands of Ukrainians, die. One was buried last month: Maksym Burda, a 25-year-old wedding photographer. Another friend went to war this week. This friend, an artist, had just five weeks of accelerated training: now he’s an infantry soldier in one of the hottest spots on the Dobas front. He has been provided with a

Kyiv General Valeriy Zaluzhny, stocky, forceful, apple-cheeked, sits at the desk in Kyiv from which he commands all Ukraine’s armed forces. I ask him what they need from the West. First, air defence. With a twinkle in his eye, he unzips his khaki fleece to reveal a garish T-shirt demanding ‘F-16s!’ Next on his list are long-range missiles such as the American ATACMS and the Franco-British Storm Shadow, so they can hit Russian targets beyond the range of their current armoury. Now the General jumps up, disappears behind a glass-fronted office cupboard into an improvised sleeping area, and returns with another T-shirt, this time calling for missiles. It seems he

Ukrainian and Russian forces have been locked in either dogged stalemate or vicious urban fighting for towns and cities in the Donbass and in the north of the country throughout winter. As the bitter Ukrainian winter thaws, the war will soon take on a more deadly momentum as the spring rains of the Rasputitsa give way to better weather for mobile units. This week marks a year since Vladimir Putin’s invasion. The campaign has been calamitous for Russia: 86,000 soldiers have been killed and wounded. The death toll will rise in the coming weeks. Yet Putin’s regime still not only manages to keep a lid on internal dissent, but continues

Russia’s winter offensive appears to have begun with a decidedly underwhelming series of operations in the Donbas. So far results have ranged from grinding and very costly victories in the towns of Krasna Hora and Soledar, to an outright disaster at Vuhledar where most of Russia’s 155th Naval Infantry Brigade was destroyed, and its commanding officer killed, after becoming stuck and then fixed by artillery fire in the middle of recently re-laid Ukrainian minefields.   Meanwhile, a long-running operation by Wagner mercenary troops to take the partially encircled town of Bakhmut continues, and Russian forces are making probing attacks as far north as the Russian border near Kharkiv oblast and as far south

The war in Ukraine changed fundamentally after Vladimir Putin failed to capture Kyiv and decapitate the regime there a year ago. His army settled into Russia’s traditional way of war: a slow, brutal, relentless slugfest. That strategy necessarily expends countless Russian lives. Human-wave attacks rely on untrained troops, dragooned from prisons or off the streets. The idea is to use these expendable men to weaken Ukraine’s front-line defences and then follow them with more sophisticated attacks by Russia’s battle-hardened troops. Risky as it is for Russia to double down, it is really the Kremlin’s only path to victory This strategy has cost countless lives on both sides while producing only

Putin’s war has finally made its way to the Russian home front. A leak from the Kremlin reveals that Russia’s regional governments are being ordered to conduct surveys of and update bomb shelters across the country. Speaking to the independent newspaper the Moscow Times, one Kremlin source said this audit had been going on since at least last spring. Renovating Russia’s bomb shelters is, however, easier said than done. A relic of the Soviet Union, the country’s shelters were decommissioned in the 1990s, with many being leased or sold to the private sector and many more falling into disrepair.  This tangible ‘evidence’ primes Russians to believe the threat of an attack is higher Now, local

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is in Britain for a surprise visit. ‘Freedom will win – we know Russia will lose,’ he told a joint session of Parliament in Westminster Hall this afternoon.  This address is the first he has given in Westminster since a video message in March 2022, when the situation for his country was vastly grimmer than it is now. Last year, when he addressed MPs, Zelensky had just rejected a British attempt to evacuate him and his family from Ukraine. He was under threat of assassination; and his country’s capital faced siege and – as Foreign Office officials still insisted – the brand of Russian destruction like that suffered by the

In early October 2021 President Joe Biden, the CIA director William Burns and other top members of the US’s national security team gathered in the Oval Office to hear a disturbing briefing from US military chief General Mark Milley. ‘Extraordinary detailed’ intelligence gathered by western spy agencies suggested that Vladimir Putin might be planning to invade Ukraine. According to briefing notes that Milley shared with the Washington Post, the first and most fundamental problem facing Biden was how to ‘underwrite and enforce the rules-based international order’ against a country with extraordinary nuclear capability ‘without going to World War 3’. Milley offered four possible answers: ‘No. 1: Don’t have a kinetic

Nearly 188,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or injured since the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine eleven months ago, according to the latest estimate by US intelligence. This devastating toll amounts to an average of over 500 Russian dead or wounded soldiers for each of the 341 days Russia has been at war with Ukraine. Russia is also believed to have lost as many as two thirds of its tanks on the battlefield in the past eleven months. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Kremlin has yet to acknowledge these figures that were confirmed in a UK cabinet meeting this morning, even to deny them. The last time the Russian Ministry