Julius Strauss is the Telegraph's former Moscow bureau chief. He has reported on conflicts in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.
After 13 years of war that began with street protests during the heady days of the Arab Spring and morphed into one of the bloodiest civil conflicts in the Middle East’s recent history, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian strongman, collapsed in just over a week. Sunni rebels – some of them former jihadists
Sumy, Ukraine In the city of Sumy, the jumping off point for the Ukrainian attack on Russia’s Kursk region, the night is punctuated by the sound of explosions, the staccato fire of anti-aircraft batteries, and occasionally the whir of Iranian-made Shaheed suicide drones. In a parking lot in the east of the city a dozen
Vladimir Putin, it seems, is procrastinating. Just when the war in Ukraine was going his way and the Russian army doing what it does best – pummelling its way forward like a leaden-footed but seemingly unstoppable heavyweight boxer – Kyiv has sneaked in a powerful side punch. By launching an incursion into the Kursk region,
In the sprawling and unlovely village of Billopilya, only five miles from Ukraine’s border with Russia, when death comes, it comes from the skies. Moscow had been targeting the hardscrabble settlement with glide bombs – known here as KABs – ever since Ukrainian troops smashed their way into the Kursk region on 6 August. Vladimir
The road from the Ukrainian city of Sumy to the Russian border gave just a foretaste of the fighting 20 miles ahead. We passed tanks on transporters, armoured vehicles, and occasionally an olive-green ambulance with flashing lights speeding the Ukrainian wounded away from the battlefield. In dusty half-deserted villages, stray dogs roamed and a few
Driving into the bomb-damaged eastern Ukrainian town of Kostiantynivka you can hear the impacts from the big Russian guns and bombs. Block by block they are blowing apart a small workers town just to the east called Chasiv Yar. On the wall of a destroyed building a Ukrainian soldier had vented his frustration. ‘We are
The residents of Velyka Pysarivka had almost finished renovating their municipal library. They laid the floor with large white tiles, built a special section for hundreds of brightly-coloured children’s books which they brought in from the city, and even painted a large cartoon giraffe with oversized spectacles on one wall to make the place feel
Irina Kotenko, 53, was already awake when a Russian drone crashed into the roof of her three-story building at 1 a.m. last Thursday. She had heard another strike nearby and was wondering where it might have hit. The explosion blew out the windows of her home. Somehow Irina, her husband, Vitaly, 48, and her daughter
High on a hillside not far from the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica the remains of dozens of young Muslim men had been left to rot. By the time I found them most of the flesh had been eaten away by forest scavengers – bears, wolves, foxes and even stray dogs – but the skeletons
A young woman called Lyudmila walks into a cafe in Odessa, the southern Ukrainian city. Her phone is switched on and the camera set to record mode. She approaches the owner and asks for service in Ukrainian. He declines. He says his Ukrainian language skills are poor. When she insists he makes excuses, then tells
Lviv, Ukraine At the Lychakiv cemetery in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv the bodies keep the score. Within its confines the more than 300,000 graves offer a tangled insight into the labyrinthine history of this eastern European city that even now goes by four different names. There are Polish generals, mathematicians and philosophers; Ukrainian
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This week: the haunting of Rishi Sunak. In her cover piece for The Spectator Katy Balls says that Rishi Sunak cannot escape the ghosts of prime ministers past. She is joined by former Chief Secretary to the Treasury and New Statesman contributor David Gauke to discuss pesky former PMs (01:05). Also this week: In the magazine Julius
Dovhenke, Ukraine The Russian soldier lay where he had fallen. His plastic combat belt and flak jacket were still intact, but his legs were splayed at an unnatural angle, and where his face and scalp had once been there was now only a skull with dark stains on it. ‘The guys who died protecting our
On the road to the frontline Andrii, 36, managed to coax the tired old British ambulance up to 80mph. The tarmac ahead was scarred with the impact of artillery shells and some of the holes were big enough to pitch us off the road, but he navigated around them skillfully. Suddenly, far in front of
In the eastern Ukrainian town of Chasiv Yar, seven-year-old Symon was clinging to a chocolate bar and a packet of biscuits he had just been given by an aid worker. With the sound of each new shell landing – and they were coming every few seconds – his small body shook and shivered in sympathetic
My first taste of proper street violence came in a Transylvanian town square 30 years ago. Ethnic Romanian and Hungarian villagers were going at each other with pitchforks, knives and strips of wood they had ripped from park benches. In an attempt to separate the two sides, the Romanian army had driven half a dozen
After several months in the UK, the lady sleeping on the opposite bunk on the night train to Kyiv told me she had had enough. Welcomed under the Homes for Ukraine scheme into a small English village, she had watched as the thermostat in the house was turned down and then turned down again. ‘Finally
It was 2 a.m. when Russian gunmen broke in and took away 21-year-old Milana Ozdoyeva. When Sara, her three-year-old daughter, tried to grab her mother’s hand they shoved her aside. Milana’s son, who was 11 months old, just stared uncomprehendingly. ‘They were wearing masks and camouflage,’ Milana’s mother told me. ‘They forced us all to
Russia has signalled that, a month into a war that it expected to take a few days, it would begin scaling back its military activities around the Ukrainian capital Kyiv. Moscow’s deputy defence minister, Alexander Fomin, said that the move was designed to increase mutual trust between Russia and Ukraine. The real reason, if indeed
Battered Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second most populous city, is showing no signs of falling. The column of Russian tanks outside Kiev has gone to ground. The capital itself seems to be off Moscow’s menu entirely, at least for now. In Russia FSB chiefs are reported to be under house arrest. The economy is in freefall. There
