WorldcrunchAnna Akage is a freelance journalist based in Paris. Articles published in The Atlantic Council, LensCulture, L’Oeil de la Photographie, American Social Documentary Network, Polish doc! photo magazine, and others. In love with documentary photography and Chinese noodles.
Russia’s investment in the Arctic continues with reports of a new joint project with India. This comes with the development of a Siberian station called Snezhinka (Snowflake), at the center of both scientific and economic development of the Northern territories in the times of global warming.
New drones near the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, in the wake of attacks that killed at least three in the area in southeastern Ukraine, have once again raised fears of a Chernobyl scenario. Threatening nuclear disaster is a tool Putin has used before.
Longtime Putin critic Alexei Navalny has died in prison at the age of 47, sparking outrage inside and outside of Russia. While widely esteemed for his courage challenging the Kremlin, the Russian politician’s views on Ukraine were more ambiguous. Here’s a commentary by a Ukrainian writer after a documentary last year about his struggle won an Academy Award.
As Ukraine steps up its attacks on the Black Sea fleet and other targets in Crimea, here’s the inside story of Russia’s devastating naval defeat in April, 2022.
Yevgeny Prigozhin is gone, two months to the day of his aborted insurrection against the Russian military. The Wagner Group chief was likely killed in a plane crash on orders from the Kremlin. A piece written after Wagner’s coup offers a reminder that Russia is in the hands of a man obsessed with control, who wields his cowardice as a weapon.
An estimated 700 soldiers who defended Mariupol remain in Russian captivity. As prisoner exchanges prove challenging, relatives wait nervously for news.
The images of World War II have been used many times when describing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But memory can deceive — many Ukrainian victims were forgotten as the Soviet Union spun history for its own purposes.
The excitement with which the West watched Prigozhin’s failed uprising reveals the delusional hopes that somehow a Russian white (or black) knight will come to overthrow Putin. No, there’s still only one way to be rid of him, argues Ukrainian writer Anna Akage.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Israel says the current Israeli government is inching closer to Russia, while doing nothing to help Ukraine. A look at what may be driving the shift.
Alexander Lukashenko recounts how he took charge of the operation to defend Moscow from Yevgeny Prigozhin, and looks to shift the region’s balance of power. “I am as much a participant in these events as Putin. So if someone in Russia talks about Lukashenko mediating, there is no mediation!”
The recent revolt led by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin has opened the door to what Russia could become after Vladimir Putin is deposed.
After months of anticipation, expectations were impossibly high when Ukrainian forces finally launched a counteroffensive into Russian-occupied territory. But those expecting a lightning advance, like last year’s liberation of Kharkiv, overlooked one critical fact: the war is nearly 10 years old.
As Russia loses in influence in Central Asia, Ukraine has an opportunity to take over a key role in relations between countries in the region and the European Union.
The Defense Ministry had pushed for a bill to adopt the same dubious method of recruiting volunteers from prisons begun by the Wagner Group private mercenary outfit. Parliament approved it on Tuesday, the latest sign of the Kremlin’s desperate search to recruit soldiers to stave off the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
Ukraine’s counter-offensive to liberate Russian-occupied regions has finally begun. Ukrainian news outlet Livy Bereg explains how it’s playing out over the first seven days, as the first villages are liberated.
The owner of the Wagner mercenary group says he will refuse an order from Russia’s defense ministry to fold his fighters into the regular military — but it may be a sign that the Russian government finally wants to get rid of the increasingly powerful mercenary chief.
Moscow quickly deleted an article detailing the mobilization process and the formation of new units, which made clear that potential Russian conscripts have two choices: flee or fight.
The destruction of the hydroelectric dam has caused massive flooding and is forcing mass evacuations. And while the disaster is threatening local populations, it is also bound to alter the course of the war — in more ways than one.
The Nova Kakhovka dam explosion was undoubtedly carried out by Putin, putting both Ukrainian and Russian lives at risk. The explosion makes clear that there are no limits to how far Putin will go. That has been his message since Day One of the war.
The blowing up of the Nova Kakhovka dam has unleashed massive flooding in southern Ukraine. The damage is sure to be staggering, which will add to the huge toll the government estimated in March that takes into account land, air, and water pollution, burned-down forests, and destroyed natural resources.
Today’s Russia is similar to Stalin’s USSR in more and more ways, including the constant search for enemies and the paranoia of betrayal. Some examples of this panic may be funny, but also help inform what Moscow might do next.
An investigation by Russian independent news outlet Vazhnyye IstoriiImportant Stories found nearly 2,500 orphaned children who may have been forcibly deported from Ukraine and are being raised as Russians. There is no mechanism set up for their return.
Putin is hesitant to mobilize troops for political reasons. And the Ukrainian military command is well aware that the key to a successful offensive lies in creating new front lines, where Russia will have to relocate troops from Ukraine and thus weaken the existing front.
The continuing heavy shelling of Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities shows that Russia still has more missiles than Ukrainians would have hoped. The look through the web of Kremlin diktats and murky international commerce that keeps the Russian military churning out hardware that drives the war in Ukraine
Russia attacks Ukraine with Iranian shahed drones, thinks about buying Iranian missiles, sells Iran Su-35 fighters, and starts repairing its civilian aircraft. How is it that Iran has become Russia’s main ally?
The month of May has seen a brazen drone attack on the Kremlin and a major incursion by Russian rebels across the border war into the Russian region of Belgorod. Could this lead to Russians pushing Vladimir Putin out of power? Or all-out civil war?
Russia failed to respond in time to an attack in the Belgorod region, close to the Ukraine border. Now, independent Russian news outlet Vazhnyye Istorii/Important Stories reveals hears from Russian security forces and military analysts about what this week’s brazen incursion reveals about the vulnerability country’s defenses.
Having claimed conquest over Bakhmut, Wagner Boss Yevgeny Prigozhin says his troops will begin to leave the city Thursday and hand control over to the official Russian army. But there are plenty, especially inside of Russia, who have no interest in seeing Wagner go. A showdown with the Kremlin looms.
Wagner-like military groups are being formed in Crimea. Are they preparing to fight the Ukrainian army? Or to evacuate the local oligarchs?
Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine goes well beyond the battlefield. Russia is trying to destroy Ukrainian identity by imposing the Russian language in occupied areas, as a prime weapon in Moscow’s policy of “Russification.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky succeeded in securing massive stocks of weapons essential to Ukraine’s imminent counteroffensive — and, crucially, he laid the groundwork for Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership.
A fourth physicist from the Novosibirsk Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences has been detained on treason charges. The scientists’ research is linked to the development of hypersonic missiles, and an open letter now warns that Moscow’s arrests of its top researchers will cause Russia to fall behind in the development of such weapons.
A spate of speculation on the health of Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko follows similar reports about would-be Vladimir Putin illnesses. Such talk feeds the hope of the Russian opposition and many in the West. Ukrainians have a different agenda — and timetable.
Chairman of the Parliament of Moldova Igor Grosu has announced the nation’s withdrawal from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Will Moldova succeed in making a final break with Russia?
Pavlo Kazarin is a journalist for Ukrainska Pravda. He is also serving in the Ukrainian army: With the good and the bad, heroes and otherwise.
As Russia continues to suffer heavy losses in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree to mandate training for military reserves, which human rights activists is meant to be used to force new recruits to the frontlines.
In the second year of the war, the Kremlin looks weak while Putin brags about defending the homeland from outside attacks.
In Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, an estimated 19,000 children have been abducted and put in so-called “filtration camps,” Soviet-era-like facilities where they are being “re-educated” in brutal conditions. Exclusive testimony from several victims who managed to escape.
Tamila Tasheva, the Permanent Representative of the President of Ukraine in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, issues an appeal on the eve of Kyiv’s counter-offensive to seize this moment in history — but do so carefully.
When the invasion began on Feb. 24, 2022, Iryna Zhyvolup hunkered down with three generations of her family in Izyum, Ukraine. A few weeks later, she lost her loved ones in a missile attack.