Worldcrunch
After going on humanitarian missions in Kenya and Rwanda, Ukrainian surgeon Evgeniy Tkachev returned home in 2014 when the Donbas war broke out. He recounts his experiences as a medical volunteer then and now, as his hometown of Chasiv Yar is being stormed by Russian troops.
Switzerland announced, on April 10, that it would hold a peace conference on Ukraine in June. While some 100 countries are expected to attend, Russia will not. So what is behind these talks, and what can be expected from them?
As Putin’s Russian propaganda aims at Islamist terrorists now, justifying the use of torture, Russian literary critic Ilya Kukulin takes a step back to understand how we can keep our humanity amidst such violence. Human rights are perceived as something natural, akin to a birth right. But this is not so in reality: these rights can only be established by human will.
While Vladimir Putin wages his holy war against the West, Russian officials and their families are often seeking better lives there. Will these double lives be the downfall of the aging dictator’s fixation?
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.
After Russian soldiers committed multiple war crimes last year during the attack on Kyiv and the surrounding region, some confessed to their crimes. But now they are being tried in Russia for spreading misinformation about the military.
Ukraine and countries around the world recognize the Holodomor, the famine which killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s, as a genocide caused by Soviet authorities. But Russia still refuses to admit responsibility. A new study uses agricultural records and mathematical modeling to show that the famine clearly targeted Ukrainians.
By putting the economy on a war footing, Putin risks returning Russia to the days of Stalinist totalitarianism, where there will be no oligarchs or businesses left, only loyal administrators.
Russian occupation authorities promised to rebuild housing in Mariupol by winter, but in reality, thousands of people face the cold in largely destroyed houses and apartments. Mariupol residents told Vazhnyye Istorii about how they are surviving as winter falls.
After Vladimir Putin announced a national military draft, thousands of men are fleeing the country. Independent Russian news platform Important Stories spoke to three men at risk of conscription who’ve already fled.