Worldcrunch
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.
As we wait for Ukraine’s looming counteroffensive, analysts are already looking ahead and asking what will happen after this decisive summer. After brutal battles, a general weariness risks setting in, that could push Ukraine to accept a ceasefire.
While military attention was focused on the harshly contested city of Bakhmut, fights were reported on the other side of the border in Russian territory. But it was Russian groups that claimed responsibility.
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.
A new report has done a deep dive into the support (or lack of opposition) of ordinary Russians for the so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine. Independent Russian media outlet Important Stories breaks down the findings, which don’t necessarily follow the rationale one might imagine.
Dmitry Glukhovsky, the Russian author of Metro 2033, is currently standing trial in absentia in Moscow for speaking out against Putin. He has gone into hiding in Europe, where Die Welt has met up with him in a secret location in Berlin.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement that France will train Ukrainian pilots appears to pave the way for the delivery of fighter jets to Kyiv. Similar moves are coming from the UK. It’s a delicate process to never declare war on Russia, while maximizing Ukraine’s ability to repulse the invaders.
In the ambulances transporting the wounded to the field hospitals, in the vans traveling to the front or in the trains returning them home for a few days’ rest, the soldiers stationed on the Bakhmut front do not talk about military victories or war strategies. They talk about death, and life.
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.
The West has been eagerly awaiting Ukraine’s counteroffensive, but is mistakenly convinced it will be a major tank assault. Kyiv has already launched the first actions, as it also tries to lower its allies’ expectations of rapid victory.
May 8th and May 9th crystallizes the divergent fates of Ukraine and Russia. For Vladimir Putin, the victory of the “Great Patriotic War” is at the core of his national narrative. More than 14 months into his invasion of Ukraine, who still believes the story?
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.
After its initial blitzkrieg failed, and with Ukraine gearing up for a counteroffensive, Russia sees its best hope in holding out for a protracted conflict. Kyiv, instead, is trying to convince its Western allies that achieving victory as soon as possible is the only path forward.
Whether Ukraine or Russia is behind the clamorous attack on the Kremlin, which Moscow says was an assassination attempt against Vladimir Putin, it is bound to shape the imminent counter-offensive.
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.
The war in Ukraine has launched an epidemic of denunciations in Russia: 145,000 individual reports to the security services in just the first six months of the war. It’s the latest evidence of the current regime’s Stalinist approach.
Desperate to supply depleting forces in Ukraine, Russia’s defense ministry has taken up the dubious recruiting method of offering prisoners freedom in exchange for going off to war. The same technique was begun but then halted in February by the Wagner Group mercenaries. It’s Putin’s latest attempt to avoid a nationwide mobilization.
Ukraine became the country with the most landmines in the world. Kyiv has limited resources, so NGOs are trying to help by training soldiers to identify and destroy the potentially deadly devices even while protecting themselves from new assaults from Russian forces.
“We are realists, and therefore we do not believe in the possibility of a compromise between freedom and slavery…” Poland’s foreign minister has outlined what the country’s foreign strategy will look like in the coming years, built on support of Ukraine and steadfast resistance to the Russian aggressors.
It was one of the most striking photographs since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with a tragic postscript. A year later, it has been chosen as World Press Photo of the Year award.
The Ukrainian and Russian presidents made separate visits to the frontline recently, in closer physical proximity than anytime since the war began. It was a sign that we should not expect negotiations anytime soon.
Vladimir Kara-Murza was handed the heaviest prison sentence since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Putin is making an example of the rare few who dare to speak out against him, evoking the reign of Joseph Stalin.
A confrontation between the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox churches has been brewing for centuries. But a video showing a Ukrainian war veteran being beaten up in church shows that the standoff has become all-out war.
Reporting from agricultural centers in eastern Ukraine confirms a landmark study: Extensive wartime damage to the country’s crucial agricultural sector risks raising hunger in places that have counted on Ukrainian grain.
Even if Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky were willing to find a compromise on territory, their respective constitutions explicitly forbid signing off on such a deal.
According to a new report, the world’s primary recipient of Ukrainian grain is China, and the pace of exports has exceeded pre-war levels. But the Chinese leader’s long game goes much further.
Ukraine was the trickiest part of French President Emmanuel Macron’s state visit to China. And though Xi Jinping didn’t say much, Macron made his voice clear on the war and possible arms shipments to Russia — and the West is watching closely.
After more than a year of war, a journalist from Spanish publication La Marea returns to one of the capital’s top clinics for foreign couples looking for children. Business is better than ever, though the clinic is looking for women from other former Soviet republics to become surrogate mothers.
Last spring, after Moscow’s troops occupied Mariupol, minors with no parents were forced from the southern city to go to Russia. One 17-year-old recently tried to escape, and return home to be with his sister. He didn’t make it — and Russia proudly shared the story.
Few believe the Russian government claims that it can recruit 400,000 new troops as volunteers, even with cash bonuses. But the alternative, a nationwide draft, may be too high a risk for Vladimir Putin.
For a long time, Kyiv didn’t have to resort to mass conscription, because so many people were enlisting. But as the war drags on, and casualties continue, Ukrainian recruitment becomes an urgent necessity. From the capital to the frontline of Bakhmut, Die Welt traces the current state of Kyiv’s fighting power.
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán appears to be courting Vladimir Putin, and turning his back on the EU. There is a clear strategy behind his rhetoric — but it is not any personal affinity for Russia.
Even beyond the bloodshed of its war in Ukraine, lesser acts of aggression by the state are a clear expression of the intentions of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
From ballet to opera to classic literature, Russia has turned its culture into an instrument for its own expansion. The West must fight back, Ukraine’s culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko writes in an op-ed in German daily Die Welt. It’s time to stop supporting Russian artists and seek out Ukrainians instead.
Citizens of the now destroyed Ukrainian city of Maryinka are left struggling to remember what their town used to look like.
A few weeks after an explosion at a military field in Belarus, Vladimir Putin announced plans to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. There is a connection, even if Belarus leader Alexander Lukashenko is walking a tight rope of domestic control and keeping Putin satisfied.
With a decisive deal with Putin out of the question, the only way to create a lasting peace is to recreate some fundamental dynamics of the Cold War.
Journalists from Ukrainska Pravda report directly from the trenches near Avdiivka, one of the oldest settlements in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine, where troops are facing near-constant Russian fire.
What does Russia’s ruling class really think of Putin? A leaked audio recording of Russian producer Iosif Prigozhin and Russian billionaire ex-senator Farhad Akhmedov criticizing Putin has been verified by Russian intel service FSB, offering a peak into the anger toward the Kremlin’s war.
Thousands of foreign soldiers are fighting alongside Ukraine. German daily Die Welt met a Chechen battalion to find out why they are fighting.