Worldcrunch
Russia has launched a barrage of missile strikes against Kyiv and other major cities, timing the attacks for maximum civilian toll to coincide with Monday morning rush hour. The attacks are a direct response from Moscow to the explosion Saturday that severely damaged the bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland. Three people reportedly died […]
Europe should welcome the exodus of conscientious objectors from Russia. But the conditions vary across the continent, and there needs to be some security precautions.
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.
As much as he tried to, Vladimir Putin could not avoid the nationwide mobilization of new recruits. But now he can no longer hide from a war he chose for his nation — and more than ever, his own destiny is riding on the result.
The Stauffenberg conspiracy against Adolf Hitler can help us reflect on how regime change can happen when an autocrat is in charge. Historian Thomas Weber writes that resistance to figures like Putin — not assassination plots — must come specifically from those loyal to the regime.
Russian troops have so far been unable to mount a decisive offensive in the east, as Ukraine records small but meaningful successes near the southern city of Kherson. This is not how Vladimir Putin had it planned.
The Supreme Leader’s advisers in Tehran argue the Islamic Republic must back Russia in Ukraine because Russia is fighting a common enemy: the Western alliance.
Switzerland has rejected a NATO request to take in injured Ukrainian soldiers, arguing it would compromise its neutrality. This is an old game of masking moral cowardice by a country that has profited off the Putin regime.
The Ukrainian army is preparing its counteroffensive, already beginning to hit Russians hard with U.S. Himars missiles. But experts warn about keeping the expectations too high, because Russia has key advantages. A German reporter sees how Ukrainians are preparing and how far they are willing to go to regain their lost territory.
Western leaders have given mixed messages on ending war in Ukraine. They fear the fallout of a power change in Moscow, and when it comes to Putin, it may be a case of “better the devil you know.”
Our Ukrainian journalist has another job to help pay the bills: at a luxury hotel in the South of France. It brings the stark contrast of her life right now, and the risks facing her native country, into desperately sharp relief.
In a rare in-depth interview, Ukraine’s top diplomat didn’t hold back as he discussed NATO, EU candidacy, and the future of the war with Russia. He also reserves a special “thank you” for Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi.
Sisters Rante and Satu Vodich fled Russia because they could no longer bear to live under Putin — but their mother believes state propaganda about the war. Her daughters are building a new life for themselves in Georgia.
French President Emmanuel Macron is making a point of keeping an open dialogue with Putin, hoping to avoid a world war at all costs. But he needs to get his historical comparisons (and world wars) in order.
Why has Russia invaded Ukraine? Internet readers want to know. What will Ukraine be like after the war? That’s a question to start answering, even if the battle is far from over.
Wars on the ground are increasingly being won and lost up in space. Without a constellation of satellites, notably the Starlink fleet delivered promptly by Musk, Ukraine would not have been able to hold off Russia in the first weeks of the invasion. But there’s more work to be done for the West to stay ahead.
We know them from the movies: the heroes who save the world from disaster in the nick of time. In real life, you sometimes look for them in vain. But the Russian invasion of Ukraine shows that the West needs new heroes.
For years, Vladimir Putin’s regime has been pushing its agenda into schools. With the start of the invasion of Ukraine, the pressure on the education system has intensified on a massive scale. Here’s a peek inside the means of control over students’ minds.
As a war reporter, Ibrahim Naber has seen unimaginable suffering. But he has also seen the Ukrainians’ unbroken will to resist. He reflects after more than three months since the Russian invasion – and explains how his generation’s illusion of peace has been shattered.
Flipping through the pages of an old photo album with my nonna, I asked her, “Grandma, why were you all in black and white when you were young?” She replied, “The war broke out. One morning we woke up, and all the colors were gone.” Learn more about Worldcrunch’s exclusive Dottoré! series here.
It’s been exactly 50 years since the photograph was taken that many say is the most powerful image of innocent war victims ever. “Napalm Girl,” which was captured at the height of the Vietnam War in 1972, is also the story of that girl at the center of the image.
Polish-born French writer Marek Halter, who fled the Nazis to the USSR, has known Vladimir Putin for 30 years. Halter sent the Russian president a long letter on May 18, and later shared a copy of it with Les Echos. In the letter, he lays out the path for Putin to renounce the war without undermining Russia’s standing.
Anatoly Dremov shares his experiences of the war in Ukraine on the Russian Telegram network – and reveals details that don’t always line up with the Kremlin narrative.
Putin has not forgotten about the breakaway republic of South Ossetia, which wants to decide in July whether to join Russia. People here still remember when the Russian army invaded while the West looked on. And there is growing worry that this could soon happen again.
Russia’s invasion has created a stark global divide: them and us. On one side are the countries refusing to condemn Moscow, with the West on the other. It’s a dangerous split that could have repercussions far into the future.
A member of the Ukrainian Armed Forces writes his account of the new dynamic of targeting, and being targeted by, the invading Russian troops, as drones circle above and trenches get left behind.
As a psychoanalyst, Wolfgang Schmidbauer has researched the psychological effects of war on children — and in the process, also examined his own post-War childhood in Germany. In this article, he warns that parents tend to use their experiences of suffering as a method of education, with serious consequences.
Can you believe Poles are happy to see Germans re-arming? It is just one of a series of examples of how the world has turned upside down since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, completing a shift begun during the pandemic toward less interdependence and more uncertainty.
Russian forces have been pushed out of the area around Kharkiv. Villages that were occupied for two months are free once more — but utterly destroyed. And thousands of people have disappeared without a trace.
A group of pro-peace German intellectuals published a letter asking the country not to deliver heavy weapons to Ukraine, but they’re missing the point completely. Germany needs to reinvent itself in order to face today’s challenges — and threats.
Though different than concentration camps constructed by Nazis, the “filtration” facilities nevertheless are a return to another brutal history, reopened under Putin, and ramped up since the invasion of Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin has put his nuclear forces on alert — a shock for many, but even more so for those just across the Polish border from Kaliningrad where Russian nuclear missiles are stationed, and aimed at European capitals from Warsaw to Berlin.
The war rages on, but some in Ukraine are already looking to how society can be rebuilt. Two Ukrainian architects share their vision for what a future Ukrainian urbanism — and society — might look like.
In Poland, the support for the war effort against Russia is linked not only to history but to an aggressive male-dominated narrative, tinged with tales of martyrdom and acceptance of sexual violence.
In Ukraine, those who do not want to fight on the front or who want negotiations cannot say so publicly for fear of accusations of being traitors.
From sharing positive news to evacuating areas where combat is ongoing, no action is too small in the list of tips created by Victor Kruglov for Ukrainian media Livy Bereg.
There are few children left in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, but there are many elderly people, trapped by their health in their homes. Their fate is a mirror of the tragic fate of a nation that was already aging before the war.
This is the story of Olga Simonova from Dymer, 50 kilometers north of Kyiv, which was occupied by the Russian army as a base for their assaults to the south. It was a time of great fear and uncertainty, as Simonova is still assessing the damage and searching for those who have disappeared.
The way armed conflicts have been represented in fiction for decades could explain the racism that has been revealed in Western media coverage of the war in Ukraine compared to multiple conflicts over the years in Africa.
Excerpts from essays by young Ukrainians, aged 15 to 17, yearning for peace in the middle of war.