Author: Reporter

In a sunlit art studio in Kyiv filled with easels and canvases, Iryna Farion puts the finishing touches on an oil painting with a predominantly dark color palette in shades of blue and brown. The artwork depicts two intertwined trees held together by their roots, as though in embrace, and a radiant yellow sun shining against a moody blue background. “I feel like it’s me and my husband, who was killed in the war,” Farion says of the trees. “They are like two souls, like two hearts, like one body.” Farion is among thousands of Ukrainian women who have...

Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov had just broken out of Mariupol after covering the first 20 days of the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian city and was feeling guilty about leaving. He and his colleagues, photographer Evgeniy Maloletka and producer Vasilisa Stepanenko, had been the last journalists there, sending crucial dispatches from a city under a full-scale assault. The day after, a theater with hundreds of people sheltering inside was bombed and he knew no one was there to document it. That’s when Chernov decided he wanted to do something bigger. He’d filmed some 30 hours of footage...

After the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan in 1989, defeated by an insurgency equipped and guided by the United States, a two-word cable arrived at CIA headquarters: “WE WON.” It was one of the last moments of the Cold War, credited with helping push the Soviet Union to collapse two years later. But the U.S. would leave behind a country that rapidly fell into civil war, eventually becoming al-Qaida’s training grounds for the September 11 attacks and the site of a two-decade war that ended in U.S. withdrawal and defeat. Decades later, one of the architects of the covert...

President Joe Biden recently defended what he said was a “difficult decision” to provide cluster munitions to Ukraine, a move the administration said was key to the fight and buttressed by Ukraine’s promise to use the controversial bombs carefully. The decision comes on the eve of the NATO summit in Lithuania, where Biden is likely to face questions from allies on why the U.S. would send a weapon into Ukraine that more than two-thirds of alliance members have banned because it has a track record for causing many civilian casualties. “It took me a while to be convinced to...

The first phase of Ukraine’s counteroffensive to recapture Russian-occupied territory began weeks ago without fanfare. Apart from claiming that its troops are edging forward, Kyiv has not offered much detail on how it is going. Taking place mostly out of sight of impartial observers, the fighting in eastern and southern Ukraine pits troops equipped with new Western-supplied weapons against Kremlin forces that spent months digging formidable defenses and honing tactics. Here is a look at what is happening after more than 17 months of war: WHAT ARE UKRAINE’S TACTICS? Fighting has intensified at multiple points along the 930-mile front...