Author: Wire Service

Oleksandr Bugeruk covers his mouth in horror as five men lift his mother’s body from a grave using two straps of taught cloth. The men then stumble over the wet, uneven ground as they carry the body away from the grave. One of them begins to retch from the smell as they place the remains on the ground. Forty-nine-year-old Bugeruk says he buried his mother, Lydia Chichko, on March 13 as heavy fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces raged around Kyiv’s suburbs. He recalls the heavy thud of shelling that lit up the night sky as he dug her...

“Women’s war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things.” – Svetlana Alexievich, “The Unwomanly Face of War” By now, ski season is over in the picturesque town of Zakopane in the south of Poland. The lifts that transport thousands of alpine skiers each year to the foothills of the Tatras Mountains have ground to a halt, dangling eerily in the frosty air. The trees are still mostly bare and flowerless even though...

The last of the Ukrainian defenders in the port city of Mariupol surrendered at the Azovstal plant on May 20. The fact that at least half of them belong to the Azov regiment, created by far-right militants in 2014, offers the Kremlin a chance to claim major progress with regards to one of the officially declared goals of its war on Ukraine, the “denazification” of the country. Inevitably, the Russian propaganda machine is now excitedly parading all the tattoos and patches on the uniforms of the surrendering Ukrainian soldiers, which betray the far-right sympathies of their bearers. In violation...