Author: Reporter

For 10 days, Alesha Babenko was locked in a basement and regularly beaten by Russian soldiers. Bound, blindfolded and threatened with electric shocks, the 27-year-old pleaded for them to stop. “I thought I was going to die,” said Babenko. In September, Babenko and his 14-year-old nephew, Vitaliy Mysharskiy, were arrested by Russian soldiers who occupied his village of Kyselivka in Ukraine’s southern region of Kherson. They had been taking photos of destroyed tanks and sending them to the Ukrainian army. Seated this week on a bench outside his home, Babenko was visibly shaken as he recounted the trauma of...

By mid-March, less than a month into the full-scale invasion by Russia, it was immediately clear that Putin’s ambitious campaign was not going to plan. What was expected to take a mere three days on February 24 is now on day 277 on November 27. In that time Russian forces have faced a series of humiliating retreats, and lost more than half the territory seized at the start of the invasion. When Russia’s top military brass announced in a televised appearance that they were pulling troops out of the key city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, one man missing...

Amid the death and destruction war leaves in its wake, there are powerful dynamics and narratives: domination, besieged populations, occupation and their counterparts, resistance, freedom and liberation. Vast swaths of Western and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union knew this well at various points of the 20th century: Paris, Leningrad, Sarajevo. Iraq and Syria more recently in the 21st century. In Russia’s nearly nine-month war in Ukraine, the names of towns and cities like Mariupol, Bucha, Irpin, Kharkiv, and Kherson have been seared on the global consciousness as they witnessed the full spectrum of wartime horrors and more recently,...