At the start of the full-scale invasion, the youngest soldiers were those born in 2003. Now — those born in 2007. Their feats and deaths are felt especially acutely, as recent school photographs have become portraits on graves.
They consider themselves lucky – those who are living out their days with care and under a roof. Across Ukraine, shelters for people with disabilities and pensioners are overflowing. With each year of war, the situation worsens.
At least 9,000 foreigners are fighting for Russia against Ukraine, according to estimates by the Coordination Headquarters “I Want to Live” project, a Ukrainian government initiative that operates a hotline to encourage Russian soldiers to surrender.
Russian soldier Mykhailo Romanov, commander of a tank regiment, has been accused by Ukrainian prosecutors of shooting a resident of the village of Bohdanivka and then raping his wife three times in 2022.
On August 8, 2025, people in Kyiv bid farewell to Viktoriia Roshchyna, a 27-year-old journalist tortured to death while in Russian captivity. Her killing shocked the international community and became another stark reminder of Russia’s brutality and lawlessness.
An ambulance pulls away from Ukraine’s Heart Institute, a state-run facility in Kyiv, at 1 a.m. It speeds along at 150 kilometers per hour (93 miles per hour), occasionally turning on its sirens, as almost all the roads are empty. The destination: Korosten, a small town in the Zhytomyr region of northern Ukraine, approximately 90 miles (145 kilometers) west of Kyiv and near the border with Belarus. There, a deceased donor’s heart can save a seriously ill patient.
At least 9,000 foreigners are fighting for Russia against Ukraine, according to estimates by the Coordination Headquarters “I Want to Live” project, a Ukrainian government initiative that operates a hotline to encourage Russian soldiers to surrender.
Across Kherson runs one of the toughest stretches of the frontline — a shifting maze of river delta channels, overgrown thickets, and elusive crossings. In this watery battlefield, survival depends on adaptation. One of the units that has mastered it is “Buzky Gard”: fighters who fuse intimate knowledge of the terrain with the tactics of asymmetric warfare. Frontliner reports on how they operate in this zone of constant risk.
Russian soldier Mykhailo Romanov, commander of a tank regiment, has been accused by Ukrainian prosecutors of shooting a resident of the village of Bohdanivka and then raping his wife three times in 2022.
Service members and veterans are excavating the Trypillian culture, thereby reclaiming themselves. They are rehabilitating through archaeology near Lehedzyne in Cherkasy Oblast.
Local authorities promised to bury every fallen defender at public expense, yet the mourners who trailed a cortege of three soldiers through town witnessed indignities money had not fixed. Widows and mothers were left convinced that the state’s help fell short.
An ambulance pulls away from Ukraine’s Heart Institute, a state-run facility in Kyiv, at 1 a.m. It speeds along at 150 kilometers per hour (93 miles per hour), occasionally turning on its sirens, as almost all the roads are empty. The destination: Korosten, a small town in the Zhytomyr region of northern Ukraine, approximately 90 miles (145 kilometers) west of Kyiv and near the border with Belarus. There, a deceased donor’s heart can save a seriously ill patient.
Seventy-three-year-old Lidiia Burlatska has lived through two wars in one city. In 2014, she did not leave Sloviansk during the occupation, and now she refuses to evacuate, even though the front line is approaching and is only 25 kilometers from her home. During three years of full-scale war, the retiree lost her son-in-law, learned to fall asleep to the sound of shelling, and stopped watching the news “because it hurts.” More than 50 years of living in Sloviansk have convinced her that there is no point in running away from what she has built her whole life. A Frontliner reporter spoke with a woman who lives where war has become part of everyday life, but where people still continue to hope.
Artist Valentyna Huk decorates the streets of Kharkiv with mosaics she has created herself. Today, six patterns made from the debris of windows that did not withstand Russian shelling hang on the city's buildings. Valentyna spends several weeks of painstaking work on each one, starting with searching for pieces of glass in the ruins and ending with assembling them into unusual “puzzles.” The artist showed Frontliner how sharp shards become “loud” street art under her delicate fingers.
Drones hunting enemy UAVs have become the latest twist in the battle of technologies. The war behind the controls and screens in a cozy dugout is somewhat reminiscent of a computer game, but the stakes are life itself. Frontliner visited the anti-drone drones of the 93rd Mechanized Brigade “Kholodny Yar” in the Donetsk direction and learned about the specifics of such hunting.
He survived the hell of Mariupol and several Russian prisons—and never broke. Oleksandr Savov, 33, was one of the last Ukrainian soldiers to surrender at the Azovstal steel plant — the vast industrial fortress in the besieged southern city of Mariupol— in May 2022. Three years later, on March 19, 2025, he stepped off a prisoner-exchange flight with broken ribs, missing teeth and a single thought: to hug his 12-year-old daughter.
Frontliner Reporter Andriy Dubchak and his colleague Inna Varenytsia have traveled to the Donetsk region to document life in frontline towns and villages. They will visit Ukrainian military positions, speak with locals, and share photos and reports from their journey. Follow their diary on the Frontliner website.
During a recent mass missile-and-drone attack on Kyiv in the early hours of 6 June, a Russian kamikaze drone ignited a large fire in buildings on Vadym Hetman Street near Shuliavska metro station, a busy transit hub on the capital’s Red Line just west of the city center. As firefighters, rescuers and the DSNS press team worked the scene, a deliberate “double tap” drone strike — now a grim new norm in Kyiv — hit the same spot. With U.S. deliveries of air-defence munitions growing uncertain, such follow-on strikes threaten to become even more frequent and deadlier.
