Poltava met the war in its usual rhythm, but with an unusual silence. Life here continues by inertia, suspended between indifference, routine and quiet whispers about the future. A Poltava native and Frontliner reporter shares her view of the city during wartime.
“The biggest problems come from indifference,” says Petro Shuklinov, a servicemember who created a unique auto repair shop. According to him, people are willing to donate to drones or new cars – it’s new and effective.
The Frontliner team shares a live playlist — music that accompanied reports, trips to the front, and work during the war in Ukraine.
Yevhen grew up too fast. He never finished school because his battalion was sent on a combat operation in Krynky – there was no time for online lessons. He spent 67 days there and came out nearly unscathed.
About 11,000 convicts have joined the army, according to the Penitentiary Service of Ukraine. Many have distinguished themselves in battles on the most difficult sections of the front.
What are the younger generations taught? What is the difference between national-patriotic education and the militarization of children? Seeking answers to these questions, Frontliner reporters visited the celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the public organization “Patriots 1654” and talked with its participants.
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.
The maxillofacial surgery ward is crowded. Men in civilian clothes and uniforms cluster by the exam rooms, wearing dark glasses or eye bandages. Among them — Oleksandr, who needs an ocular prosthesis after being wounded. So does Andrii. Ivan’s eye survived, but a fragment damaged the muscle and now he cannot open his eyelid.
Over 50,000 Ukrainians have lost limbs as a result of the war. Most of them experience phantom pain – physical sensations in parts of the body that are no longer there. In Ukraine, such pain is treated with augmented reality (AR) technologies, physiotherapy, and even psychedelic therapy. Frontliner explains how it works in this report.
He lost the memory of his daughter's birth, but he will never forget Russia's crimes against Ukraine. Ivan Liubysh-Kirdei, a Reuters war correspondent and winner of the George Gongadze Prize, was seriously wounded in the head during a missile attack on Kramatorsk in 2024. Almost a year later, he is reconstructing his life from the stories of his loved ones and the few memories that remain after his injury.
As Washington’s support for Kyiv falters, some of America’s leading plastic surgeons are stepping in to help in the hospitals of Ukraine.
The first Ukrainian gun designed for NATO-standard 155-millimeter shells, the Bohdana self-propelled howitzer, is operating on the Toretsk sector. Its distinctive feature is the ability to strike the enemy at distances of up to 40 kilometers (25 miles).
The Russian army is steadily building up forces in the Pokrovsk sector to intensify assaults that now happen daily. The Ukrainian army is holding Pokrovsk, but the Russians are not giving up their attempts to break through the city's defenses.
On May 25, another 303 Ukrainian service members were brought home as part of the large-scale "1000 for 1000" prisoner exchange.
