Radiation, wild animals, and “Shaheds.” At night near the ghost city of Prypiat, a mobile fire group from the 25th Brigade stands guard under a sky where threats can appear without warning.
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.
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.
