Leaving their prosthetics in the stands, veterans enter the ice rink
The ice rink is chilly and alive with sound. It’s much like a regular hockey game, but only coach Serhii Shvets is wearing skates. Frontliner reporters watch the session unfold.
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‘We’re used to it, always on alert’: life in Izium, 30 kilometers from the front
Izium in the Kharkiv region remains a key military logistics hub, with a steady flow of troops and heavy equipment passing through the city. Frontliner reporters look at daily life in frontline Izium.
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Invisible trauma of war: how Ukrainian surgeons restore hearing to wounded soldiers
For service members whose hearing was damaged in combat, help is becoming easier to reach. A new microscope at Kyiv’s Hearing Restoration Center is expected to increase the number of complex surgeries, notes a report by Frontliner.
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Love under fire: 3rd Assault Brigade soldiers start a new family on the front lines
Soldiers of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade traded conventional wedding venues for a torchlit outdoor ceremony. The event, held in the Kharkiv region, was documented by Frontliner.
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A step toward a new life: women from prison join the war effort
Formerly incarcerated women have joined the military and are now serving on the Zaporizhzhia front. Frontliner followed their journey from the correctional facility to their first combat deployment and explored why they see the army as a second chance.
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Artillery under drones: holding the Pokrovsk front
Along the boundary between Ukraine’s Donetsk and Dnipropetrovsk regions, Russian forces continue efforts to push the front line forward. The Pokrovsk sector remains among the most intense areas of fighting. Frontliner reports on how Ukrainian artillery operates under these conditions.
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Trees of life born from rubble: artist creates mosaics from glass shattered by Russian missiles
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.
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Sky hunters. How anti-aircraft drones hunt enemy UAVs
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.
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“They beat me for speaking Ukrainian”: How an Azovstal defender survived three years of torture in Russian captivity
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.
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Andriy & Inna’s Frontline Diary
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.
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Surviving a double Tap: Rescuer Pavlo Petrov and the new norm of repeat strikes in Kyiv
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.
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Surgeries for Ukrainian service members that are changing global medicine
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.
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Ghosts of the past – how the brain refuses to let go of lost limbs
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.
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Piecing himself together from fragments of memory: a Ukrainian war reporter recovers after being wounded
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.
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“You Are Not Alone”: The American Surgeons Helping Ukraine’s Wounded Warriors
As Washington’s support for Kyiv falters, some of America’s leading plastic surgeons are stepping in to help in the hospitals of Ukraine.
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“The weapon is good, but there are no long-range shells”: how Ukraine’s Bohdana howitzer operates in the Toretsk sector
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).
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“The Russians attacked relentlessly for 12 hours,” how Ukrainian Special Operations Forces repel assaults in the Pokrovsk front
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.
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“1,000-for-1,000” prisoner swap: Who Ukraine brought home from Russian captivity
On May 25, another 303 Ukrainian service members were brought home as part of the large-scale "1000 for 1000" prisoner exchange.
