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.
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.
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.
The full-scale war in Ukraine has dramatically reshaped the country’s demographic landscape. Over two and a half years, the population has declined by at least 10 million.
Missiles, drones, and guided bombs have become a daily threat to Ukrainian cities since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Russia systematically targets residential neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and markets—places with no military value.
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.
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.