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☆ ‘Kharkiv Is Unbreakable’: A Battered City Carries On
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-24 | by ( Marc Santora | Tyler Hicks | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

The espresso machine was warming up and Liliia Korneva was counting cash at the coffee shop in Kharkiv where she works when a powerful Russian bomb detonated nearby, sending up a deafening explosion and knocking her to the floor. “I can’t describe in words how it felt, it was terrifying,” said Ms. Korneva, 20. She was not hurt, though the courtyard where the bomb fell was destroyed and a man riding a bicycle nearby was killed, according to city officials. Just a day later, the cafe was open again. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, is open for business, too, despite a sustained bombing campaign that is among the most devastating of the entire war and growing fears that Russia might launch a renewed offensive aimed at taking the city.

Persons: Liliia Korneva, ”, Korneva Locations: Kharkiv, Ukraine’s, Russia

☆ Looking for a Fight
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-17 | by ( Tyler Hicks | Photographs | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

The bullet-scarred pickups raced the sunrise along a rough dirt road wending through a dense pine forest. Multiple languages were spoken by the men inside them — Ukrainian, Brazilian, Colombian, Polish — but few words. They had come to fight Russians. The trucks barely came to a halt to discharge their passengers before speeding off again. Armed drones might appear overhead at any moment, and so as the men continued on foot, they, too, did so with urgency.

Organizations: International Legion Locations: Polish

☆ Collecting the Dead Russia Left Behind
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-22 | by ( Tyler Hicks | Marc Santora | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Oleksii Yukov spends many of his nights dodging drones, navigating minefields and hoping not to be targeted by Russian artillery as he races to collect the remains of fallen soldiers from the battlefield. In just three shattered tree lines around the ruined village of Klishchiivka outside Bakhmut, where Ukrainian and Russian forces have fought seesaw battles for well over a year, he collected 300 bodies. They were almost all Russian, he said, left behind in a maelstrom of violence where the struggle to stay alive often outweighs concern for the dead. Mr. Yusov has been collecting bodies from the bloody fields and battered villages of eastern Ukraine for a decade. He is now the head of a group of civilian volunteers called Platsdarm, and has witnessed more death than he would care to remember.

Persons: Oleksii Yukov, Yusov Locations: Klishchiivka, Bakhmut, Ukraine

☆ The Death Throes of a Ukrainian City
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-18 | by ( Marc Santora | Tyler Hicks | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Even from a few miles away, the death rattle of another Ukrainian city echoed through the mist and fog. Russian warplanes were dropping more thousand-pound bombs on Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine, reducing an already battered city to rubble and ashes. Since Jan. 1, President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces have dropped around one million pounds of aerial bombs on an area encompassing just 12 square miles, according to estimates by Ukrainian officials and British intelligence. In the end, Russia’s superior firepower and manpower overwhelmed Ukrainian forces over many months, even as Russia incurred a staggering number of casualties. Russian warplanes bombed the hulking coke-processing plant on Avdiivka’s northern outskirts, using incendiary munitions to blow up fuel tanks at the plant, unleashing a toxic smog, according to Ukrainian soldiers fighting in the plant.

Persons: Vladimir V, Avdiivka Organizations: Ukrainian Locations: Ukraine, British, Russia

☆ ‘They Come in Waves’: Ukraine Goes on Defense Against a Relentless Foe
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-04 | by ( Marc Santora | Tyler Hicks | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

His unit decimated by Ukrainian fire, the last surviving soldier in a Russian assault took cover in a shallow crater while Ukrainians shouted at him to surrender. As he lifted two grenades in the air, a Ukrainian drone swept in from above and exploded. Soon, the smoke cleared, a surveillance drone overhead showed, revealing the Russian soldier’s corpse. “They come in waves,” said Lt. Oleksandr Shyrshyn, 29, the deputy battalion commander in the 47th Mechanized Brigade. “And they do not stop.”As the war enters its third year, Ukrainians find themselves outmanned and outgunned.

Persons: ”, Oleksandr Shyrshyn Organizations: 47th Mechanized Brigade Locations: Ukrainian, Avdiivka, Russia

It was the middle of the night in early January when a Russian missile streaked in and exploded in the center of Kharkiv, blasting down walls and shattering windows. The next day, people went shopping and to work, ate out in restaurants and clogged the streets with traffic jams, almost as if nothing had happened. But behind the business-as-usual veneer, residents of Kharkiv have been seething. Over the past month, Ukraine’s second-largest city has taken the brunt of Russia’s missile campaign, which has killed and wounded dozens of people, blown up buildings and unnerved everyone. To vent, Kharkiv’s residents have a dedicated outlet: Radio Boiling Over, a new FM station.

Persons: Ukraine’s, It’s Locations: Russian, Kharkiv

The agony came in waves as the wounded Ukrainian soldier in the back of the ambulance slipped in and out of consciousness. The driver, hurtling past cratered fields on roads thick with mud, was racing to escape Russian artillery fire north of the city of Avdiivka, while hoping he was not spotted by drones. “They are just razing everything to the ground,” said the driver, Seagull, using only his call-sign in accordance with military protocol. Ukrainian forces are resisting furiously, while probing for openings in a southern counteroffensive and conducting river crossings near the southern port city of Kherson. When Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, said recently that the war had reached a “stalemate”— with intense and exhausting battles yielding little territorial gains — it created an impression in some quarters of a war in stasis.

Persons: ”, Valery Zaluzhny Locations: Ukrainian, Avdiivka, Ukraine, Kherson

The Russian soldiers turned up at her home close to midnight with an ominous message. “They said, ‘If in two weeks you don’t have a Russian passport, we will talk to you in a different way,’” recalled Evelina, a social worker who until this month lived under Russian occupation in southeastern Ukraine. She didn’t wait to have that conversation. Instead, she bundled a few possessions into a suitcase and left with her teenage daughter, heading for territory controlled by Ukraine. But for the estimated 4 million to 6 million Ukrainians living in Russian-held areas, as Evelina was, the stalemate means something more dispiriting: an occupation with no end in sight.

Persons: “, ’ ”, Evelina Locations: Russian, Ukraine, Europe

☆ Load. Fire. Get to Cover.
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-19 | by ( Tyler Hicks | More About Tyler Hicks | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Get to Cover. New soldiers were rotating in, and others were rotating out. Then orders came in, and several Ukrainian soldiers went to their SPG-9 recoilless rifle. They repeated the process several more times, removing spent propellant charges from the rear of the gun, tossing them aside and sliding in fresh projectiles. Yevgen offered a salute, and his men sought safety, or the closest thing to it one could hope for on the front lines.

Persons: Yevgen, —, ” Organizations: The New York Times, 95th Air Assault Brigade, SPG Locations: Donbas, Ukrainian

☆ Blinken, in Kyiv, Says U.S. Will Send $1 Billion More in Aid
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-06 | by ( Constant Méheut | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +6 min

The aid will also include demining assistance to clear Russian land mines and prevent the remnants of war from causing further harm to civilians, Mr. Blinken said. It includes ammunition made with depleted uranium for Abrams tanks, which are scheduled to arrive in Ukraine this fall, Mr. Blinken said. Mr. Blinken traveled by train to Kyiv with Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, according to a State Department statement. He was replaced by Rustem Umerov, who has been the chairman of Ukraine’s State Property Fund. A senior State Department official told reporters traveling with Mr. Blinken that the effort was aimed at “putting global support on a long-term, sustainable path.

Persons: Antony J, Blinken, Biden, Dmytro Kuleba, Volodymyr Zelensky, ” Mr, Zelensky, ”, “, Lynsey Addario, Mr, Mette Frederiksen, Blinken’s, Oleksii, Rustem Umerov, Umerov’s, Tyler Hicks, Putin, Vladimir V, Russia, Erin Mendell, Anushka Patil Organizations: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kyiv, United, Pentagon, The New York Times, Ukraine’s, Department, Property Fund, 22nd Mechanized Brigade, State Department Locations: Kyiv, Ukraine, U.S, United States, matériel, Kostyantynivka, Ukrainian, ”, Russia, “, Denmark, Ukraine’s, Bakhmut, Israel

The mission for the Ukrainian unit was to take a single house, in a village that is only a speck on the map but was serving as a stronghold for Russian soldiers. Finally, one day last month, the order came to move. Driving out or killing the remaining Russians, they secured the house as night fell, posting guards and reviewing the day’s tactics to see how they might improve. In the morning, the new order came: Take another house. But the engine driving the effort are hundreds of small-scale assault groups, often just eight to 10 soldiers, each tasked with attacking a single trench, tree line or house.

Persons: speck, Andriy Locations: Urozhaine, Ukraine

Mykola Honchar lives in a crumbling stone house in what is left of a tiny hamlet of eastern Ukraine. The town was attacked by Russian forces in June of last year, as the Wagner mercenary forces were spearheading a renewed offensive. Even before the Kremlin set Wagner loose to wreak havoc in Ukraine, the Russian campaign was notable for its brutality. But from the moment Wagner forces entered the war in April 2022, they earned a special reputation for bloodlust from civilians and soldiers alike. To Mr. Honchar, the death this week of Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, responsible for so much carnage in the war, would be fitting — a violent end to a violent life.

Persons: Mykola Honchar, Wagner, Honchar, Yevgeny V, Prigozhin Locations: Ukraine, Russian

After months of Russian bombardment, the town of Avdiivka in southeastern Ukraine has been reduced to rubble. The fighting remains fierce in the vicinity as Ukrainian forces have dug in to resist the Russian assault. With no electricity, running water or regular supply of food, the people who remain largely rely on aid from volunteers. The threat of a strike from Russian jets or artillery is never far off. Still, they stay.

Locations: Avdiivka, Ukraine

☆ Ukraine Claims to Retake Another Village in Its Counteroffensive: Live War Updates
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-12 | by ( Andrew E. Kramer | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

The military said it had reclaimed the village of Storozhove early Monday, suggesting it had crossed the Mokri Yaly River from its positions in the village of Blahodatne. The combat with tanks, armored vehicles, howitzers, drones and infantry is happening on farmland near the small river that loops around the villages now changing hands in the fighting. Ukraine did not dispute those claims of losses last week, even as it gave signals that the long-awaited push was underway. It also appeared that flooding after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine had done little to slow Ukraine’s advance. The Ukrainian military said on Monday that Russia had also blown up a dam on the Mokri Yaly River to thwart Ukrainian crossings.

Persons: Tyler Hicks Organizations: 28th Mechanized Brigade, ., The New York Times, Ukrainian Volunteer Forces, Engineers Locations: Bakhmut, Ukraine, Storozhove, Blahodatne, Russia, United States, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia

A critical dam on the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine broke overnight on Tuesday, endangering tens of thousands of people who live downstream. Russia said that Ukrainian forces had carried out sabotage. Located near the front line of the war in the southern Kherson region, the dam and nearby infrastructure have been damaged by shelling throughout the war. The area including the dam and the adjacent hydroelectric plant has been occupied by Russian forces since last year. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine blamed “Russian terrorists,” while the Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, blamed Ukrainian forces, describing what happened as sabotage.

Persons: António Guterres, Nova Kakhovka, Volodymyr Zelensky, “, Dmitri S, Peskov, ” Natalia Humeniuk, Radio Svoboda, Sergei K, John F, Kirby, Ihor Syrota Organizations: The New York Times, Engineering, Radio, Kyiv, National Security Council, Russian, of Locations: Dnipro, Ukraine, Russia, Kherson, Nova, Ukrainian, Donetsk, United States, Russian, Antonivka, Zaporizhzhia, Crimea, Kakhovka, of Culture

Bakhmut is obliterated. As fighting around the city in eastern Ukraine rages on, drone footage taken by The New York Times on Friday captured the scorched buildings, destroyed schools, and cratered parks that now define Bakhmut. What looks like an early-morning haze spreading across the shattered skyline is the acrid smoke that hung heavy after another night of relentless shelling. The Russians are declaring victory in this battle, the war’s longest and bloodiest. It was not immediately possible to know who the people are, where they are going and how they survived.

Russia’s claim of victory in Bakhmut suggests that the brutal urban combat that marked the deadliest battle of its war in Ukraine might be over. Those gains will allow Ukrainian troops to continue raining artillery on Russian forces trying to hold Bakhmut, according to Ukrainian officials. A battle on May 6 breached Russian lines south of the village of Ivanivske and forced Russian soldiers into a disorganized retreat. Image Ukrainian soldiers west of Bakhmut after rotating out of the city, this month. A Russian capture of Bakhmut “will mean nothing, actually,” predicted Colonel Serhiy Hrabsky, a commentator on the war for the Ukrainian news media.

☆ How Ukraine Reversed the Momentum in Bakhmut
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-20 | by ( Marc Santora | Tyler Hicks | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Ukrainian soldiers were waiting for just the right moment to attack. Then they received critical intelligence: Russian mercenaries on the other side of the front line outside Bakhmut were about to rotate out and be replaced by other soldiers. Ukrainian soldiers were told to get their kits ready, making sure they had plenty of grenades and full clips of ammunition. It was the morning of May 6, the beginning of three days of fighting on the outskirts of Bakhmut that has shifted momentum in the fiercest battle of the war. Soldiers from Ukraine’s 3rd Separate Assault Brigade battled with the Russians across forest belts where the trees rose like scorched matchsticks.

☆ As Ukraine Makes Inroads in Bakhmut, Devastation Still Reigns
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-14 | by ( Marc Santora | Tyler Hicks | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

With the furious battle for the city of Bakhmut raging at their backs, a squad of Ukrainian soldiers tore through an open field, racing to get out of range of falling Russian artillery. The three soldiers — known by the call signs Omar, Chip and Bandit — had spent the day on Friday taking part in Ukrainian offensive operations on the edge of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, blasting Russian tanks and armored vehicles. But after surviving another brutal day of battle, they worried that the punctured tire might doom them. The men, who recounted their story on Saturday just outside the nearby town of Chasiv Yar, were among the hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers ordered on the offensive around Bakhmut in recent days. The fighting has often been hard, they said, with many Russians willing to die rather than surrender even when surrounded.

Russian service members rehearsing last week for the military parade in Moscow on Tuesday, when Russia celebrates the anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. More recently, he has tried to wrap Ukraine into that narrative, falsely depicting it as a Nazi redoubt. The parade is likely to be subjected to closer scrutiny than usual, both inside Russia and beyond its borders. This year, the jets have skipped their usual practice runs over Moscow, raising questions about whether they will participate. Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said the march was canceled as a “precautionary measure” against possible attacks.

☆ Sudan Live Updates: Civilians Feel Strain as Blasts Rock Capital
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-17 | by ( Abdi Latif Dahir | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

A policeman in 2011 in Abyei, a dividing line between northern and southern Sudan that was the site of a long-running standoff. For decades, Sudan’s military has waged brutal conflicts in the south, east and west of the country. The two sides ultimately negotiated a peace agreement that split the country in 2011 after southerners voted in a referendum for South Sudan to become a new nation. Image Celebrations in Juba, Sudan, on the eve of independence for South Sudan in 2011. Credit... Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesWithin South Sudan, infighting in the government led to clashes in 2013 and ultimately triggered a violent feud between the two biggest ethnic groups. Nuba Mountains conflictClashes between government forces and rebel Nuba fighters in Sudan’s South Kordofan State broke out in the aftermath of South Sudan’s secession, with Nuba fighters supporting South Sudan.

☆ Russia’s New Offensive Sends Conscripts Into the Teeth of Ukraine’s Lines
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-27 | by ( Andrew E. Kramer | Tyler Hicks | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

LYMAN, Ukraine — Peering through an infrared scope, a Ukrainian soldier noticed some heads poking over a trench a few dozen yards away. “‘Are there any of our guys in front of us?’” he asked, according to an account of the ensuing firefight by fellow Ukrainian soldiers. Two Ukrainians crept forward into the muddy wasteland of artillery craters between the two trench lines outside the eastern city of Lyman, eventually reaching the wreckage of an armored personnel carrier. Using it as cover to shoot from an unexpected angle, they forced the Russians to retreat. When it was over, they found the body of one soldier.

It takes just over a minute to microwave the mini pizza that Andriy Shved sells in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut. But despite the risks that come with any order, the oblong cheese, meat and dill pie is a top seller among the Ukrainian soldiers and residents who make up the dwindling customer base. Mr. Shved thinks his food stall is the last one open in the battered city, a pivotal battleground in the nearly 10-month old war. Then, in the afternoon, it’s from 2 until 4,” sighed Mr. Shved, 41. On Wednesday night, in a high-profile appearance before the U.S. Congress, President Volodymyr Zelensky presented House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a Ukrainian flag signed by soldiers fighting in Bakhmut.

☆ The Year in Pictures 2022
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-19 | by ( The New York Times | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +57 min

Every year, starting in early fall, photo editors at The New York Times begin sifting through the year’s work in an effort to pick out the most startling, most moving, most memorable pictures. But 2022 undoubtedly belongs to the war in Ukraine, a conflict now settling into a worryingly predictable rhythm. Erin Schaff/The New York Times “When you’re standing on the ground, you can’t visualize the scope of the destruction. Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb. 25. We see the same images over and over, and it’s really hard to make anything different.” Kyiv, Ukraine, Feb 26.

Since the early days of the invasion, Mr. Putin has conceded, privately, that the war has not gone as planned. “I think he is sincerely willing” to compromise with Russia, Mr. Putin said of Mr. Zelensky in 2019. To join in Mr. Putin’s war, he has recruited prisoners, trashed the Russian military and competed with it for weapons. To join in Mr. Putin’s war, he has recruited prisoners, trashed the Russian military and competed with it for weapons. “I think this war is Putin’s grave.” Yevgeny Nuzhin, 55, a Russian prisoner of war held by Ukraine, in October.

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