Latest news with #UkrainianArmy
Wall Street Journal
18 hours ago
- Health
- Wall Street Journal
Her Husband Went Missing Fighting Russia. She Is Still Trying to Have His Baby.
LVIV, Ukraine—On brief leave from fighting against Russia's invasion of Ukraine, soldier Petro Kotovych's wife, Maria, rushed him to a fertility clinic here. The couple had struggled to have a baby and undergone five rounds of IVF before the war. Now, with Petro drafted into the Ukrainian army and Moscow's forces posing an existential threat to the country, their personal battle to conceive seemed more urgent.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Zelenskyy Calls for Increased Pressure on Russia
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called for increased international pressure on Russia after a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin where the leaders announced plans for Ukraine and Germany to jointly produce long-range weapons boosting Ukraine's ability to fight. "There is not enough pressure," Zelenskyy told German broadcaster RTL on May 28, criticizing what he sees as insufficient commitment from global powers. "The United States is involved, but not 100 percent. Other countries, like China and those from the Global South, are holding back," he said. Zelenskyy also suggested a lasting peace may only be possible once Russian President Vladimir Putin is no longer in power. "We will have a just peace, but likely only after Putin," he said. Zelenskyy earlier on May 28 accused Russia of stalling diplomatic efforts to achieve a cease-fire. "They (Russians) will constantly look for reasons not to end the war," Zelenskyy said at a joint news conference with Merz, adding "you can see what Putin is doing" and referring to "mass drone attacks every night." The air strikes launched on Kyiv and other cities and regions in recent days "are not the language of peace," said Merz. "They are a slap in the face for everyone who is working for peace, in Ukraine, in Europe, and in the United States," he added. He said Germany would help Ukraine develop its own long-range missile systems that would be free of any Western-imposed limitations on their use and targets. Merz said that under an intensified cooperation agreement, Germany "will strive to equip the Ukrainian Army with all the capabilities that truly enable it to successfully defend the country," including upgraded domestic missile production. "Ukraine will be able to fully defend itself, including against military targets outside its own territory" with its own missiles, Merz said at a joint news conference. Germany is the second-biggest individual supplier of military aid to Ukraine after the United States. But some of the advanced weapon systems have been subject to range and target restrictions over fears the Kremlin might retaliate against the country that provided the weapons and draw NATO into Europe's biggest conflict since World War II. Later on May 28, Merz told German public broadcaster ZDF that he wouldn't rule it out sending German-made Taurus cruise missiles -- a long-range weapon that Zelenskyy has asked for -- but said it would not help Ukraine now because it would take months for Ukrainian troops to learn to use the system. That's why Germany is improving its military cooperation and support with Ukraine now, he said. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov criticized the announcement on weapons production cooperation between Germany and Ukraine. Germany is on the same path that it moved down "a couple of times in the last century," leading to its collapse, Lavrov said on Telegram. German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul responded by saying that Russia should not be able to dictate whether Ukraine's allies provide help in producing long-range weapons. "The reality is that Russia is not provoking a war but conducting a war day by day without any right and violating international rights, so we are not in a position that Moscow has [to] educate us on international war or what we are allowed to do," Wadephul said in an interview with CNN on May 28. "We stand with Ukraine as long as Ukraine has to defend itself, its territory, its people, and the international law against the Russian aggression," he said, adding that Germany agrees with many of its partners, especially in Eastern Europe, that "we will not have security in Europe with Russia but only against Russia." By RFE/RL More Top Reads From this article on
Telegraph
3 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
Ukraine struggles to solve unprecedented PoW problem
When Maksym Kolesnikov returned from almost a year in a Russian prison camp, 32kg lighter than he was before, the first things he wanted were warm socks and fried chicken. Captured in March 2022 while defending Kyiv, Mr Kolesnikov endured relentless horrors at the hands of Russian soldiers. The Ukrainian was tortured with electric shocks and beaten, his knee shattered. He was starved and became emaciated. In the biting cold, Mr Kolesnikov wore the same clothes he was captured in, the same thin socks on his frozen feet. But none of this compared with the psychological horror. 'In Russian captivity, you are never safe,' Mr Kolesnikov said. 'At any moment, they can beat or torture you. You eat badly, you sleep badly, you know that they can do what they want because they don't see you as a human being.' At home, when he was finally reunited with his family, Mr Kolesnikov said: 'People saw the human in me again.' But gallstone disease, muscle atrophy, chronic fatigue, contusions and a shattered knee were just some of the scars that followed him and his fellow captives home from months of hell. The 1,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war exchanged last week for the same number of Russians will confront the same challenges. 'It's a situation of such long-term stress,' Mr Kolesnikov said of being a prisoner. 'When you come back, you're a different person.' The largest exchange in the war to date saw a staggered release of hundreds of flag-donning Ukrainian captives from Friday through to Sunday. Some of the prisoners have spent as long as three years in Russian jails. But once the cameras stopped filming the tearful reunions, the former captives were left to return to normal life. The initial gruelling stages of physical and psychological rehabilitation will take place at military hospitals and sanatoriums across the country. But reintegrating into civilian society will be even more complex. Ivona Kostyna, the chairman and co-founder of the NGO Veteran Hub, said an overarching national strategy for veterans and prisoners of war is not there. She said that veteran reintegration in Ukraine is posing an unprecedented public health challenge. Many veterans, especially former prisoners of war, will return with complex health needs and may struggle to adapt to the workplace or rediscover their place in the community. Veteran Hub provides free legal, psychological, educational and employment support to veterans and their families, which would be impossible without the help of NGOs. The charity began in 2016, when it was becoming clear that veterans returning from the war in eastern Ukraine were struggling. 'When we started, we didn't even have a vocabulary for veteran reintegration,' Ms Kostyna explained. At the start of the full-scale invasion, Veteran Hub was forced to dramatically upscale. With funding rescinded from the US this year, it is under huge strain and fears that the Ukrainian authorities will not pick up the mantle of its work. 'We are just a patch on a broken system. The only reason we exist is because the system doesn't work,' Ms Kostyna said. Ukraine's veteran reintegration effort has never been done on such a large scale. Today, Ukraine has 1.2 million registered veterans, but official projections say the figure will rise to between five and six million in Ukraine's 40-million population after the war is over. This means that veterans could account for 15 per cent of Ukraine's population. Many will struggle to find stable employment or opportunities for retraining. Some will have sustained permanently disabling injuries and carry a heavy psychological burden, which threatens to destabilise themselves and their families. 'Most of the data we have [on veteran reintegration] is from Western societies, where a smaller number of people have been sent overseas to fight and then they have come back to a peaceful society,' Ms Kostyna explained. 'In our case, you go to war, you come back home, and you're still at war. For some people, you're from the occupied territories, and you also no longer have a home.' 'Foundation of national security' Ukraine draws heavily from its reserve of veterans because they are skilled and require less training than newcomers. Ms Kostyna estimated that up to 70 per cent of Ukrainian veterans could stay in the reserve. 'Veterans are the foundation of national security,' she said. 'But we understand that this means veterans are never fully going back to civilian life.' 'So you have this disparity between a civilian who has never served, and a veteran who has served two or three times, maybe over 20 years. And that veteran has never had time to commit to civilian life, so they will have a much lower well-being,' Kostyna said. 'The challenge here in Ukraine is that we are becoming a country of veterans. We have already been fighting for 11 years. We could be fighting forever, for whoever knows how many more years, how many more iterations of war.' To tackle the lack of employment opportunities, the government established a fund for entrepreneurship among returning veterans and their spouses. Veteran-run businesses can be found dotted around cities in Ukraine, such as Veterano, a lucrative franchise of war-themed pizzerias and cafes founded and run by veteran pizza chefs, and TYTANOVI coffee, a cafe which hires veterans with prosthetics as baristas. Oleksandr Manchenko, 40, built the Ola Dance Studio with the help of his wife, a fellow dancer who he met via TikTok while he was serving on the front line. Alongside their usual operations, the studio in central Kyiv runs dance classes for other veterans to help them rehabilitate when they return from combat. 'We had one guy who was here, and for a time, when he came back, he just wanted to kill everyone,' says Mr Manchenko. 'After about a month and a half with us, it was clear that his thinking had changed and that period of his life was over.' For Mr Manchenko, this is proof that the best form of recovery is community. 'It was difficult for me, coming home. I had PTSD, and it took some time to become used to normal things. From time to time, things I didn't understand happened, and I became full of anger and hatred. But things got better when I made the decision to start dancing and talking again.' With funding granted for fewer than 600 veteran-owned businesses as of last year, entrepreneurship may be little more than a cosmetic fix for the scale of economic and social disadvantage felt by soldiers. Without a structure to help them cope in the long term with persistent health complaints from traumatic brain injury or other common disabilities, as well as repeated psychological trauma, the effects of unsuccessful reintegration could be felt for decades. Mr Kolesnikov, now back to a healthy weight, works for a defence tech company to feel 'closer to the military community'. Though there are still difficulties – while holidaying abroad, he was paralysed with fear at the sound of a plane because of its similarity to an FPV drone – being close to his former combatants helps. 'The other day, four guys from my battalion went to get a coffee in Kyiv, and we all had the same thought at the same time,' he said. 'Kyiv is still free, and this is our impact... it was our fight.'
BBC News
6 days ago
- Politics
- BBC News
Russia-Ukraine war: How a Russian couple helped Ukraine's war effort
It was shortly after Moscow annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 that Sergei and Tatyana Voronkov decided they would leave couple, who had long been critical of Vladimir Putin, had condemned the actions of Russia to friends and acquaintances. In response, they were told that if they didn't like it they could the couple, both Russian citizens, decided to relocate to Ukraine, where Tatyana was 2019 they eventually settled in Novolyubymivka, a village of about 300 people in the south-eastern Zaporizhzhia couple got four dogs and started raising livestock, while Sergei, 55, also found work as a land surveyor – his specialism during his time in the Soviet hoped for a quiet life. But when Moscow launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the peace of their new lives was shattered by the first Russian rockets flying over their home."I heard something whistling, something flying, and I went outside," Tatyana, 52, recalls."A rocket was flying right over the house."I went on the internet to see what had happened and they wrote that Kyiv had already been bombed."The couple quickly found themselves in occupied territory, and decided to become informants for followed was detention, interrogation, an escape into Europe – and a letter of thanks from the Ukrainian army. It was when a Russian convoy passed their home for the first time that Tatyana decided to ran inside and messaged an acquaintance in Kyiv, whom she believed had contacts in Ukraine's security contact sent her a link to a chatbot on messaging app Telegram which told her they would be contacted by a person with a unique couple were then asked to provide the location and details of Russian electronic warfare systems and military hardware they had seen, particularly missile systems and tanks. The locations would help the Ukrainian army target and destroy Russian troops in the area with drones and artillery."We didn't think of it as treason," says Tatyana, who along with Sergei insists the information they gave did not result in any strikes on civilians or civilian infrastructure."Nobody attacked Russia. This was a fight against evil." For two years, Sergei would collect coordinates and Tatyana would transmit them from her phone - removing all traces of the messages afterwards - as and when their village's internet access allowed them to do all of this came to an end when Sergei was detained in April 2024 by armed men while he was shopping for gardening seeds in the regional centre of Tokmak. Interrogated in a pit Sergei says he was taken to an abandoned house and put in a cold basement pit - around two metres wide and three metres deep - where he slept in a squatting next day he was questioned about whether he had passed details of Russian positions to the Ukrainians. Sergei says a bag was kept over his head during the interrogation and he was threatened with initially denying his involvement, Sergei confessed on the fourth day of his captivity, fearing that if he were subjected to violence he might accidently implicate others. While all of this was happening, Tatyana was desperately searching for information on his travelled the area and phoned hospitals and morgues, while the couple's son, who was still living near Moscow, contacted various authorities there. Ten days after Sergei's arrest, security forces searched the Voronkovs' home and dug up $4,400 that had been hidden by the couple in their after, Tatyana was told that her husband was "sitting in a basement" and was with Russia's security services, the later, after 37 days in captivity, Sergei was made to confess to assisting Ukraine on camera by people who introduced themselves to him as to his surprise, he was released two days later, though almost all of his documents, including his passport, were this day, Sergei and Tatyana do not understand why he was the BBC understands this is not uncommon in parts of Ukraine occupied by Russia, where investigative and judicial processes lack transparency and often no explanations are given as to why a person is detained or released. In the weeks after Sergei's release, the couple believe they were kept under surveillance, with cars constantly driving up to their home and strangers asking them if they were selling they'd never be left alone, the couple began plotting a way to consulting human rights activists, Sergei and Tatyana decided to try to travel to Lithuania. But to do that, they needed to return to Russia first to get Sergei a new neighbours in Novolyubymivka helped by buying livestock and household appliances from them. The couple even managed to find a new home for their dogs, which Sergei says was his biggest worry. Escape with a rubber ring The couple set off in their they could be pulled over and quizzed by Russian forces, they made up a cover story about going to the beach to get fresh air for Tatyana, who has asthma. They even brought a straw hat and a rubber ring to make the story more in the end they weren't couple were initially denied entry into Russia, but were eventually able to enter after Sergei got a certificate proving he had applied for a new delays in getting his passport and a thwarted attempt to leave Russia via Belarus, Sergei bought a fake passport through couple were then able to travel by bus to Belarus and cross the border using Sergei's forged document. From there, they crossed into Lithuania, a member of the European Union and a close ally of Ukraine, though Sergei was detained for holding forged was later found guilty of using a fake passport by a Lithuanian court. The couple are now living in a shelter for asylum seekers and hope to settle in Ukrainian army sent them a letter of thanks - at the request of their former handler in Kyiv - to support their application for asylum. The BBC has seen a copy of the BBC has also seen documents from official bodies in both Russia and Ukraine that confirm what happened to the Voronkovs. We are not reproducing them to protect the identities of those Voronkovs' actions have caused deep rifts in the son, who remains in Russia, stopped talking to his parents after learning what they had done. Sergei's mother, who is 87, still lives in Russia and is supportive of the war and President despite this, the couple are adamant they will never return to Russia."Only if it starts showing some humanity," Sergei says."For now, I see nothing human there."
Al Bawaba
6 days ago
- Politics
- Al Bawaba
Video: Russian church catches fire after Ukraine missile
Published May 25th, 2025 - 09:36 GMT ALBAWABA - A video was shared by Russian media outlets showing a church in the country on fire following an airstrike by the Ukrainian army. In the footage, the top of St. Nicholas Cathedral was seen on fire following an attack carried out by Ukraine, RT said on Sunday. The Russian outlet mentioned that the windows of the church located in Mozhaysk city of the Moscow region were broken, however, no injuries were reported. Zelensky's WAR on Christianity — Ukrainian drone sets Russian church ABLAZEHomes near Tula region's St. Nicholas Cathedral have windows BLOWN OUT Thankfully no casualties — RT (@RT_com) May 25, 2025 On the other hand, Ukraine's emergency services revealed via Telegram that three children were killed in a Russian attack in the northwestern Zhytomyr region. Sergiy Tyurin, the deputy head of the regional military administration, posted Sunday on Telegram: "Last night, the Khmelnytskyi region came under hostile Russian fire, which resulted in the destruction of civilian infrastructure... Unfortunately, four people were killed." © 2000 - 2025 Al Bawaba (
