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Unlike Russian society, Ukrainian society has long since overcome the collapse of the Soviet Union. People are looking ahead to a better future. © Alexey Furman/​Getty Images “Ukrainians, no matter who they vote for, whether they live in the East or the West, in the country or in the city, share a sense of pride in how they overcome.” “Thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, Ukrainian society has managed to fill the trauma of transformation with new meaning.” Read the full article in Zeit here.

Reporting from Ukraine, a veteran war correspondent chronicles a campaign to collect evidence of Russian atrocities that might stand up in court against Putin, his commanders, and their troops. Bucha became a commuter town, where those who couldn’t afford city prices built Soviet-style apartment blocks and small, pretty, pastel houses with neat square gardens and iron gates. Now this is a place that stinks of death. Evil things happened here. According to Amnesty International, those things included torture. Extrajudicial killings (murders without lawful authority). Indiscriminate shelling of homes. Still, life returns, even to the most haunted of places. And it is returning to Bucha in slow motion. After all, life must return after war: Bosnian schools opened in Srebrenica after the 1995 genocide. In Rwanda, where more than 800,000 civilians, primarily Tutsis, were slaughtered in the spring of 1994, farms were replenished and soon grew coffee and corn, even after so much blood was spilled on that same earth. A little more than a month after the Russians retreated, the cleaning of Bucha had begun. Read the full story in Vanity Fair here.

In Kyiv, we are marking the day under the constant threat of Russian attack – and facing a watershed in the course of the war Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images A year ago on 24 August – the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence – a new generation of pilots were leading the Ukrainian air forces flying over Independence Square in Kyiv. The fighter jet column was headed by Anton Lystopad, who was recognised as one of the country’s best pilots. He was 30 years old, born in the year of independence. Almost a year later, in August 2022, Lystopad received the Order for Courage from the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. A few days after the ceremony, he was killed in combat. Lystopad’s story may sound almost too symbolic, but Ukrainians have become used to such tragic symbolism. Six months on from the start of the Russian invasion, with its indiscriminate bombardment of peaceful towns, the atrocities and horrors of Bucha and Mariupol, but also the solidarity, resilience and sacrifices we have experienced, everything feels sharper and deeper. The bitterness of losses and the joy of survival. Read the full story in The Guardian here.

A disturbing video out of Ukraine evokes similar scenes from Srebrenica. In July 1995, 12-year-old Senada Ibrahamovic leaned out the window of her house in Srebrenica, a former mining town in eastern Bosnia, and caught a fleeting glance of her father, Smail. A defender of the embattled city, he was running into the forest. He turned around and waved goodbye to his daughter. He was wearing his favorite blue jean jacket. When I spoke to her in 2005, Senada remembered this detail and also that she was angry with her father for leaving as the town’s warning sirens went off. But he had kissed her and told her he would see her in a few days: that the family would be reunited. Read the full story in Foreign Policy here.

New Allegations of Russian War Crimes: Ukrainian villagers accuse Russian troops of abuse, torture, and the murder of civilians as brutal war grinds on When Tetyana Bozhko first saw her husband’s body, she screamed. Russian troops had just pulled out of her hometown on March 19th, and villagers were looking around the house the occupiers had commandeered to use as a makeshift headquarters — and apparently a torture chamber and a place of execution. “When I heard ‘Tanya, Tanya,’ I knew. Serhii’s body was frozen in this horrible pose: one of his hands in one direction, another in a different one. I rushed to him, he was cold. I lifted his clothes, he was all covered in blood. I asked, ‘How can we bury him?’ He wouldn’t fit in the coffin,” Tetyana recalls. The photos taken by the local doctor show signs of torture: a finger without a nail, peeled skin from the palm of his hand, and a fatal bullet hole in his chest. Serhii had been seized when the Russians had first occupied the town and, according to multiple accounts from villagers, was tortured and executed during the Russian occupation this past March. Tetanya tells me this only days before what would have been his 60th birthday, when I went to the village of Lotskyne in the Mykolaiv region of southern Ukraine. The couple were both retired teachers: She worked in the village school library; he used to teach IT, physics, and math. Read the full story in The Rolling Stone here.

Valentyna told me that not long after Russian troops arrived in Yahidne, her village in northern Ukraine, a tall, blond soldier came to use her bathroom. She asked him what the Russians were doing in Ukraine. “We want you to be with us,” he told her, “for you to be with Russia.” In Yahidne, the reality of being “with us” meant the following: The Russian soldiers herded some 300 villagers into a cellar underneath a school next to their artillery, turning them into human shields. The oldest villager was 96. “We are here to protect you,” the Russian soldiers told them. But they held the villagers in the cellar for about a month, and 10 died after Russians did not provide proper medical care. Others, including Valentyna, a pensioner who lives alone, stayed in their homes, which Russian soldiers ransacked, looking for money and loot. I went to Yahidne in mid-April, not long after it had been liberated by Ukrainian troops. The village is not an unusual example of the brutality that Russia tries to sell as brotherhood in Ukraine. Throughout the war, being “with us” has been synonymous with atrocity: the mass bombings of schools, homes and hospitals, and the rape and execution of civilians. It’s also been synonymous with humiliation. To humiliate people is to exploit your power over them, making them feel worthless and dependent on you. It is clear, then, that the Russian military seems intent on humiliating Ukrainians, taking away their right to independence and their right to make their own decisions. This war is an act of imperialism, a colonial war meant to destroy another nation’s right to exist and to subjugate it. But it is not empire building in the sense of a coldly considered plan for territorial gain and economic resources; it is the next act of Vladimir Putin’s empire of humiliation. Read the full story in The New York Times here.

What were once perceived to be weaknesses are turning out to be advantages. On a recent trip to a village near Ukraine’s border with Russia, during a break between the seemingly constant explosions and skirmishes taking place nearby, a teenage Ukrainian soldier told me of how he did not want to live under a leader like Vladimir Putin, someone “who believes he may tell others what they should do.” Another volunteer fighter, a former Thai-boxing coach, chimed in that whereas Russia offered only “stagnation,” Ukraine was “a place where things are developing with the influence of the people.” In a neighboring area, a former appliance repairman recounted to me his disbelief that Russian soldiers would invade “and kill innocent people, as if they have no choice.” He would prefer to go to prison, he said. As a Kyiv-based journalist working for Ukrainian and international media, I am very much a representative of the professional class, what many may call my country’s “liberal elite.” My circle of friends and I discuss democracy, accountability, and the rule of law, but we long believed we were a minority in Ukraine, that the majority of our compatriots did not care about these abstract terms. Yet in reporting on Putin’s invasion, in traveling through my country, I have heard fellow Ukrainians, without any prompting, explain these enormous concepts better than many academics. I listened as those frontline fighters spoke of the freedom to choose who governed them and change course if need be, and the freedom to chart one’s own path in life. I heard a mayor say that his town near the Russian border was defending civilization and fighting on behalf of a world where laws mattered. A window installer in Odesa, on the Black Sea coast, told me he had learned how to fire a gun to ensure that he did not have to “live in a country where Moscow tells me whom to elect.” This started happening so often—in bombed-out villages as well as bustling cities—that I began to understand that something deeper was under way. Read the full story in The Atlantic here.