essays on the war in ukraine

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Opinion 7 opinions on the war in Ukraine after one year

One year after Russia invaded Ukraine , Post Opinions is looking back at what has transpired and forward to what is to come.

The selection of opinions below forms a snapshot of that coverage, intended to help you understand the war.

These charts suggest peace isn’t coming anytime soon

By Michael O’Hanlon, Constanze Stelzenmüller and David Wessel of the Brookings Institution

After gathering data on territory, economics, refugees and more, O’Hanlon, Stelzenmüller and Wessel came to the same conclusion : The war could last for quite some time.

“Pressure to make peace could rise within and outside Ukraine and Russia in 2023 (or thereafter),” they write . “But the data doesn’t suggest that will happen right now.”

How to break the stalemate in Ukraine

By the Editorial Board

The Post’s Editorial Board reviewed the year of war and looked for solutions .

“To thwart Russia and safeguard Ukraine’s sovereignty, the United States and its European allies have little choice but to intensify their military, economic and diplomatic support for Kyiv,” the Editorial Board concluded .

Why Ukraine will win the war

By Mark Hertling, retired Army lieutenant general

Hertling examined five phases of the war and says Ukraine’s forces significantly outperformed Russia’s in each one.

“Ukraine’s armed forces have admirably adapted in each phase of this fight, learning lessons from training they received over the past decade, and from the scars earned on the battlefield itself,” he writes . “And Russia has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to do the same.”

How the war will enrich Ukraine when it’s over

By Iuliia Mendel, journalist and former press secretary for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

Sharing a story of a New Year’s Eve delivery she received while hiding in her bathroom from Russian strikes, Mendel shows how she believes the war will make Ukraine stronger when it’s over .

“Today’s war heroes, organizers and businesspeople will be the leaders of tomorrow,” she writes . “The energies unleashed by this war will enrich the country that comes after it.”

What a year of war has revealed of three leaders

By David Ignatius , Post Opinions columnist

Three figures have largely defined the war so far: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Biden. Ignatius looks at what we’ve learned about each leader over the last year.

“Putin was convinced that his cold-eyed, brutal resolve would outlast everyone else’s,” Ignatius writes . “But a year on, Putin’s staying power begins to look questionable, while Zelensky and Biden have never looked stronger.”

You can’t understand the war without knowing history

By Timothy Snyder, the Levin professor of history at Yale University

Snyder dives into the contrast between the historical importance of this war and the lack of coursework in history.

“Ukrainian history makes today’s world make more sense,” he writes .

Putin can win only if Hawley-esque isolationists multiply

By George F. Will , Post Opinions columnist

Will homes in on how American politics could affect the war’s result .

“Putin can win only by Ukraine’s allies choosing to lose by not maximizing their moral and material advantages,” he writes . “He is counting on Western publics’ support for Ukraine being brittle, and especially on the multiplication of Josh Hawleys.”

What to know about Ukraine’s counteroffensive

The latest: The Ukrainian military has launched a long-anticipated counteroffensive against occupying Russian forces , opening a crucial phase in the war aimed at restoring Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty and preserving Western support in its fight against Moscow.

The fight: Ukrainian troops have intensified their attacks on the front line in the southeast region, according to multiple individuals in the country’s armed forces, in a significant push toward Russian-occupied territory.

The front line: The Washington Post has mapped out the 600-mile front line between Ukrainian and Russian forces .

How you can help: Here are ways those in the United States can support the Ukrainian people as well as what people around the world have been donating.

Read our full coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war . Are you on Telegram? Subscribe to our channel for updates and exclusive video .

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Six ways the war changed the world.

The ripple effects of Russia’s invasion have reordered lives and upended economies. Here are some of the consequences.

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By Matthew Mpoke Bigg

• Published Feb. 24, 2023 Updated Feb. 27, 2023

A year of war in Ukraine has reshaped the world in ways few had predicted. Far beyond the front lines, the ripple effects of Russia’s invasion have reordered lives and upended economies.

Here is a look at the war’s consequences in six key areas.

The war helped push global grain prices to record highs, given the importance of Russia and Ukraine as exporters of food crops including wheat. The United Nations warned that millions of people, especially in parts of Africa and the Middle East, were threatened with famine. In July, Moscow and Kyiv signed an agreement to release millions of tons of grain stuck in Ukraine’s Black Sea ports because of a de facto Russian naval blockade. Although Russia briefly suspended its participation in the deal in October, the agreement has largely held, and global grain prices have returned to prewar levels.

The war unleashed the worst global energy crisis since the 1970s. Energy prices soared in many parts of the world as nations reduced or cut off their purchases of Russian fossil fuels. In Europe, gas bills nearly doubled and electricity costs spiked about 70 percent in the first six months of the war. European Union diplomats in December agreed on a $60-per-barrel limit on the price at which Russian oil can be traded outside the bloc in another bid to deprive Moscow of revenue for the war. But with global supplies tight, Russia has remained a dominant exporter, selling more oil and gas to China and India over the last year.

The global economy was just emerging from the pandemic, and the energy crisis and slower growth contributed to higher inflation. Soaring prices ate away at people’s savings and paychecks, causing real wages to fall in many countries and slashing purchasing power. High inflation has become a political headache for leaders in countries including the United States , France and Britain , with governments raising spending to ease the pain for families and businesses using price caps, subsidies and reduced taxes.

President Biden said this week in Warsaw that “NATO is stronger than it’s ever been.” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia may have hoped his invasion would exacerbate divisions in NATO, but the alliance has been galvanized. Finland, which shares a border with Russia, abandoned its policy of neutrality and applied to join the alliance , as did Sweden. NATO leaders have said they expect that both will win approval, although Turkey has raised objections over Sweden’s treatment of Kurdish groups that Ankara regards as terrorists. In September, Ukraine applied to join , although its bid is considered a long shot.

More than eight million Ukrainians fled as refugees to other parts of Europe, particularly in the early stages of the war, according to the United Nations refugee agency . Another five million are estimated to be displaced inside Ukraine. The highest number of refugees, more than 1.5 million, are registered in Poland. At the same time, the war has enhanced the influence on the continent of Poland and the Baltic States, which have embraced stout defense of Ukraine and pushed for greater and faster supplies of military aid. Europe’s traditional leaders, France and Germany, struggled early on with the delicate task of reorienting their longstanding policies of a European security structure that included cooperation with Russia.

China has walked a fine line during the war, calling for peace while refraining from criticizing Russia, an increasingly important partner . China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, on a tour of Europe this week, told his Ukrainian counterpart that he did not want to see the war “prolonged and escalated .” At the same time, China is holding joint military drills with Russia and South Africa, and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is expected to pay a state visit to Moscow in the spring. The Biden administration is watching closely for signs that China may cross the line into providing direct military support to Russia and has warned it against doing so , but Beijing has pushed back strongly against the U.S. accusations.

Matthew Mpoke Bigg is a correspondent covering international news. He previously worked as a reporter, editor and bureau chief for Reuters and did postings in Nairobi, Abidjan, Atlanta, Jakarta and Accra. More about Matthew Mpoke Bigg

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

News and Analysis

Ukraine’s troop-starved brigades have started their own recruitment campaigns  to fill ranks depleted in the war with Russia.

The Czech Republic froze the assets of two men and a news website  it accused of running a “Russian influence operation” in Europe.

Ahead of the U.S. elections, Russia is intensifying efforts to elevate candidates  who oppose aid for Ukraine and support isolationism, disinformation experts say.

Symbolism or Strategy?: Ukrainians say that defending places with little strategic value is worth the cost in casualties and weapons , because the attacking Russians pay an even higher price. American officials aren’t so sure.

Elaborate Tales: As the Ukraine war grinds on, the Kremlin has created increasingly complex fabrications online  to discredit Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, and undermine the country’s support in the West.

Targeting Russia’s Oil Industry: With its army short of ammunition and troops to break the deadlock on the battlefield, Kyiv has increasingly taken the fight beyond the Ukrainian border, attacking oil infrastructure deep in Russian territory .

How We Verify Our Reporting

Our team of visual journalists analyzes satellite images, photographs , videos and radio transmissions  to independently confirm troop movements and other details.

We monitor and authenticate reports on social media, corroborating these with eyewitness accounts and interviews. Read more about our reporting efforts .

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Russia’s war in Ukraine, explained

Putin’s invasion in February began Europe’s first major war in decades.

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Russia is bombarding major cities in Ukraine, more than a week into a war where Moscow has faced setbacks on the battlefield — yet seems undeterred from its campaign to take Ukraine.

Get in-depth coverage about Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Why Ukraine? 

Learn the history behind the conflict and what Russian President Vladimir Putin has said about his war aims .

The stakes of Putin’s war

Russia’s invasion has the potential to set up a clash of nuclear world powers . It’s destabilizing the region and terrorizing Ukrainian citizens . It could also impact inflation , gas prices , and the global economy. 

How other countries are responding

The US and its European allies have responded to Putin’s aggression with unprecedented sanctions , but have no plans to send troops to Ukraine , for good reason . 

How to help

Where to donate if you want to assist refugees and people in Ukraine.

On March 4, Russia seized Zaporizhzhia , one of Europe’s largest nuclear power plants. Russian shelling of the southeastern Ukraine facility set off a fire , which Ukrainian officials warned could set off a nuclear disaster. It took hours, but the fire was extinguished, and international monitors said that they do not detect elevated radiation levels and that the fire did not damage “essential” equipment. US officials have said Russia now appears to be in control of the plant.

But the incident was a reminder of how dangerous this war in Ukraine is becoming, and how uncertain and confusing things still are on the ground. Russian troops were advancing toward Kyiv, and thousands and thousands are fleeing in advance of a possible siege on the city.

The Russian military has made advances in the south, and are gaining in the area of Kherson, a port city on the Black Sea whose control is reportedly contested , and Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov. Russian bombardment of these cities has resulted in humanitarian issues , with bridges and roads damaged by the fighting and dwindling access to food, clean water, medicine, and electricity in certain areas. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, experienced heavy Russian fire this week, and strikes have heavily damaged residential areas .

Ukrainian and Russian officials met in early March, and tentatively agreed on the need to humanitarian corridors — basically, safe zones for civilians to flee and supplies to pass through — but did not reach agreements on a larger ceasefire. As of March 6, multiple attempts to evacuate Ukrainian civilians have been halted because of Russian shelling.

Putin’s attempt to redraw the map of Europe risks becoming the most devastating conflict on the continent since World War II. Already, it is causing an astounding humanitarian crisis: Hundreds, perhaps thousands , of civilians have died, and more than 1.5 million people have fled the violence so far, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, making it the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.

The battle for Ukraine began in the early morning hours, local time, on February 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched what he called a “special military operation” into the country of about 40 million. He claimed the Russian military seeks “demilitarization and denazification” but not occupation; attacks shortly followed from multiple fronts and targeted toward multiple cities.

Ukraine’s resistance has complicated Russia’s efforts to seize the country. Russian forces have not made the progress they likely thought they would at the start of the campaign. The Russian military’s early strategy has perplexed some experts and observers . But the more protracted this war becomes, the more catastrophic it will be.

The United States and its allies in Europe and the United Kingdom imposed the toughest financial sanctions ever on Russia after the first incursion, and have only built on these penalties since. On February 26, the United States and European countries agreed to block some Russian banks from SWIFT, a global messaging system, which will essentially prevent those institutions from doing any global transactions, a punishment that allies had previously hesitated to pursue . Already, Russia’s economy is reeling from the impact of these penalties .

This sustained international pressure, and Ukraine’s resistance, may still not be enough to force Russia to end its military campaign. That leaves Ukraine — and the world — in a perilous and unpredictable moment.

Ukraine is under siege

After months of Putin building up tens of thousands of troops near the Ukrainian border and a series of failed diplomatic talks, Russia is now waging a full-out war on Ukraine.

Tensions escalated quickly when, on February 21, Putin delivered an hour-long combative speech that essentially denied Ukrainian statehood . He recognized the independence of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine where Moscow has backed a separatist rebellion since 2014 and sent so-called peacekeeping forces into the region. As experts said , that was likely just the beginning, setting the stage for a much larger conflict.

Days later, that larger conflict materialized. On February 24, Putin announced he was launching an assault “to defend people who for eight years are suffering persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime,” a reference to a false claim about the government in Ukraine. He demanded Ukraine lay down its weapons or be “ responsible for bloodshed .”

Soon after Putin’s speech, reports emerged of explosions around cities, including Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and the capital Kyiv . The Ukrainian foreign minister called it “a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” By the afternoon in Ukraine, Russian troops and tanks had entered the country on three fronts : from Belarus in the north, from the east of Ukraine, and from the south.

The Russian military has targeted critical infrastructure, like airports, with airstrikes and has launched more than 400 missiles , as of March 1. As a senior US defense official said on February 26, “There’s no doubt in our mind that civilian infrastructure and civilian areas are being hit as a result of these barrages.”

The main battlefronts are in Kyiv’s outskirts; in southern Ukraine, including the major city of Mariupol; and in eastern Ukraine around Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city.

NEW #Ukraine Conflict Update; Click the link to read the latest assessment from @TheStudyofWar and @criticalthreats https://t.co/0Hb0nLSebU pic.twitter.com/RINKbJsJIM — ISW (@TheStudyofWar) March 4, 2022

“They had maximal war aims,” Michael Kofman, research director in the Russia studies program at CNA, said in an interview posted on Twitter on February 25. “They had a military operation that’s now in progress, first to try to achieve regime change, encircle the capital, and try to overthrow the Ukrainian government, and then a much larger set of pincer movements to encircle and envelope Ukrainian forces. Try to do this quickly and force surrender of isolated pockets.”

But the Russian army has not been able to completely roll over Ukrainian forces, and some analysts have suggested Moscow may have been surprised at Ukraine’s resistance. Pentagon officials said that, as of March 4, Russia has committed about 92 percent of its combat power so far. Ukraine’s airspace remains contested.

Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at RAND Corporation, told a panel of reporters on February 28 that Russia’s military performance has been odd. “In other words, some of the things that I would have expected — like the air force taking a major role — have not happened.”

“Seems to me there was a lot of war optimism and a sense that the [Ukrainian] government would fall with just a little push,” Charap continued. “And that didn’t happen. I wouldn’t read too much into that about the ultimate course of the war, though. This is still a situation where the deck unfortunately is stacked against the Ukrainians, despite their bravery.”

Putin himself has called on the Ukrainian army to “take power into their own hands and overthrow” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a sign that Putin remains focused on regime change. “According to the available intelligence, the enemy marked me as a target No. 1 and my family as the target No. 2,” said Zelenskyy, speaking on the night of February 24.

Efforts to stop the fighting have so far failed. On February 28, high-level officials from Russia and Ukraine met at the Ukraine-Belarus border, and again on March 3. Russia has continued to insist that a ceasefire requires “demilitarization” and neutrality for Ukraine, but Ukraine has only continued to push for more military aid and ascension into Western bodies like the EU, even signing an EU membership application amid the fighting .

Both Ukraine and Russia have suggested they will hold another round of talks in coming days. Across conflicts, there is usually a severe escalation in fighting before ceasefires, as everyone attempts to maximize their leverage. “I think that they want to inflict maximum damage to pressure the Ukrainian government to seek some sort of ceasefire that is effectively a surrender,” said Margarita Konaev, associate director of analysis and research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

The toll of this young conflict is growing. The UN has said that, as of March 6, more than 350 civilians have been confirmed killed and hundreds more have been wounded; Ukraine’s emergency services puts the civilian death toll at 2,000 people as of March 2 . Ukrainian officials have said about 11,000 Russian troops have been killed in the fighting, as of March 6, but American and European estimates of Russian casualties have been substantially lower . The Russian government has reported nearly 500 soldier deaths . Experts said all these statistics should be treated with a great deal of caution because of the fog of war and the incentives both Russia and Ukraine have to push a particular narrative.

Ukrainian officials have also accused Russia of war crimes after reports of a shelling of an orphanage and kindergarten outside of Kyiv . Across Ukraine, thousands of civilians of all ages are enlisting to fight . Ukrainian officials called on residents to “make Molotov cocktails” to defend against the invasion. More than 1.5 million Ukrainians have fled to neighboring countries like Poland since the conflict began, according to a United Nations estimate .

The roots of the current crisis grew from the breakup of the Soviet Union

Russia’s invasion contravenes security agreements the Soviet Union made upon its breakup in the early ’90s. At the time, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, had the third-largest atomic arsenal in the world. The US and Russia worked with Ukraine to denuclearize the country, and in a series of diplomatic agreements , Kyiv gave its hundreds of nuclear warheads back to Russia in exchange for security assurances that protected it from a potential Russian attack.

But the very premise of a post-Soviet Europe is helping to fuel today’s conflict. Putin has been fixated on reclaiming some semblance of empire, lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is central to this vision. Putin has said Ukrainians and Russians “ were one people — a single whole ,” or at least would be if not for the meddling from outside forces (as in, the West) that has created a “wall” between the two.

Last year, Russia presented the US with a list of demands , some of which were nonstarters for the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Putin demanded that NATO stop its eastward expansion and deny membership to Ukraine, and also made other demands for “security guarantees” around NATO.

The prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO has antagonized Putin at least since President George W. Bush expressed support for the idea in 2008. “That was a real mistake,” Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton, told Vox in January. “It drove the Russians nuts. It created expectations in Ukraine and Georgia, which then were never met. And so that just made that whole issue of enlargement a complicated one.”

Ukraine is the fourth-largest recipient of military funding from the US, and the intelligence cooperation between the two countries has deepened in response to threats from Russia. But Ukraine isn’t joining NATO in the near future, and President Joe Biden has said as much. Still, Moscow’s demand was largely seen as a nonstarter by the West, as NATO’s open-door policy says sovereign countries can choose their own security alliances.

Though Putin has continued to tout the threat of NATO, his speech on February 21 showed that his obsession with Ukraine goes far beyond that. He does not see the government in Ukraine as legitimate.

“Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” he said, per the Kremlin’s official translation . “Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.”

The two countries do have historical and cultural ties, but as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained , Putin’s “basic claim — that there is no historical Ukrainian nation worthy of present-day sovereignty — is demonstrably false .”

As experts noted, it is difficult to square Putin’s speech — plus a 2021 essay he penned and other statements he’s made — with any realistic diplomatic outcome to avert conflict. It was, essentially, a confession that this wasn’t really about NATO, said Dan Baer, the acting director of the Europe program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “It was about that he doesn’t think Ukraine has a right to exist as a free country,” he said before Putin’s escalation on the night of February 23.

This is the culmination of eight years of tensions

This isn’t the first time Russia has attacked Ukraine. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, invaded eastern Ukraine, and backed Russian separatists in the eastern Donbas region. That conflict has killed more than 14,000 people to date .

Russia’s assault grew out of mass protests in Ukraine that toppled the country’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, which began over his abandonment of a trade agreement with the European Union. US diplomats visited the demonstrations, in symbolic gestures that further agitated Putin.

President Barack Obama, hesitant to escalate tensions with Russia any further, was slow to mobilize a diplomatic response in Europe and did not immediately provide Ukrainians with offensive weapons.

“A lot of us were really appalled that not more was done for the violation of that [post-Soviet] agreement,” said Ian Kelly, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Georgia from 2015 to 2018. “It just basically showed that if you have nuclear weapons” — as Russia does — “you’re inoculated against strong measures by the international community.”

Since then, corruption has persisted in the Ukrainian government, and the country ranks in the bottom third of the watchdog group Transparency International ’s index.

Ukraine’s far-right presence has grown and become somewhat normalized, and there are government-aligned fascist militias in the country. But Moscow has drawn out those issues to advance false claims about genocide and other attacks on civilians as a way to legitimize the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine and to create a pretext for invasion. In his prerecorded speech shared on the eve of the bombardment of Ukraine, Putin said he sought the “ denazification ” of Ukraine.

To be clear: The Ukrainian government is not a Nazi regime and has not been co-opted by the far right. Zelenskyy is Jewish; he speaks proudly of how his Jewish grandfather fought against Hitler’s army .

Yet, days earlier, Putin used these sorts of claims as part of his explanation for recognizing as independent the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic, the two territories in eastern Ukraine where he has backed separatists since 2014. “Announcing the decisions taken today, I am confident in the support of the citizens of Russia. Of all the patriotic forces of the country,” Putin said before moving troops into the regions for “peacekeeping” purposes.

At the time, most experts Vox spoke to said that looked like the beginning, not the end, of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine.

“In Russia, [it] provides the political-legal basis for the formal introduction of Russian forces, which they’ve already decided to do,” Kofman, of CNA, told Vox on February 21 . “Secondarily, it provides the legal local basis for Russian use of force in defense of these independent republics’ Russian citizens there. It’s basically political theater.”

It set “the stage for the next steps,” he added. Those next steps are now clear.

How the rest of the world is responding

The United States and its allies around the world have condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and have since announced increasingly tough sanctions, intended to completely isolate Russia from the international community and inflict real economic costs.

Biden announced on the afternoon of February 24 that the United States would impose sanctions on Russian financial institutions, including cutting off Russia’s largest banks from the US financial system, and on Russian elites in Putin’s inner circle. America will also implement export controls on certain technologies . The United Kingdom and Europe added their own sanctions, imposing the “ massive ” penalties the West had been warning Putin about.

The US and its allies have only amped up the pressure since then. On February 25, the EU and US imposed sanctions on Putin himself . On February 26, the US and European countries announced an agreement to cut some (but not all) Russian banks off from SWIFT, the global messaging system that enables most international transactions, which will make it very difficult for Russia to make transactions beyond its borders. (Japan also signed on to SWIFT actions on February 27.) The US and its allies have said they will target Russia’s central bank , specifically its foreign reserves that Moscow needs to help support its currency. The US has continued to add penalties, including joining other countries in closing US airspace to Russian aircraft , and sanctioning more than a dozen oligarchs.

The United States has said it will not involve troops in any Ukrainian conflict, though more US military aid to Ukraine is on its way and the US has shored up its presence on NATO’s eastern flank. On February 24, the Pentagon said it would send 7,000 additional troops to Germany , and Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on February 26 that he was authorizing “up to $350 million” in additional military aid to Ukraine, including “further lethal defensive assistance to help Ukraine address the armored, airborne, and other threats it is now facing.”

Such aid, according to a February 26 tweet by State Department spokesperson Ned Price, will be provided “immediately” and include “anti-tank and air defense capabilities.” Other European and NATO countries are also stepping up their assistance, including Germany , which reversed a long-standing policy of not sending lethal aid to conflict zones.

Russia knows that the US and its partners do not want to commit themselves militarily, and, as Putin launched his invasion, he offered an ominous warning as he touted Russia’s nuclear arsenal : “There should be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.” On February 27, Putin escalated that threat by putting the country’s nuclear deterrent forces on high alert .

NATO has vowed to protect its members from any Russian aggression. On February 25, NATO announced that it was activating part of its NATO Response Force — a 40,000-troop unit modernized after the 2014 Crimea invasion — to protect allies on NATO’s eastern flank. “We are now deploying the NATO Response Force for the first time in a collective defense context. We speak about thousands of troops. We speak about air and maritime capabilities,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said .

Yet these are largely defensive measures, which means most of the punishment against Russia will come in the form of economic sanctions. Still, the West is starting to shift from an original hesitancy to impose the most severe costs on Russia over fears of what it might mean for Europe, the US, and the rest of the global economy — and what Russia might do to retaliate.

They’re not all the way there, however. For example, even the SWIFT action is expected to leave some carve-outs so Russia can still export gas to Europe . The tougher the sanctions on Russia, the harder it will hit the US and especially European economies, so leaders are still trying to soften the impact. But the fallout from these punishments — along with other measures, like the EU and United States barring Russia from their airspace — is being felt in Russia, as the ruble crashes and analysts warn of a deep recession .

A way out of this war is difficult to contemplate as bombs are falling on Ukraine, but the US and its allies are going to have to do careful diplomacy to isolate and put pressure on Russia in the long term — and create incentives for Moscow to stop its assault on Ukraine . The US and its allies are also likely going to have to decide how much they want, or can, support Ukraine as it battles Russia.

“The real question, I think, is going to come down to what extent the West can and will try to support and supply a long-term insurgency against Russia,” said Paul D’Anieri, an expert on Eastern European and post-Soviet politics at the University of California Riverside. “And what level of success does Russia have in fighting back against? Unfortunately, it seems like the best strategy for peace right now is when enough Russians die, that the Russians decide it’s not worth it anymore.”

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An Anniversary of Destruction, Loss, and Bravery in Ukraine

By Joshua Yaffa

Nastya Stanko is among Ukraine’s most revered war reporters, with an onscreen persona that comes off as assured, competent, and intrepid, in the best tradition of frontline journalists. She is rarely deterred by danger, and yet, at times, she is also charmingly awkward in the ways of war. Not long ago, on a shoot near the front lines in the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, she tried to climb atop a Ukrainian mobile artillery system, and repeatedly slipped off. “Shit, I can’t get on this thing!” she shrieked, as soldiers tried to hoist her up.

Over the summer, while walking through a wooded section of the “gray zone”—territory that lies between Ukrainian and Russian positions, controlled by neither side—she asked if she could hold the hand of the Ukrainian general who was showing her the front. Artillery exploded in the distance, shaking the trees. “I’m scared. This way I feel safer,” Stanko said. The general, in camouflage, with a Kalashnikov swinging in his right hand, joked that his wife would be upset when she saw the footage. “Don’t worry,” Stanko replied. “I have a husband at home. He’ll understand.” Later, she told the audience at a journalism conference that this wasn’t a reportorial trick; it was the only thing she could think to do to calm herself.

In 2021, Stanko stepped down from Hromadske, an independent media channel, where she was the editor-in-chief, to spend more time with her newborn son, Ostap, who was six months old. But, when Russia invaded, last February, Stanko, who was living in Kyiv , brought Ostap to her parents’ house in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in western Ukraine, and returned to the capital the next day. She was the only Hromadske journalist remaining in the city. She and her husband, Illia, a software developer who had formerly been a cameraman for the channel, started filming: the eerily empty streets, the train station jammed with fleeing families, the scores of ordinary people clamoring to join the Territorial Defense Forces. Stanko is back, viewers exclaimed. What they really wanted was reassurance that Kyiv was still standing. Stanko stood in front of city hall. The metro worked, she said. So did cash machines.

This February, in advance of the war’s first anniversary, I met up with Stanko in Ivano-Frankivsk, an atmospheric city with Polish and Austro-Hungarian roots, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. She grew up in town, born to a family of patriotic Ukrainian speakers, who knew firsthand the suffering inflicted by Moscow’s imperialism—her father’s parents each spent a decade in the Gulag . Ivano-Frankivsk has remained relatively unscathed by the war. In November, Stanko and Illia rented a small apartment, with Ostap, on the outskirts of town.

Stanko’s life is now split in two: in Ivano-Frankivsk, she takes Ostap to feed the ducks at a nearby lake and stops for coffee at a café opened by recent arrivals from Kharkiv ; at the front, where she often spends a week or more, she treks through mud, weighed down by a flak jacket, and waits out shelling in a bunker with Ukrainian troops. At least four soldiers whom Stanko has featured in her reporting were later killed. Two close friends have died.

Death seems everywhere these days, Stanko said. On New Year’s Eve, she stopped into a church service in Ivano-Frankivsk, where she learned that the brother of Ostap’s nanny, who had been drafted into the Ukrainian Army, had just been killed. “I stood there in shock, thinking to myself, Another one—how can this be?” She struggled to reconcile the loss with the festive atmosphere—the feeling, as she put it, that “death is sitting with you at the holiday table.” But she also knew, better than most, that “right now, we have no other life, no other reality.”

Since the start of the war, I have travelled from the capital to Kharkiv, a historically Russian-speaking city that has faced relentless rocket and artillery fire; from the decimated towns of the Donbas to Zaporizhzhia, a regional capital in the south that became a waystation for Ukrainians fleeing the horrors of Mariupol and elsewhere. In early February, I wanted to check in with people I had met along the way, to get a sense of how a year of war has, for so many in Ukraine, imparted great trauma and loss but also a sense of purpose and identity.

For many Ukrainians, the mere fact that the war is entering its second year is unignorable proof that a quick victory isn’t going to materialize. The fight shows little sign of ending soon, and, if two years, why not three, or four? For all its inefficiencies, Russia’s military draft, announced by Vladimir Putin last September, has had an effect on the battlefield. The kind of relatively easy and rapid counter-offensive that Ukraine mounted last September to take back territory in the Kharkiv region is unlikely to be repeated; meanwhile, the Russian Army is able to throw men and equipment at a renewed push in the Donbas.

As of late January, the Kyiv School of Economics put the total damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure at nearly a hundred and thirty billion dollars. In many places in the country, the war is physically distant, felt less through missile or artillery attacks than through cuts to electricity and heat. At any given moment, millions of households are without power, as the state energy provider has been forced to institute rolling blackouts in response to Russian strikes on power plants and substations .

President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukraine’s military leaders are hesitant to make public the scale of losses on the battlefield, but the toll is surely enormous. Last November, Mark Milley , the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated that as many as a hundred thousand Ukrainian soldiers had been killed or wounded by that point in the war. Given that Ukraine’s most promising, energetic, and patriotic young people were among the first to volunteer to fight, their names have been overrepresented among the dead. “This war is consuming the best of our people,” Nataliya Gumenyuk, a Ukrainian journalist, said on the occasion of the death of Roman Ratushny, a prominent twenty-four-year-old activist who was killed on the front in June.

In Kyiv, I had dinner with a friend, Tanya Logacheva, and her parents, Yuriy and Raisa. They are from Luhansk, a city in the east that has been occupied since 2014. This is their second Russian invasion, they darkly joke. Logacheva is thirty-six, with a background in marketing, but also with interests in photography, dance, and wine. “It’s the stolen time that pisses me off,” she said over a spread of roasted duck and potatoes that Raisa had prepared for us. “All the things I could have done, the life I could have lived.”

Instead, Logacheva said, the past year was defined by a single necessity: “survival.” The electricity and Internet go out; she starts a meeting or a work call, only to have an air-raid siren sound. The thought of making any long-term plans is laughable. Logacheva and her parents were resolute, insisting that these challenges would end only with Ukraine’s victory, however ultimately defined. Life, in the meantime, was exhausting. “It’s good to survive,” Logacheva went on. “You don’t know how much you enjoy it until you realize you might not.”

On trips to Kyiv, I often visited Goodwine, a gourmet emporium the size of a big-box store, with an in-house bakery and a coffee bar. On March 3rd, a Russian missile struck its main warehouse outside Kyiv, incinerating an estimated fifteen million euros’ worth of inventory. But Goodwine never shut down completely. I visited the store in early April, as life was returning to the capital, and marvelled at the refrigerator case full of buffalo mozzarella and rows of imported chocolate bars. It was a relief, both disorienting and pleasurable, to find myself transported to a world of such banal hedonism. How could anything dangerous or terrible happen here?

Early on the morning of October 17th , an Iranian-produced kamikaze drone, a style of weapon that Russia had apparently been using to target energy infrastructure in Kyiv, slammed into an apartment building on Zhylianska Street. It was presumably meant to hit a neighboring thermal power plant, but overshot, exploding in a flash of brick and steel. Several floors of the building collapsed. Among those at home was Viktoriia Zamchenko, a thirty-four-year-old sommelier who worked at Goodwine. She and her husband, Bohdan, were both killed. Zamchenko was several months pregnant with their first child.

I instantly recognized Zamchenko’s face when the news of her death began making the rounds. “Today is a very dark day,” Goodwine wrote in a post. “We loved Vika madly. And surely you did, too.” By then, I had met or interviewed a handful of soldiers who later died in battle, but this felt different. Zamchenko was an eminently familiar and recognizable peer, a young woman who worked in a wine shop and once helped me choose a suitable Pinot Noir. Logacheva, my friend in Kyiv, had once attended a wine tasting led by Zamchenko; she remarked that Zamchenko’s killing was yet another reminder that, by this stage in the war, “death was one or two handshakes away.”

I sat in Goodwine’s café with Borys Tarasenko, a fellow-sommelier. He told me of his first impressions of Zamchenko: “She was strong, independent, precise.” Zamchenko, with a shoulder-length bob of brown hair and a wide smile, came from a small town in the Rivne region of Ukraine, about two hundred miles from the capital, and was a self-taught oenophile. “She was never satisfied with the answer ‘I don’t know,’ ” Roman Remeev, the head of the store’s wine department, said. “She wanted to find out everything for herself.” She developed her own sensibility. “She loved strong wine,” Remeev said. “Clean, classic, strict.”

Like many other Goodwine employees, Zamchenko left Kyiv at the start of the invasion, returning home with Bohdan. In July, she came back. “Everyone was happy to see one another,” Remeev said. “We asked, ‘Where were you? How was it for you?’ No one thought about anything bad.” Zamchenko said she was pregnant.

That October, Kyiv was getting hit with regular air strikes; Zamchenko was conscientious about always leaving the store during an air-raid alert and heading to a nearby metro station, which doubled as a bomb shelter. “She always tried to reason with us,” Tarasenko recalled. “ ‘Come on. Let’s go wait out the siren somewhere safe.’ ”

The members of the wine department have their own group chat, where, on the morning of October 17th, they shared news of yet another strike. Everyone checked in—except Zamchenko. Someone wrote that it looked like the damage was in Vika’s neighborhood. There had already been a close call some weeks before, when another drone meant for the power station exploded in the street in front of Zamchenko’s apartment. “I started to get worried in a serious way,” Tarasenko said.

He and a colleague from Goodwine went to the building. All that Tarasenko could see was emergency workers sifting through rubble. But a video that surfaced on social media showed the bodies of Viktoriia and Bohdan, along with their cat. Remeev sent a message to the group chat. “Unfortunately our worst expectations have been confirmed,” he wrote. “Vika is no longer with us.”

Tarasenko accompanied Zamchenko’s mother to the morgue. An official stepped outside to tell her she could come identify her daughter’s body. “You could see all her hopes collapse,” Tarasenko said. When I asked him how he feels now, he replied, “Empty.” He told me of a favorite saying of Zamchenko’s: “Enough feeling sorry for yourself.” He said, “I have to repeat this phrase to myself a lot these days.”

In the coming weeks, Goodwine will release a special collection of bottles from a vineyard in the Carpathian Mountains, in western Ukraine; the collection is called Victoria. Remeev, the head sommelier, told me, “However strange, I can’t say I have destructive feelings. If anything, I want to be strong, to create, produce.”

Before I left Goodwine, Tarasenko wanted to emphasize a final point. “What happened to Vika is not a coincidence, or a natural disaster,” he said. “It’s not like a tree fell on her apartment or the building collapsed in an accident.” This was something different. “It’s murder,” he went on. “They killed this person.” That, he said, is what’s happening in Ukraine: “the purposeful destruction of an entire people.”

Last spring, Stanko had been trying to put me in touch with a friend of hers, a Ukrainian soldier named Vitaliy Derekh, who was the commander of an anti-tank unit then operating in the Donbas. Russia was using an advantage in heavy artillery to grind down Ukrainian positions, inching forward a few feet at a time. Maybe I could pay Derekh a visit near the front , Stanko suggested. But then Stanko wrote again to say that Derekh was dead. He was thirty-four, a former journalist, a well-known and widely liked local activist, scouting leader, and paramedic in his native Ternopil, in western Ukraine. In 2014, he volunteered to fight against Russia-backed proxy militias in the Donbas; after the invasion last February, he reënlisted.

I spoke with two other members of Derekh’s unit, who went by the call signs Poppy and Greek. They described a battle, near the city of Popasna, in which a Russian armored personnel carrier bore down on a group of Ukrainian soldiers, firing its large-calibre cannon. Two were killed, and another seven wounded, before Derekh fired an anti-tank missile, blowing up the vehicle. A couple of days later, he spotted a column of three Russian troop carriers on the move, preparing for a new attack. He fired, destroying them, slowing the assault. Then a Russian fighter jet streaked across the sky and launched a missile that slammed directly into Derekh’s hideout. He was killed instantly. “You can be brave and experienced and know what to do in every situation,” Greek told me. “But Fortuna also decides a lot.”

Several months went by. Ukraine lost more cities in the Donbas, even as it went on to recapture others. In late September, I got a message from Stanko. Greek was dead. He had been in a forward position near Bakhmut, a city in the Donbas that was weathering the bulk of the Russian onslaught. A day after Greek and nine soldiers under his command arrived to replace another unit, a shell landed directly in their dugout. The explosion blew out the concrete blocks meant to secure the position, and they collapsed on top of Greek. It was impossible to retrieve his body; the debris weighed several tons, and the area was now under the control of Russian forces.

I spoke again with Poppy, who is in his mid-thirties. Like Derekh and Greek, he had fought in the first Donbas war, and later he took a job as a forklift operator at a factory in Estonia. On February 26th, he returned to Ukraine, asking to be deployed.

Early on, Poppy said, his reconnaissance unit was scouting the locations of Russian troops near the village of Motyzhyn, twenty-five miles from the capital. He had taken up a position on the edge of town, balancing a machine gun behind a tree, when a young girl from the village approached him. She offered him a plate of fresh bliny . “I yelled at her, ‘Get out of here. The Russians are eight hundred metres away,’ ” Poppy recalled. The girl said she would leave only if he took the pancakes. “How do you not want to fight for such people?” he said. “I understood then that I had not come in vain to defend my country.”

Poppy was now the commander of a platoon with nearly a hundred soldiers. They had just been rotated out of Bakhmut and sent to the Kharkiv region, to an area close to the Russian border. The fight in Bakhmut had been tough, he said. It felt as if Russian munitions were endless, a wall of fire that went on uninterrupted for days. The same could be said for Russian manpower—the assaults came in waves of ten to twenty fighters. “We cut them to pieces, but they don’t care, they just keep coming.” At the same time, he said, “they are learning.” The attacks were becoming cleverer, more thought out. Smaller units were replacing larger columns; ground forces were coördinating their movements with artillery units and airpower.

One morning not long ago, I drove out to the village where Poppy and his men are stationed, a snow-mottled pastoral, with compact houses emitting thin wisps of smoke from their chimneys. Poppy brought me inside and poured me tea. Soldiers from his unit came in and out, their radios buzzing. Artillery fire rattled in the distance, but I was the only one who seemed to notice. Poppy pointed out two soldiers who looked to be in their twenties, who had been with Greek when he died. “When the shell hit, I just lay there for a minute,” one told me. “I couldn’t move or think or even see. I just saw yellow light.”

I asked Poppy how this year of war has changed him. He has suffered four concussions, he said. “I feel myself becoming more aggressive, unstable, harsh. There are times when everything upsets me.” He told me of a time when, after continuous artillery fire, a soldier under his command jumped out of the trench and started to run away. “His psyche couldn’t take any more,” Poppy said. Another soldier from the unit went home for leave and, suffering from a mental breakdown, checked himself into a hospital.

Poppy doesn’t hide his own exhaustion from his soldiers. “I tell them I also don’t want to do this,” he said. “I don’t like this job. I don’t need such a life. But I can’t just walk away.” He feels a patriotic duty toward the Ukrainian nation, but, in war, that can feel like an abstraction. More urgent, he explained, was the need to protect the soldiers in his unit. “However sad and terrible it sounds, I’m here to kill the enemy first, so that he doesn’t kill my brother-in-arms.”

War, Poppy said, is a “dirty business, dishonest and unjust.” He has three children; two are in Kyiv, a third is in Poland. He’d like them to live in a peaceful, civilized, and democratic country. The cruel tragedy, he said, is that friends like Derekh and Greek, two young men, vital and creative, in the prime of their lives, had to fight and die for what should be a given. “These guys were simply excellent, full of positivity,” he said. “They should have returned home and kept on making life better for everyone around them.” When he’s at the front, Poppy tries to avoid such thoughts. “Anguish, grief—even anger—somehow they get in the way,” he said. I left as the sun was low in the sky, casting a spectral light over the snowy fields. Before I drove off, Poppy pulled a patch from his uniform and handed it to me. It read “Born to be free.”

Recently, I headed to Chernihiv, a city near the Belarusian border, in northern Ukraine. I had last been there in April, shortly after Russia pulled back its forces from the region and lifted a thirty-nine-day siege of the city. Residents were beginning to emerge from their basements to take stock of the damage around them. I visited an apartment block on Viacheslava Chornovola Street that had been hit with thousand-pound unguided bombs; its façade was ripped open, leaving a doll-house-like view to people’s kitchens and living rooms. Forty-seven people had been killed. During the siege, a makeshift grave site popped up near a patch of forest, the dead marked by row after row of dirt mounds and wooden placards.

Now families in Chernihiv were out enjoying a snowy Sunday afternoon, going for strolls along an embankment overlooking the Desna River and sledding down the hill in front of St. Catherine’s Cathedral. At the office of a local N.G.O., I met with Halyna Kalinina, a volunteer who was responsible for taking statements from residents of the villages around Chernihiv that had been occupied by Russian forces in the spring, creating a record of Russian abuses and alleged war crimes. She told me that she often stops the recording during her interviews so that her subjects can weep or simply sit in silence. “We talk, then pause, then talk some more,” she said. “In this way, we slowly break down their trauma.”

Kalinina told me of a woman who, during Russia’s occupation, opened her front door to see a haggard and bloody young man wearing a woman’s coat. The man was from a neighboring village, where a number of Russian military vehicles had come under fire and were destroyed. Russian soldiers in the village decided that the man and his two brothers were responsible. They marched them to the forest, forced them to dig a shallow grave, then opened fire. The brothers were killed instantly; the man at the woman’s doorstep was hit in the ear and cheek but survived. He lay in the grave until the soldiers left, then crawled out and took off running, finding a stranger’s coat along the way.

Another villager told Kalinina of her son, in his thirties, who was detained by Russian troops. Days later, he returned home and relayed how he was hung upside down by his legs and beaten for hours at a time. Kalinina has a son, also in his thirties, in Kharkiv. “The whole time I was listening, I was trying this story on for myself, imagining my own son, how I would feel,” she said. “It gets hard to sleep.”

I first met Kalinina in Shchastia, a town of eleven thousand people in the Donbas, whose name means “happiness.” The day I visited, last February 23rd, Russian forces were already firing Grad rockets at the local coal-fuelled power plant, knocking out the electricity and shutting off the water. When I stopped by Kalinina’s apartment, she had just returned from the courtyard, where she filled up plastic jugs at the communal well. Kalinina, who was in her fifties, considered herself a pro-Ukrainian patriot, which was conspicuous in Shchastia, where pro-Russian sympathies were not uncommon—a symptom of the town’s post-industrial decline, which bred not so much a fondness for modern Russia but a nostalgia for the Soviet past. “People were suffering from a kind of euphoria of youth,” Kalinina said.

Kalinina had fled Shchastia the morning after we met. She briefly ended up in Kyiv, before travelling onward to Lviv, in western Ukraine. She had a room in a dormitory and was spending her days at a volunteer hub, where she distributed clothes, medicines, and other supplies to families fleeing cities under heavy bombardment. Shchastia was occupied. A concert had been held in the local house of culture to celebrate its return to Russian control. Kalinina told me that she spent her first weeks away from the town crying—in her room, at the supermarket, even while getting her hair cut. “I don’t cry anymore,” she told me. “I want to give other people their turn.”

On a recent fact-finding trip, Kalinina heard of three local men who were led away by Russian troops. Later, after Russian forces pulled out, their bodies were found, riddled with bullet holes, in a neighboring village. “You travel around and realize there is an ocean of such stories,” she said. “They simply never end.” The villages in the Chernihiv region were occupied relatively briefly, not much longer than a month. Even so, ten months later, Kalinina said that she and her colleagues have documented only a fraction of the atrocities. “Imagine,” she said, “what we will learn when we finally make it back to Shchastia.”

Stanko doesn’t like subjects who are too obviously heroic. Instead, she prefers the ordinary, middle-aged guys, with stubble and soft bellies that push against their uniforms, like the members of a tank crew she visited in the woods outside Bakhmut. “They were in their fifties, not showing off at all, just doing their job, like it’s not a big deal,” she said. They made coffee on a propane stove and ate piroshki with apples, telling jokes and sharing war stories, then reloaded the tank and fired one round after another, the ground shaking with each shot. “I sat there and thought how lucky I am to sit next to such people, to observe and listen.”

In November, Stanko was among the first journalists to make it into Kherson, a city in the south that was liberated after eight months of Russian occupation. She got lucky. Her car was waved past one checkpoint, then another. She came across what looked like a non-stop party in Kherson’s central square: a crowd was singing, dancing, honking the horns of their cars. At one point, a woman wrapped her arms around Stanko in the middle of an interview. “There I was, standing in the central square of Kherson, jumping out of happiness,” Stanko told me. “I had this feeling that it all worked out. I captured these emotions as they were just unfolding.” The Ukrainian military’s press office revoked her accreditation for entering Kherson without permission, but reinstated it some days later. “The knowledge that you managed something that others didn’t,” Stanko told me, “of course, it’s a rush.”

Stanko and I spoke about this thrill, of getting to where you’re not supposed to be, of capturing a moment of raw, unfiltered humanity, which is all the more exciting because it is so fleeting. “After a year, it’s hard to find the reason why I keep doing this,” Stanko said. There is no shortage of journalists at the front; if she doesn’t film Ukrainian soldiers, someone else will. “But my brain tells me I have to go,” she told me. “Put simply, it’s interesting. I want to be there, in the place where it’s really happening, to ask questions, to know firsthand.”

Another motivation, Stanko went on, is one closer to guilt. Why isn’t she doing more—she’s considered joining the army as a combat medic—and why does she complain about temporary discomfort or fright when those at the front face much worse? She told me of a trip to visit a unit of soldiers from Ivano-Frankivsk who were stationed in the Donbas. She set off from Kharkiv before dawn, driving through an icy rain. Her car nearly got stuck in the mud. The dugout where the troops spent most of their time had a leaky roof. Water dripped on Stanko, freezing her even more. “It’s cold here,” she remarked. “Pretty unpleasant, I guess?” The soldiers looked at her, mystified. No, they said—everything is fine. What’s there to complain about?

In May, Stanko was in Lyman, a city under constant bombardment, filming a police unit responsible for evacuating civilians. A woman relayed that her twenty-one-year-old son, Artem, had been hit in the head by shrapnel. He had been lying at home in his own blood for five days. Emergency services had refused to send an ambulance; the shelling was too intense. A police officer named Maksym volunteered for the mission. “No one wanted to go there, and no one would have said a thing or judged him if he didn’t,” Stanko said. Maksym and a couple of officers sped off in a jeep. They found Artem—his head wrapped in a makeshift bandage, his eyes distant and glazed—and drove him out, artillery rumbling the whole way. “In that moment, I realized I had just witnessed something unbelievable and heroic,” Stanko said. She and her cameraman stood in silence, with tears in their eyes. Artem survived and is now rehabilitating in Germany.

On a recent trip to the front, Stanko stopped by a hospital in the Donbas, where she met a soldier who had pulled out of Soledar, a city that fell to Russian forces in January. He told Stanko that, out of a platoon of thirty soldiers, he and one other were left in fighting shape. Still, Stanko said, like nearly all of the soldiers she’s met over the past year, he was bound by an unflinching sense of duty. “If they aren’t there to fight, the front will move further and further until we have no country left,” she said. “Even if they’re tired, even if they don’t want to be there anymore—they know they have to be.” She couldn’t ignore what felt like a personal implication in that truth. “And, if they have to be, why don’t I?” ♦

More on the War in Ukraine

How Ukrainians saved their capital .

A historian envisions a settlement among Russia, Ukraine, and the West .

How Russia’s latest commander in Ukraine could change the war .

The profound defiance of daily life in Kyiv .

The Ukraine crackup in the G.O.P.

A filmmaker’s journey to the heart of the war .

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By Claire Porter Robbins

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells