Tag: eastern Ukraine
A Looming Disaster at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant
This article is based on interviews and research by the Reckoning Project, a multinational group of journalists and lawyers collecting evidence of war crimes in Ukraine.
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, in the city of Enerhodar, in eastern Ukraine, is Europe’s largest nuclear facility. For decades, it has supplied electricity to millions of households, not just in Ukraine, but in Hungary, Poland, Belarus, Moldova, Slovakia, and Romania as well. Until two years ago, more than 50,000 people lived
Bakhmut Is Not Just a Battle. It’s My Home.
“President Joe Biden has made a statement about the situation in Bakhmut”: If anyone had said this sentence to me two years ago, I would have laughed. Back then, most Ukrainians couldn’t have found Bakhmut on a map.
Now, when I tell people that I come from Bakhmut and permanently left it in February 2022, on the first day of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, their faces change. They start talking to me as though we are standing at
Russia Is Making Abducted Ukrainian Children Impossible to Find
Amid the bombast of Russia’s one-year celebration of its war in Ukraine, a 15-year-old with thick, black hair and a gray hooded jacket was handed a microphone. In front of thousands of cheering people, Anya Naumenko thanked “Uncle Yuri”—a Russian soldier known as Yuri Gagarin—for saving her, her sister, and “hundreds of thousands of children in Mariupol,” the Ukrainian city that fell under heavy attack from the first day of Russia’s cross-border invasion, in February 2022.
Having recited words
Why Putin Made Peace With the Soviets’ Archenemies
It is impossible to watch Vladimir Putin’s arrogant invasion of Ukraine without being appalled by its savagery. Dead men and women strewn on the streets of Bucha, hands bound behind their backs. Russian soldiers raping women, sometimes in front of husbands or children. Russians seizing loot of every size, from cellphones to giant John Deere wheat-harvesting combines. And, again and again, testimony about torture: beatings, electric shocks, near suffocation with plastic bags.
How the Anti-war Camp Went Intellectually Bankrupt
In 1942, answering a pacifist opponent of British involvement in the Second World War, George Orwell replied that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.” There have of course been many times in human history when opposition to war has been morally justified, intellectually coherent, and, in the end, vindicated. But the war to defeat fascism during the middle part of the past century was simply not one of them. “This is elementary common sense,” Orwell wrote at the time. “If you hamper
One Life Among the 298 Ended by a Russian Missile
Jon O’Brien’s son, Jack, was on the type of summer-long Euro trip that marks an end to late adolescence and a step into early adulthood. Jack was 25; the seven-week trip was the longest he had been away from his parents. His travels included a road trip around Iceland, a train ride through Russia with stops in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and a visit to the Camp Nou soccer stadium in Barcelona. In mid-July 2014, Jack arrived in
NATO Secretary General Interview: The West’s Long Haul in Ukraine
The Western world must prepare itself for a long war in Ukraine that will require ongoing support for Kyiv to guarantee Russia’s defeat, as well as reinforced defenses across Europe to ensure that Vladimir Putin does not underestimate NATO’s readiness to defend “every inch” of its territory, Jens Stoltenberg, the military alliance’s secretary-general, told me recently.
The warning came in an in-depth interview at his office on the outskirts of Brussels, as the Russian war machine, after months
Nine Books to Read to Understand the War in Ukraine
Kyiv is burning. I am struggling to explain this to my young children; they know that I wrote a book about the 2013–14 Ukrainian revolution on the Maidan, Kyiv’s central square. They were too small then to understand that their parents’ friends and colleagues were being shot at by snipers. They do know, though, that I dedicated the book to them, “in hope of a better world to come.” And they have had their own experience of post-Maidan Ukraine, playing
The Reason Putin Would Risk War
There are questions about troop numbers, questions about diplomacy. There are questions about the Ukrainian military, its weapons, and its soldiers. There are questions about Germany and France: How will they react? There are questions about America, and how it has come to be a central player in a conflict not of its making. But of all the questions that repeatedly arise about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the one that gets the least satisfactory answers is this one:
No One in Kyiv Knows Whether Russia Is Bluffing
Children twirled around a skating rink just outside the president’s office in central Kyiv last week, while tourists took pictures of themselves in front of onion-domed, snow-dusted churches nearby. The stores were full of people shopping for the New Year’s holiday and Orthodox Christmas, just as they always are at this time of year. The airports were crowded.
In other words, nothing unusual was happening in the Ukrainian capital—nothing except for the contingency plans being made for a possible Russian