opinion
Editor’s Note: This article was published by the twice-weekly newsletter “The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak” on May 20, 2024, and has been re-published by the Kyiv Independent with permission. To subscribe to "The Counteroffensive," click here. When Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine began, Anastasia Boyko considered fleeing Ukraine to keep her three-month-old baby safe. She instead decided to help Ukraine's war effort using her great-grandmother's love of embroidery. Generations of women in Anastasia's family are united by this heritage – she couldn't leave her family and their tradition...
Kyiv Independent
Russian forces have encountered a new enemy in the Black Sea: Ukraine’s arsenal of naval kamikaze drones. These deceptively small unmanned vehicles have targeted Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since September 2022, picking off Russian battleships one by one. The latest of Ukraine’s maritime conquests was the Russian Mangust-class patrol boat, which it destroyed off the coast of occupied Crimea with a MAGURA naval drone. Ukraine shifted its focus to naval drones after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Due to their unavailability on the market, the Ukrainian military decided ...
Kyiv Independent
Editor’s Note: This article was published by the twice-weekly newsletter “The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak” on May 12, 2024, and has been re-published by the Kyiv Independent with permission. To subscribe to "The Counteroffensive," click here. Prisoner negotiations between Ukraine and Russia are one of the many things obscured by the fog of war. Even the wives of prisoners of war (POWs) don't find out their husbands are being freed until they are on Ukrainian soil. One woman attended these prisoner exchanges while her husband was in Russian captivity – if only in an attempt to get closer to w...
Kyiv Independent
New U.S.-supplied weapons and money are now on their way to Ukraine. Whether to provide additional military aid was a matter of debate for many months in the U.S. Congress. In the end, Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson stared down the most right-wing elements of his party and put the matter to a vote. The proposal passed by a margin of 311 to 112, thanks to the support of Democrats. While the same package also provides security aid for Israel and Taiwan, the nearly $61 billion for Ukraine is the biggest component – and will make the biggest near-term difference. The new aid ...
Kyiv Independent
U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians (REPO) Act on April 24. Largely overshadowed in the media by the groundbreaking approval of $61 billion in aid for Ukraine that same day, the REPO Act is equally crucial. However, the REPO Act has not yet won the war for Russian assets. The REPO Act allows the Biden administration to confiscate Russian sovereign assets that are subject to U.S. jurisdiction to support Ukraine. In essence, the bill overcomes the main legal concern of Russia’s sovereign immunity by allowing the U.S. to confiscate the...
Kyiv Independent
“Do you cooperate with independent Russian journalists to reach a Russian audience?” We at the Kyiv Independent hear variations of this question at every event we attend, and the audience rarely likes our answer: “No, we don’t; we don’t see the point.” A beautiful room in the old building of New York’s Ukrainian Institute of America is full of friendly faces. People are wearing vyshyvankas, traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirts, and Ukrainian flag pins. It’s Feb. 24, 2024 – the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. My colleagues at the Kyiv Independent’s War Crimes ...
Kyiv Independent
As Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine rages on, the stability of neighboring Belarus, which has been backing Russia's aggression, appears to be fracturing. Has Russian President Vladimir Putin's war of aggression opened a Pandora's box for a regime that is practically a remote wing of the Kremlin? Recall that, in Belarus' presidential election in August 2020, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya almost certainly defeated the incumbent Alexander Lukashenko, whose minions had dismissed his opponent as a "housewife." When an upswell of support made it obvious that Tsikhanouskaya was heading for victory,...
Kyiv Independent
Even as the 38th anniversary of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster has come and gone, the nuclear threat posed by Moscow continues to grow. Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear energy company, has a hand in this – namely, by financing Russia’s war against Ukraine, fostering global energy dependencies that threaten to undermine support for Kyiv, and facilitating the occupation of Ukrainian nuclear facilities. Rosatom controls over 40% and 17% of the global markets for uranium enrichment and reactor fuel, respectively. Close to 90 nuclear power units around the world are Russian-designed. Rosatom’s fo...
Kyiv Independent
The news this past week was undoubtedly met with relief in Kyiv and with grief in the Kremlin. The U.S. Congress finally broke its six-month logjam and approved a new package of military aid for Ukraine (as well as for Israel and Taiwan). And the breakthrough came only days after EU leaders also committed to providing even more support, in addition to the large aid packages they recently approved. What this will look like is still being determined, but Germany has already pledged yetanother Patriot air defense system – one of the key technologies that has prevented Russia from gaining a decisi...
Kyiv Independent
Editor’s Note: This article was published by the twice-weekly newsletter “The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak” on April 29, 2024, and has been re-published by the Kyiv Independent with permission. To subscribe to "The Counteroffensive," click here. While most Ukrainians take shelter during Russian attacks, Ukrainian soldier Kostiantyn Chernyshov heads toward the drones. In a war of advanced technology, Kostiantyn's tools would be more at home in World War II: he shoots down Russian drones with a machine gun. "You only have a few seconds to shoot down the drone or damage it as much as possible," ...
Kyiv Independent
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