“Ukraine – Russia”

“I grew up speaking Russian, I am Russian by blood, but I don’t associate myself with Russia or the Russian world,” says Anatoly Deryugin, a major in the Latvian army.

Anatoly, 43, is one of more than one in three Latvians who speak Russian as their first language. They are now under pressure to prove their loyalty because of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Born and raised in Latvia, he has spent more than half his life in his country’s military. His mother is also a Russian-speaker from Latvia, and his father is from eastern Ukraine.

It marks the first month since the conflict began that major European governments failed to make a single new promise to send weapons

Military support for Ukraine appears to be drying up after research revealed that major European governments failed to make a single new pledge to send weapons to Kyiv last month.

Since Russia’s invasion in February, the UK, France and Germany have promised to stand by Ukraine with whatever assistance it takes to win the battle.

But July became the first month since the beginning of the conflict during which there were no significant new pledges of international support by Europe’s largest economies.

One by one, the men slipped out of their houses into the night in plain clothes, breaking the Russian curfew. Dodging patrols and moving quickly but quietly, they gathered at the site of a weapons cache hidden two years earlier.

Selected from a wide network of Ukrainian partisans in the nation’s occupied south for their weapons training and physical prowess, they were about to embark on their most daring mission of the war to date; one that would almost cost one of them his life.

KYIV, Ukraine — Tensions around the nuclear power plant on the front lines of the war in Ukraine escalated sharply on Thursday, as the Russian and Ukrainian militaries traded charges that each was preparing to stage an attack on the plant in coming days, risking a catastrophic release of radiation.

The Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that the Ukrainian military was preparing a “terrorist attack” on the sprawling Zaporizhzhia power plant complex on the Dnipro river, prompting the Ukrainian military intelligence agency to respond that the Russian warning was in fact a pretext for Moscow to stage a “provocation” of some kind there on Friday.

#Ukraine: The first documented loss of a Russian 2S5 Giatsint-S 152mm self-propelled gun, after being hit by counter-battery fire from the Ukrainian 44th Artillery Brigade. pic.twitter.com/FZn9wxF6xH

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) August 18, 2022

KYIV — “Grenade!”

As recently as last year, the shout would have been frighteningly out of place at Kyiv’s EBSH sports club — a gym like those in well-heeled neighborhoods worldwide, frequented by upwardly mobile members seeking to get fit, build muscle, or lose weight — and perhaps get their weekly dose of adrenaline.

Pavel Filatyev knew the consequences of what he was saying. The ex-paratrooper understood he was risking prison, that he would be called a traitor and would be shunned by his former comrades-in-arms. His own mother had urged him to flee Russia while he still could. He said it anyway.

“I don’t see justice in this war. I don’t see truth here,” he said over a tucked-away cafe table in the Moscow financial district. It was his first time sitting down in person with a journalist since returning from the war in Ukraine.

Elite special forces reported to be behind fireball blast at ammunition dump in Russian occupied territory

Ukrainian special forces are reported to be behind a series of mysterious explosions behind enemy lines in occupied Crimea.

Blasts at an open-air ammunition dump and an electrical substation in the north of the Russian-held peninsula were the work of an elite military unit, according to an anonymous Ukrainian official.

Footage shared on social media showed a huge fireball sent into the sky by the explosion at the ammunition dump, followed by secondary blasts as munitions cooked off.

Explosions at a munitions dump in Crimea. The detonations have allegedly damaged a cable, disabling Russian communications.#russiaisaterrorisstate #WarInUkraine #StandWithUkraine pic.twitter.com/2ovloxoZ5v

— Stepan Stepanenko (@StepanenkoSF) August 16, 2022

On a sunny October morning, the nation’s top intelligence, military and diplomatic leaders filed into the Oval Office for an urgent meeting with President Biden. They arrived bearing a highly classified intelligence analysis, compiled from newly obtained satellite images, intercepted communications and human sources, that amounted to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war plans for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

#Ukraine: The crew of a Russian BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicle decides to take the safest route – right between two previously destroyed Russian BMP-1AM and BMP-2 in Yakovlivka, #Donetsk Oblast – and surprisingly they blow up on an anti-tank mine. pic.twitter.com/2E2cNs0sbF

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) August 15, 2022

A week after an apparent Ukrainian attack on a Russian military base in occupied Crimea, an arms store at another military facility has been hit by a series of explosions.

Russian officials said a fire triggered the blasts in the Dzhankoi area, before blaming “sabotage”.

A separate fire broke out at a power sub-station and a railway was damaged.

A string of blasts last week destroyed Russian warplanes at a Black Sea base on the Crimean coast.

#Ukraine: A Russian cargo truck and APC were tracked by the Ukrainian drone right up to the moment when the truck was hit by a German DM22 HEAT off-route mine hidden in the bushes. pic.twitter.com/D9wR1nFlbI

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) August 16, 2022

Soaring international energy prices have brought power blackouts to Europe as Kosovo said it could no longer afford to import electricity, adding to fears that tensions with Russia will plunge the continent into crisis this winter.

Consumers in the Balkan state have been told they will be allowed six hours of power at a time, punctuated by two-hour breaks, according to a spokesperson for its energy distribution company, KEDS.

In the scrubby bush of a southern Ukraine battlefield, the enemy is hard to see but clearly a looming threat.

Four soldiers fire repeated rounds through a curtain of flimsy trees as their unit beats a halting escape from the Russian troops.

“Move, move, move,” someone urges, his command rising above the clutter of English and Ukrainian voices.