“Ukraine – Russia”

On Sunday, President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the war with Russia — the first official announcement concerning Ukrainian troop losses since December of 2022. Many on social media have expressed scepticism about the figure. But what do the facts say?

A conflict between Russia and NATO would be inevitable if Western troops go to Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said today.

The Kremlin’s comments come after French President Emmanuel Macron did not rule out putting boots on the ground in Ukraine as Kyiv struggles to fend off Russia’s full-scale invasion.

While Macron noted that there was no consensus about troops at this stage, Ukraine has not asked allies for soldiers to fight its cause and other Western governments even scrambled Tuesday to insist troops were not set to be deployed, the mere suggestion sparked a furious response from Moscow.

Denmark has dropped its investigation into the 2022 explosions on the Nord Stream pipelines carrying Russian gas to Germany, becoming the second country to do so after Sweden closed a separate inquiry.

The multibillion-dollar Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines transporting gas under the Baltic Sea were ruptured by a series of blasts in the Swedish and Danish economic zones in September 2022, releasing vast amounts of methane into the air.

Russia and the west, at loggerheads over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February that year, have pointed fingers at one another. Each has denied involvement and no one has taken responsibility.

The authorities said best leave it unsolved…

After two years of secrecy, Volodymyr Zelensky has finally revealed the number of fallen Ukrainian soldiers. ‘31,000 Ukrainian military personnel have been killed in this war. Not 300,000 or 150,000, as Putin and his deceitful circle falsely claim. But each of those losses is an enormous loss for us’, he said. The President chose not to disclose the number of wounded troops: this, he said, was to prevent Russia from knowing how many people had ‘left the battlefield’.

For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.

Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed, its command center a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage early in the war.

But that is above ground.

Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders.

On one screen, a red line followed the route of an explosive drone threading through Russian air defenses from a point in central Ukraine to a target in the Russian city of Rostov.

Maryna Lyushyna was planning to give a chocolate-themed cooking class on February 24, 2022. The actress and mother of two had prepared everything the night before, and was looking forward to greeting the children who were supposed to be coming to her youth theater in Konotop in northern Ukraine for the event.

But that night, she had trouble sleeping. When she heard some noise, she thought it must be the tram. “At 7 in the morning, a friend called me and said: ‘Turn on the TV, the war has begun!”

Konotop is around 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) from the border with Russia. Two years ago, the town was surrounded by Russian troops within hours of the invasion. There was some resistance, but the forces were unequal and the Ukrainian army soon withdrew.

“Whichever way this war ends,” thought Volodymyr Ishchenko on 24 February 2022, “I will no longer have a homeland.” In the preface to his new book, Towards The Abyss, the iconoclastic sociologist outlines his Soviet-Ukrainian identity as distinct from Ukraine’s Russian-speakers or the population of its south-eastern regions. Instead of ethnicity, these people were shaped by the forces of social revolution, class and modernisation. Looking back at the post-Soviet decades, Ishchenko argues that the political fragmentation of Soviet Ukrainians and the fragility of the “Eastern” (misleadingly called “pro-Russian”) camp in Ukrainian politics, as opposed to the politically stronger “Western” (“pro-European”) camp, is an underestimated cause of the ongoing war.

Oil income: slashed. Oligarchs’ assets: frozen. Access to weapons: choked.

Russia has faced a historic slew of penalties from Washington, Brussels and beyond since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. The punishments, chiefly economic sanctions, were designed in large part to drain Russia’s coffers so it would struggle to fund its war. And more pain has been promised as both the U.S. and EU unveiled new sanctions against Russia this week, some tied to the death of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau emerged Saturday in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, joining other world leaders at the site of one of the war’s first and fiercest battles to mark the second anniversary of the brutal Russian invasion.

Trudeau appeared at Hostomel airport alongside European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo in a show of global solidarity.

As the second anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine arrives, the Russian Army is showing a remarkable capacity to take extraordinary punishment and regenerate itself at a pace western military leaders and experts had not anticipated.

Only nine months ago, American intelligence officials were telling the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that it would take a decade — or more — for Moscow to recover from the staggering losses inflicted by Ukrainian defenders. The German Council on Foreign Relations refined that estimate last fall, warning that the window would be more like five to eight years.