Soldiers practice during urban warfare drills on Dec. 26, 2021 in Kyiv. (Kyiv’s 130th Territorial Defense Brigade)
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: Why?
Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, a fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.
Ukraine has no information about an energy ceasefire that U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Oct. 11, a senior Ukrainian official told the Kyiv Independent.
A press release from the defense ministry notes that its procurement agency has contracted for 5.5 times as many drones as in the same period of 2025, and that the volume of deliveries has increased by almost 3.7 times.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said "this week alone, the Russians have launched around 1,450 aerial bombs, 75 missiles of various types and over 1,640 attack drones, around 60% of which are jet-powered."
"These things are important now to put clearly on the record and, I believe, help voters in Germany and France understand that some of this politics is instigated via our enemies, namely Russia," media reports Burnham saying.
In this interview, the Kyiv Independent’s Kateryna Hodunova speaks with Pavlo Kazarin, a Ukrainian journalist, publicist and serviceman, about Ukraine’s mobilization crisis, draft evasion, soldiers going absent without leave (AWOL), and the growing divide between those serving and those remaining in civilian life.
"The real cause of the war in Europe is Russia, and Russia alone. It is already possible today to halt the attacks on our energy sector, but Putin does not want to do so," Zelensky said.
Three children were among those killed by a Russian airstrike in the early hours of Oct. 10. Some victims were trapped for hours beneath the rubble as rescuers searched for survivors.
On Oct. 10, Yandex updated its user agreement to include drone and missile attacks among circumstances of force majeure that could exempt the company from contractual obligations.
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