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.
Russian forces launched a missile attack on the city of Poltava on the evening of June 20, injuring 11 people, including five children, officials reported.
Ukraine's military reportedly struck an oil terminal in occupied Crimea overnight on June 21, Telegram media channels reported, citing resident accounts.
Russian forces launched nine glide bombs on the regional capital, according to preliminary information, Governor Ivan Fedorov said. One victim's body was recovered from the rubble of a destroyed home.
"Tonight and in the coming hours, we must pay particularly close attention to air raid alerts," Zelensky warned Ukrainians in his evening address on June 20.
Sending the medal back via Nova Post, Ukraine’s leading postal service, President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked the Polish people for their support and solidarity during Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The scheme involved men pretending to be musicians going on charity tours abroad, with the former minister signing documents to the State Border Guard permitting them to cross the border.
The decision by Viktor Orban's Fidesz party to block 12 Ukrainian newspapers in September 2025 only sought to deepen divisions between Kyiv and Budapest, said Hungarian Social Relations and Culture Minister Zoltan Tarr.
In the city of Kharkiv, two people were killed and 10 were injured, including a child and a teenager, after Russian drones and glide bombs struck apartment buildings in an overnight attack, Kharkiv Oblast Governor Oleh Synehubov wrote on his Telegram channel.
"Without a reliable power supply, the plant cannot continue assembling unmanned systems and manufacturing electronics for new batches of drones for the occupying forces," the group claimed.
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