Dinara Khalilova

Some names have been changed to protect the identities of those featured in the story As a war crimes researcher at the Reckoning Project, my job was to listen to Ukrainians who had fled the occupation. What they had to say reshaped how I understand life in Russian-occupied territories. Simplistic outside judgments about people living under occupation often feel deeply unfair to Ukrainians who escaped it. From a safe distance, it is easy to say, "Why didn't they stay and resist?" or "Why didn'

Some names have been changed to protect the identities of those featured in the story. After over two years of full-time reporting on the war in my country, I spent several months with the Reckoning Project, recording testimonies of alleged war crimes. I focused on forced displacement, deportation, and daily life under occupation, speaking with people who lived under Russian rule — from Crimea's annexation in 2014 to the occupation of parts of Kherson and Kharkiv oblasts in 2022. Many lost lo

Most Russians seem unwilling to give up the privileges the government gives them at the expense of the country's ethnic minorities, says Botakoz Kassymbekova, a historian focusing on Eastern Europe at the University of Zurich. "Russian colonialism is not reformable," she says. "Russian dissidents want to retain the empire, which means they want to maintain the status quo,” Kassymbekova alleges. “This status quo will never bring democracy, simply because an empire is an authoritarian system," s

The Kyiv Independent's Dinara Khalilova sits down with the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Steven Pifer, to discuss the political implications of Russia's attack on Dnipro with a nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile last week.

The Kyiv Independent sat down with the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, John Herbst, to discuss the future of the U.S. policy towards Ukraine as it continues its defense against Russia’s aggression.

State Border Guard spokesperson Andrii Demchenko confirmed to the Kyiv Independent that a Russian sabotage group planted a Russian flag near the border in Ukraine's Chernihiv Oblast, but said that the event occurred in the grey zone and Russian troops did not launch a major offensive in the region.

Marharyta Koldanova was standing at a bus stop in a residential area in Kyiv when a sudden loud noise went off, prompting her to take out a tourniquet from her bag and prepare to quickly apply it in case she got injured by an aerial attack. "I was overwhelmed with adrenaline and stress," Koldanova told the Kyiv Independent. The air raid alarm that usually alerts Ukrainians of a threat of a Russian drone or missile strike wasn’t on. The sound she heard wasn’t a weapon exploding but the noise co

Russian troops shelled the village of Bilozerka in Kherson Oblast, wounding a paramedic and an ambulance driver, Governor Oleksandr Prokudin reported on Nov. 3.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said in a radio interview on Nov. 3, as cited by Hungarian news outlet Telex, that if Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidency, "Europe cannot remain pro-war," supposedly referring to EU's defense assistance to Ukraine, which Orban has repeatedly criticized.

After "a public reaction," Google representatives contacted the Ukrainian side, and the company is already working on fixing the issue, Andrii Kovalenko, the head of the counter-disinformation department at Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, said in a later update on social media.

Most of these strikes targeted civilian facilities and critical infrastructure, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The largest number of casualties was reported in Kherson Oblast, where Russian attacks killed one person and injured another 10, including three children.

Russia launched its latest overnight drone strike on Ukraine, targeting the capital in an attack that lasted over five hours, city officials reported on Nov. 3. Several waves of explosions were heard in Kyiv throughout the night.

The Russian military carried out at least 36 double-tap strikes against Ukraine from the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022 to August 2024, killing over 100 people, according to a recent report by Truth Hounds, a Ukrainian non-profit organization that documents and investigates war crimes. Twenty such attacks were carried out this year alone. A double-tap attack is an illegal military tactic in which an initial strike is followed by a delayed second strike, usually intended to ki

Why do some young people in the West romanticize Communism? How did Russian President Vladimir Putin manage to sell the idea of retaining the imperialist regime to the Russian people?