This week’s bonus episode is an extended interview with Bektour Iskender, a journalist and co-founder of Kloop, an NGO and leading news publication in Kyrgyzstan. Through his work with Kloop, Bektour trains young journalists to cover politics and investigate corruption, while also reporting on the most significant stories happening in his home country and near abroad.
We spoke to Bektour about his work in journalism and the history of Russian colonial aggression in Kyrgyzstan, creating a snapshot of a country whose past mirrors Ukraine’s, and whose present is also being determined by Russia’s war.
Until now, the Trump administration's military aid to Ukraine had only consisted of weapons authorized by former President Joe Biden. The Presidential Drawdown Authority allows the president to directly transfer weapons from U.S. military stocks in response to an emergency.
The post-war plan will aim to regenerate Ukraine’s land forces, provide air policing in coordination with Ukraine’s Air Force, and expand Black Sea mine-clearing efforts to restore maritime access.
"We need a person (as an ambassador to the U.S.) to be strong and to be in the context of the most important thing, in the context of strengthening Ukraine — through weapons, first of all. Therefore, one of my ideas is that it can be Ukraine's defense minister," President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets mistakenly presented a June 30 report by a little-known group as an internal U.N. analysis on the 2022 Olenivka prison explosion, which killed over 50 Ukrainian POWs, Slidstvo.Info reported on July 10, citing a response from Lubinets’s office.
"I wouldn't characterize it as something that guarantees peace, but it’s a concept that, you know, that I'll take back to the president (Donald Trump)," U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said without giving further details.
The Kyiv Independent staff documented what it feels like to live and sleep in Kyiv, Ukraine, as Russia intensifies its drone and missile attacks on the city. Filmed over several weeks in June and July, our journalists take shelter in bathrooms, basements, and parking garages as explosions ring out overhead.
DTEK, Ukraine's biggest private energy company, has begun final commissioning of the country's largest battery energy storage project, , developed in partnership with Fluence Energy Inc., DTEK announced on July 10 at the Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC) in Rome.
At least two were killed and 25 injured in a Russian attack on Kyiv overnight on July 10. The assault comes a day after Russia launched its largest-ever drone and missile strike against Ukraine since the start of the full-scale war.
