KI short logo

Russia news

'Impossible to ban grief' — how Russia tries and fails to hide its casualties in Ukraine
Russia

'Impossible to ban grief' — how Russia tries and fails to hide its casualties in Ukraine

by Karol Luczka

Russia has tightened control over information about its battlefield losses in Ukraine, cutting off data and closing one public loophole after another. The effort has not stopped the evidence of the dead from surfacing. As 2025 came to an end, Western governments and independent groups alike tallied staggering figures for Russia's battlefield losses in Ukraine, reaching no fewer than 400,000 killed, wounded, and missing that year. According to some estimates, Russia could have lost more soldiers

More from Russia

NewsLetters

News Feed

Tuesday, February 3

Ukraine war latest: 'Ukraine's defense forces have regained positions in Kupiansk'

This is Chris York reporting from Kyiv on day 1,441 of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Today's top story so far: Ukraine's Armed Forces have regained positions in the embattled city of Kupiansk, Kharkiv Oblast, Ukrainian open-source mapping project DeepState said on Feb. 3. Russia has been trying  to push across the front by launching heavy offensive operations on multiple axes, including in the Kupiansk sector, to recapture the city it lost to a 2022 Ukrainian counteroffensive. Rus

Kyiv's National Botanical Garden's battle to keep plants alive amid war, sub-zero temperatures

On a bitterly cold winter morning inside Kyiv’s M.M. Gryshko National Botanical Garden, scientist Liudmyla Buyun checks a thermometer mounted against the glass wall of a greenhouse. She pauses, notes the reading, and moves on. The routine repeats several times a day, and sometimes through the night. "This is not a job that ends when you go home," says scientist Liudmyla Buyun. "For many of us, this is our life." Winter has pushed the National Botanical Garden into a daily fight to keep thousan

Employees of the Kyiv National Botanical Garden bring wood to the greenhouse in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Jan. 30, 2026.

How Soviet nostalgia and silence enable wartime complicity on Russian YouTube

"Everyone was equal," the kerchiefed babushka of Eli from Russia — a YouTuber who documents everyday life and regional culture across the Russian Federation — tells her granddaughter wistfully, recalling life in the Soviet Union. "There were no rich and poor." And as Russian missiles strike Ukrainian cities, Eli's grandmother remembers something else with longing: "We worked for our country. And it was united." The Russian public's complicity in the war of aggression against Ukraine is confoun

Screenshot from "Eli from Russia" YouTube channel.

How the Kremlin drafted Russia's hackers to attack the West, leading to a rare US court case

Muleshoe, population 5,000, sits in the Texas Panhandle, next to the New Mexico state line, and about as far away from Ukraine as anywhere can be. A small, arid town linked to the outside world by a patchwork of county roads and a smattering of private airports for single-engine planes, it’s about an hour's drive away from the nearest metropolises of Lubbock or Amarillo, and two hours away from Roswell, New Mexico. One could say that Muleshoe is prime territory for cowboys looking to ranch, al

About Russia

The Kyiv Independent’s coverage of news on Russia. Spanning eleven time zones across Eastern Europe and Asia, Russia has an estimated population of 146 million people. Russia’s capital city is Moscow, which is home to almost one in 10 Russians. Russia’s official currency is the Russian Ruble.

Read more

Most Popular

Editors' Picks

News Feed