0 out of 25,000

Quality journalism takes work — and a community that cares.
Help us reach 25,000 members by the end of 2025.

Russia news

How a trio of power brokers turned Putin’s US strategy into a quiet turf war
Russia

How a trio of power brokers turned Putin’s US strategy into a quiet turf war

by Tim Zadorozhnyy

Russian President Vladimir Putin's outreach to the Trump administration — once seen as one of Moscow's most coordinated diplomatic efforts — now appears increasingly fractured. Putin's longtime foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, is reportedly losing ground to Kirill Dmitriev, head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, who aims to take a leading role in Russia's contacts with the Trump administration. Experts caution that Russia's internal dynamics are more nuanced than they appear. "They might be

News Feed

Reporting from the front is getting even harder

Over the past few years, I’ve spent much of my time on the road — from Pokrovsk, Kupiansk, Sudzha, and the villages and fields in between — documenting what Russia’s war looks like for the people fighting it and caught in its storm. Our trips out in front-line areas can get a bit hairy sometimes, whether it’s glide bombs hitting a few hundred meters away in Vovchansk, our driver disappearing in Selydove, or nearly falling out of a speeding pick-up truck while chased by Russian drones on our way

Ukraine war latest live: Ukraine strike on Novorossiysk snarls Russian Black Sea oil exports

Hello, this is Kateryna Hodunova reporting from Kyiv on day 1,365 of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Today's top story so far: Ukraine’s Nov. 14 strike on Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, one of Moscow’s main oil export hubs, has delayed oil shipments by two to three days after damaging a jetty at the Sheskharis oil harbor, Reuters reported on Nov. 18, citing its sources. Novorossiysk and a neighboring Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal, which together handle about one-fift

Why Russia cannot help but invade

The planned Trump-Putin summit in Budapest has been shelved. The White House says there's no point meeting unless "we're going to make a deal." Some view this as a setback for diplomacy, but it may well be the clearest moment in a long struggle to curb Russia's appetite for war. Russian President Vladimir Putin made the decision to invade first in 2014 and then again in 2022. Western policy has long assumed that peace depends on his will. Under U.S. President Donald Trump, that belief was paire

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Russia, on June 22, 2025.

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.

Most Popular

1.

At first glance, a YouTube interview with Philippe Marques Pinto looks like one of dozens of others in Ukraine’s long-running campaign to recruit South American soldiers to bolster its ranks in the fight against Russia. “I worked as a private security guard in Brazil, and when I arrived here, I got training, and it was just a question of adaptation,” Pinto says in an April 25, 2025, video for the Foreign Recruitment Center, a channel run by Ukraine’s Defense Ministry. But according to police i

News Feed