Every week we wrap up essential coverage of the war in Ukraine, from news and features to analysis, opinion and more.
It took a war to see again
When Russia went to war against Ukraine, Serhiy and Tamara Sydorenko left their home town of Zhytomyr, west of Kyiv, and moved to the Polish city of Poznań with their daughter, Margarita.
Serhiy – blind from an accident during Soviet military training in 1986, but a paralympian in judo nonetheless – heard about a professor who performed corneal transplants in the Polish city of Katowice. In mid-December 2022, he went under the knife, and was discharged that Christmas Eve with the vision in his right eye fully restored, Shaun Walker and Ada Petriczko reported.
When he looks in the mirror, Serhiy sees a 56-year-old – the last time he looked, it was a 19-year-old. He has seen his daughter for the first time. When a woman walked past with a tiny, fluffy dog on a leash, he stopped in his tracks. He remembered sheepdogs but did not know people kept miniature dogs that looked like toys.
He was fascinated by the way people dressed, by the buildings and by what cars looked like in 2022. The last time he could see, most of the cars had been Ladas.
The first years after Serhey went blind were immensely difficult. It’s something he thinks a lot about, as thousands of injured Ukrainian soldiers come back from the frontlines. “They will need really good moral and psychological support,” he says.
‘Roubles can’t bring back your husband’
Maria Andreeva, 34, is one of the unofficial leaders of a grassroots movement in Russia: the wives and mothers of some of the 300,000 Russian men who were conscripted in September 2022 for the Ukraine war.
“Why should our men who led a peaceful life have to go to Ukraine?” Andreeva, who lives in Moscow, says. “If our government decided to attack a smaller country, let the army fight but leave our men alone.” They organise and fume against Vladimir Putin on a Telegram channel, Put Domoy (The Way Home), which has 35,000 members.
With their loved ones still on the battlefield, many women are staging public protests and writing open letters taking officialdom to task, Pjotr Sauer reported. Tackling the movement is a delicate matter for the Kremlin, says Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, based in Moscow. “These wives and mothers are not part of the traditional liberal and urban anti-Kremlin movement. Many of them come from Putin’s core base of support.”
In an attempt to address some of the anger, Putin previously spoke to mothers of soldiers fighting in Ukraine in a carefully orchestrated meeting. A Guardian investigation showed the women were part of a handpicked cadre of mothers of soldiers with ties to the authorities.
Andreeva, who has dismissed Putin’s meeting as a “political show” says some of the louder voices in her group have been offered money in return for silence. “No amount of roubles can bring back your husband,” she says.“We are tired of being good girls. It has got us nowhere.”
Trench archaeology
Soldier Oleksandr Koslov was digging a trench in the forest near the Siverskyi Donets river in eastern Ukraine when his group began turning up flint tools, animal bones, ceramics – even a neatly made arrowhead. The 32-year-old history graduate realised they’d struck something significant.
“Under the conditions you need to dig the trenches as fast as possible,” he said, but the group gathered up what they could. Later, Koslov improvised a “museum” from an ammunition box and called Dr Serhii Telizhenko at Ukraine’s Institute of Archaeology. Telizhenko assessed that Koslov and his fellow soldiers had stumbled on a burial site dating back perhaps 5,000 years to the stone age, but also encompassing the Eneolithic or copper age, and the “catacomb culture” of the middle bronze age.
Telizhenko, keen to impart best practice to Ukrainian troops, is the author of a military handbook titled Archaeology and Monuments in War, offering instructions on what to do if soldiers discover an archaeological site. Ukraine is spectacularly rich in ancient archaeology, whether of the Scythians, with their horses and finely worked gold, or the intriguing stone age Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, which produced remarkable, elaborately decorated ceramics and huge, city-scale “megasites”, or of the Greeks, who traded on the Black Sea coast.
But Russia’s full-scale invasion has meant an onslaught of destruction to this rich record of the past. The damage, Telizhenko told Charlotte Higgins, “is a huge loss, not just to archaeology locally; this has global significance”.
‘Russia’s underwater Black Sea fleet’
Ukraine’s military destroyed a Russian landing ship stationed in the Crimean port city of Feodosia – the bombing sparking an extensive fire in the port area, Pjotr Sauer reported.
The air force said it struck the Novocherkassk navy ship, which was stationed in Ukrainian Crimean waters that are controlled by Russia.
“The fleet in Russia is getting smaller and smaller! Thanks to the air force pilots and everyone involved for the filigree work!” the commander of Ukraine’s air force, Mykola Oleshchuk, said online.
Commenting on the strike, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, joked that he was “thankful” to his country’s air force “for the impressive replenishment of the Russian underwater Black Sea fleet with another vessel”.
‘Russia can outproduce us’
Poland’s new foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, called on European countries to boost long-term plans for military production after returning from his first foreign visit, to neighbouring Ukraine. “Wars are not decided by tactical engagements but by industrial capacities, and we are behind the curve,” he said.
“As the west, we are 20 times richer than Russia, but if Russia puts its economy on a wartime footing and we continue on a peacetime basis, they can outproduce us,” he added. He said governments should offer long-term contracts to arms companies, or fund manufacturing themselves.
Shaun Walker reported from Warsaw that Poland has been one of Ukraine’s biggest backers since Russia’s full-scale invasion last February, motivated by its own troubled history with Russia and longstanding Polish concerns about Russian expansionism.
This week, the US government announced what it said was its last available package of military support for Ukraine, unless and until Republicans in Congress agree to send more. According to the state department, the package is worth up to $250m and includes air defence munitions and components, Himars ammunition, 155mm and 105mm artillery ammunition, anti-armour munitions, and over 15m rounds of ammunition. Jack Watling, from the Rusi defence thinktank, writes that Ukraine can defeat Russia, but doing so will require far more support from Europe.
