Ahead of a new round of peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv, a dispatch from the one bright spot in the long-embattled grey zone separating Ukraine from the breakaway lands of the east. With words by Tom Vennink for De Volkskrant.

A weapon rests up against a muddy bunker wall. A soldier sits apart from his rifle. Per a new agreement, this tiny strip of the frontline has been designated a safe zone, and troops have been pulled back. But it’s a shaky peace. On the edges of the safe zone, mortar shells explode and the irregular heartbeat of war continues to echoe through the snow-covered hills. At the Stanytsia Luhanska crossing point, 70 kilometres away, a once bombed-out bridge has just been restored, another possible portent of peace.


In Ukraine, two kilometres of hope

Two years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the hourly artillery duels, airstrikes and pitched fighting in the country’s east and south have turned the more than 600-mile front line into a scarred frontier. Parts of it may be uninhabitable for years, if not decades. Villages and towns are destroyed. Fields are mined. Roads are barely recognizable.

But clinging to the wreckage of their homes, and hometowns, are residents who refuse to leave. Buoyed by volunteers who deliver aid and their own battle-hardened survival instincts, they carry on with their lives in an unending test of endurance. The reasons they stay are many: to care for disabled family members, to look after pets or livestock or, plainly, their love of home.

But in enclaves where the thuds of artillery serve as white noise, war is never far away.

See the essay published in The New York Times

When Home Is Now the Front Line

As well as picking up migrants at mosques, markets and their workplaces, Russian authorities have also begun recruiting migrant workers straight from jail, offering them freedom in exchange for fighting in the war.

Kyrgyz national Beknazar Borugul Uulu was recruited straight from a Siberian prison by the mercenary group Wagner to fight for Russia in Bakhmut. Last summer, he won his freedom and returned to his family in Kyrgyzstan with seven medals in his bag. But just days later he was back in jail — arrested this time by Kyrgyzstan, for fighting in another country’s army. At the family home — overlooking the jagged cliffs of the Kyrgyz highlands — Borugul’s wife, pregnant with their third child, now hopes that Moscow’s influence in the former Soviet republic will help in her husband‘s case.

Russia is rounding up Central Asian migrants to replace the killed and wounded in Ukraine

The meltdown in 1986 blanketed the region with a hundred times more radiation than that released by the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Chernobyl was one of the first areas Russian tanks rolled through last year as they swept out of Belarus in hopes of seizing Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, about 75 miles to the south. And it was one of the first places they were driven out, forced to withdraw at the end of last March.

Visiting the zone today, past calamity and current tragedy intersect in strange and fascinating ways. Before the war, the ghostly city of Pripyat, once home to tens of thousands of atomic workers before it was abandoned, had become a dark tourist attraction for those drawn to post-apocalyptic desolation. Now, with cities across Ukraine obliterated, the ruins of Chernobyl feel less otherworldly than grimly familiar.

The Past and Present cross Paths as War comes to Chernobyl

The exodus, fulled by fears of violence and repressions, started after Azerbaijan staged a bloody, lightning offensive to retake the territory. Armenians have decried it as ethnic cleansing.

Refugees arrived to the Armenian town of Goris, bringing with them whatever they could carry, after a gruelling journey trapped for several days in the long queue of cars that formed along the Lachin corridor, the single route out to Armenia from Nagorno-Karabakh.

Exodus in the Caucasus

Some claim they had to work with the Russians in order to survive the occupation. “You either do as they say or they can kill you,” a teacher who adopted the Russian curriculum says. Other residents demand punishment for all collaborators. One, a man who was tortured by Russian forces — after being denounced by a spiteful neighbour, he believes — says he wants her to be held accountable for the pain she caused. “When I’m overwhelmed by my emotions, I feel like I could kill her.”

See the essay published in The New Yorker

The Hunt for Russian Collaborators in Ukraine

In Kivsharivka, a small town in the Kharkiv region, the winter cold seeped in through walls damaged by shelling earlier in the war. It spread as damp and frost through apartments accustomed to central heating. “I do not play in my room now because the pillows here got mouldy,” says 6-year-old Vira Ovcharenko. As temperatures fell far below zero and snow covered the ground, Nina Hartseva, 89, stayed wrapped up in her coat day and night, keeping a gas stove burning in the kitchen, her only source of warmth.

Across Ukraine, municipal workers battled to restore power stations targeted over and over by Russian missiles. When they succeeded, families could huddle around electric heaters for warmth. But many turned to the forest too, heading into woodland riddled with landmines to chop firewood to burn in stoves. “What would we do without the forest?” Anatoliy Demiannyk says.

Fighting the cold in Ukraine

Fuelled by hot and dry weather, the fires in Siberia grew to become bigger than all the other forest fires in the world combined. Smoke from the fires engulfed far-flung settlements, blotting out the sun, making the air difficult to breathe, and turning the skies an apocalyptic reddish hue. Yakutia’s residents, many of them farmers, stepped out to fight the unprecedented fires themselves, using makeshift kit and basic tools, tying handkerchiefs over their faces to protect against the smoke. At the same time, they raced to handle the year’s harvest, collecting what they could before wildfires consumed their crops.

As fires approached ever closer, villagers faced the decision of whether to stay, or leave homes behind and go. Albina Kovrova, 31, hung up the washing on one day. The next, with the fire raging just a few hundred metres away, she took her two children and left. Others stayed. The village’s cattle herder waited all day for her twenty cows and calves to come home. By nightfall, only four had returned, injured, covered in burns and soot. The others became confused in the smoke and didn’t find their way home. The family may struggle to feed those that did — the haystacks they’d harvested for the winter had all burnt too.

See the full story at National Geographic

Siberia’s wildfires submerge it in smoke

Franz Josef Land, a jumble of glacier-covered islands in the Arctic Ocean named after an Austro-Hungarian emperor, was until a few years ago mostly uninhabited, home to polar bears, walruses, sea birds and little else. But thanks to a warming climate, all that is changing, and quickly. With words by Andrew Kramer.

Russia now has the largest military presence above the Arctic Circle. A barracks building, sealed off from the elements like a space station, accommodates 150 or so soldiers. A new runway can handle fighter jets, two of which recently buzzed the North Pole.

The Russian Ministry of Defence recently took reporters on a tour of sites that included Trefoil Base, its northernmost military installation, as its army becomes the world’s first to act on the strategic implications of climate change for the Arctic region.

In the Russian Arctic, the first stirrings of a very cold war

It is rare for Western journalists to be allowed to report from inside the self-declared republic. The criteria used by its communications ministry to grant permits are unclear. But such permits do, apparently, exist. A report from the so-called People’s Republic, with words by Der Spiegel’s Christian Esch.

At Stanytsia Luhanska, the border crossing dividing the breakaway territory from areas controlled by Kyiv, pensioners struggle across a broken bridge over the Donets river. Suitcases, baby strollers and coffins are carefully carried over its bombed-out surface. It’s the only crossing for many miles, connecting the 1.5 million residents of the Luhansk People’s Republic to families, friends and business partners on the other side of the former front line. In Luhansk itself, the smaller of the two main cities of the Donbass coal mining region, shops are largely empty, and the main hotel, bullet holes still visible in its windows, sees few guests. The city suffered heavily from fighting in the summer of 2014.

A trip to the pro-Russian pseudo-state of Luhansk

A dispatch from the far eastern Russian region of Yakutia, with words by New York Times Moscow bureau chief Neil MacFarquhar.

The region, one of the coldest inhabited places on earth, is often known as the Kingdom of Winter and 90% of its surface is covered with permafrost — permanently frozen ground — sometimes as much as 10 feet deep. This ground is now thawing underfoot. The Arctic, including much of Siberia, is warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the world, with average temperatures in Yakutsk, the regional capital, rising more than 2.5 degrees Celsius in recent decades, from -10 to -7.5. As the permafrost thaws, land sinks and transforms the terrain into an obstacle course of hummocks and craters, or sinks further into swamps and lakes. Houses slip and fall, animals are forced to change centuries-old hunting and migration patterns, and floods increasingly wreak havoc on the land. Some villages are threatened with being completely flooded, and indigenous peoples are more at risk than ever. Even in the capital, Yakutsk, subsiding ground has damaged around 1,000 buildings.

Russian land of permafrost and mammoths is thawing

Ramzan Kadyrov, the mountainous republic’s Kremlin-installed leader, is rebuilding the city with great pomp and glamour. Billions of dollars are being pumped in from Moscow and as long as Kadyrov keeps a lid on the region’s separatist and extremist tendencies, he has free rein.

Behind the glittering facades of modern-day Grozny lies its leadership’s human rights record, which is far from pristine. Under Kadyrov’s rule, opposition movements have been silenced, activists have been killed, the media brought into line and any public dissent has been quashed. Numerous Chechens have been disappeared, according to reports by civil rights groups, and anti-gay purges have recently returned. Chechnya is now a state within a state, where strict laws based on local traditions and the current regime’s interpretation of Islam are at odds with the Russian mainstream. It is a deceptively calm place.

Chechnya: The emperor's new clothes

A portrait, shot on assignment for the New York Times, of a Kazakh Muslim hired to work as a guard at one of the many indoctrination camps in China’s Xinjiang region. Baimurat, 39, said he witnessed prison-like conditions in the camps, where the Chinese government has detained as many as a million Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities. 

The rapid increase in the number of detainees has led the Chinese government to recruit guards from among the same ethnic minority groups as the detainees themselves, such as Baimurat. He later fled with his family to Kazakhstan, where he shared his story with the New York Times, offering a rare, firsthand glimpse into the workings of Xinjiang’s security state.

He needed a job. China gave him one: Locking up his fellow Muslims.

A dispatch from Kazan, the capital of the Russian republic of Tatarstan, where the Muslim Tatar population fears Moscow’s centralization drive is harming local culture. With words by Jesper Gormsen.

In the 1990s, the fluid and formative days after the fall of the Soviet Union, Tatar activists fought for local autonomy and even adopted their own constitution, which made teaching the Tatar language compulsory in schools. Now, after a lightning-fast legislative move by Moscow, Tatar language classes have been reduced from five hours a week to an optional two, and local parents plan to sue. The idea of Russia as a federation is losing ground, with everything increasingly measured in loyalty to the Kremlin. The Muslim Tatar community is on the sharp edge of this trend.

See the full story at Dagbladet Information

In Russia, a Muslim minority fears a loss of heritage

'Occupation survivors' published in The New York Times

Hope for peace along the frontline in east Ukraine rests on a 2 kilometer stretch of land, the first peaceful strip of borderland since the war began six years ago.