Svitlana Morenets is a Ukrainian journalist and a staff writer at The Spectator. She was named Young Journalist of the Year in the 2024 UK Press Awards. Subscribe to her free weekly email, Ukraine in Focus, here
Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky made an offer to Vladimir Putin. Ukraine would drop its ambition to join Nato and would instead stay neutral, he said. It would not align with the West, in exchange for an end to hostilities. It was a sincere offer, and unpopular with Ukrainians. Yet it was significant: Putin had
While most attention has focused on Vladimir Putin’s repetition of nuclear threats in his speech this morning, the takeaway in Ukraine is different: conscription has begun. This is deeply controversial in Russia given the war’s high mortality rate, but after the rout in the Kharkiv region Putin is running out of options. After his speech,
If Putin is losing the ground war in Ukraine and running out of troops, what other options does he have? The obvious fear is that he’d use nuclear weapons or attack Ukraine’s nuclear power stations. Last night, the Pivdennoukrainsk nuclear power plant in Mykolaiv oblast, 300 km (200 miles) south from Kyiv, was struck, with
Ukraine is racing to establish control over the newly-liberated Kharkiv region. The country’s president Volodymyr Zelensky paid a surprise visit to the city of Izyum, until recently a strategic point for Russia’s occupation reinforcements (photos here). ‘We are moving in only one direction – forward and towards victory’, he said after the Ukrainian flag was raised in
There is extraordinary news from Ukraine this weekend. An offensive in Kharkiv region, bordering Russia on the northwest, has stunned Russia – which had been moving troops south to defend against Ukraine’s Kherson offensive. Kharkiv region has been left only lightly defended by Russia: Moscow had assumed that Ukraine didn’t have the military strength to open
The southern city of Kherson, which fell to Russian forces in the first few days of the war, is one of the places Ukraine would need to liberate if Putin’s army is to be repelled. But what realistic chance is there? Many argued that the Russian occupation is a one-way process: that having taken Crimea,
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This week on Spectator Out Loud, Svitlana Morenets discusses the changes to the syllabus in Ukraine and the difficult decisions parents are having to make over whether to send their children back to school (00:59). Cindy Yu argues that she would be the perfect communist shill (07:45), and John Connolly tells us why cow attacks
For the first time since Russia’s invasion, schools in Ukraine are starting to re-open. For many parents, including my own, this presents a dilemma. Is it safe for pupils to return? My brother is seven and has spent the past year doing ‘remote learning’, which is hard enough in countries at peace, let alone those
This morning, Volodymyr Zelensky signed a moratorium on energy prices – so while gas bills are rising all over Europe, Ukraine will remain unaffected. This honours a pledge he made on his election. Freezing energy bills is a standard populist policy in Ukrainian politics (in a country where temperatures can reach -25ºC and the elderly
To start with, Volodymyr Zelensky was careful not to blame Russians for a war Vladimir Putin started. Appealing to them and speaking in his native Russian, he asked: ‘Do the Russians want war?’ He called on them to rise up to make Putin listen. But this did not happen. Zelensky appears to have decided that
Is Amnesty International victim-blaming? The Ukrainian military has been endangering civilians, it said, by establishing military bases and putting weapons systems in residential areas. Agnès Callamard, the organisation’s secretary-general, remarked that ‘being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law’. It was a bizarre statement. Russian forces are
This afternoon Kyiv and Moscow signed a UN-backed agreement to free up at least 20 million tons of grain from blocked ports. Ukraine said it would not sign a deal with Russia directly, only with Turkey and the UN. As Wolfgang Münchau noted this morning, it marks the first successful mediation between the two sides
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the West was certain that its sanctions were worth the pain. But there always was a question as to whether this resolve would last once the domestic difficulties actually started. This week, western countries moved closer to admitting it might be too much to bear. At the time of the invasion
Boris Johnson’s support for Ukraine looked like a gimmick for many in Britain. Whenever the PM was in trouble, he called president Zelensky. When things got too much in Westminster, Boris popped up in Kyiv. But for Ukrainians, Boris’s backing of Ukraine is no joke: he is a national hero. He is the most popular
Preparations for a ‘referendum’ have begun in Kherson Oblast, the Russian-occupied region north of Crimea, according to Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Kherson regional administration and one of Moscow’s puppet governors. ‘Kherson Oblast will never return to an environment of Nazism, debauchery, and cynicism,’ he said. A date for the referendum has not yet been announced,
After days of missile strikes, Ukrainian forces have forced Russia off Snake Island in the Black Sea. ‘The enemy hastily evacuated the remnants of the garrison in two speedboats and left the island’, according to the Ukrainian Operational South Command. Russia’s defence ministry appeared to concede defeat, saying that ‘Russian forces have completed the assigned
Ivano-Frankivsk has just become the first city in Ukraine to have no Russian Orthodox Church, amid a mass defection of churches away from the Moscow patriarchate and towards the breakaway Orthodox Church of Ukraine. At the start of the invasion in February, almost two-thirds of Orthodox churches were still formally aligned with the Russian Orthodox
A crowded shopping mall in Kremenchuk has become the latest target for Russia’s missile attack. There were more than a thousand civilians’ in the mall, Volodymyr Zelensky said, ‘The mall is on fire, rescuers are fighting the fire. The number of victims is impossible to imagine’. X-22 missiles were fired from Tu-22 M3 long-range bombers,
Dmytro Savluchenko was one of Moscow’s useful idiots: a Ukrainian advocate of Russkiy Mir (or ‘Russian world’), Putin’s idea of a kind of reich of Russian-speaking peoples. Back in 2014, when the Russian army stormed the Donbas region, Savluchenko campaigned for Kherson (an area bordering Crimea) to join Russia. More recently, Savluchenko has served as a senior official in
Two months ago, I became one of the 80,000 Ukrainian refugees who have settled in Britain. The kindness I’ve been shown, by my host family and so many others, has been overwhelming. People are caring, but curious too. They ask how long Zelensky will really fight for. By which I suspect they mean: surely you
