“Ukraine – Russia”

Ukraine said two agents working for Russia have been killed after a senior Ukrainian intelligence officer was shot dead on Thursday.

The head of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU), Vasyl Malyuk, said in a video statement that two agents working for Russia’s security service FSB had been tracked down and “liquidated” after they resisted arrest on Sunday morning.

It comes after Col Ivan Voronych was shot several times in a Kyiv car park in broad daylight, after being approached by an unidentified assailant who fled the scene.

Oleh found the job via a Telegram channel offering day work and side gigs. It sounded easy enough: he was to travel from his home in eastern Ukraine to the western city of Rivne, pick up a rucksack containing a paint canister and spray it outside the local police station.

It would require nimble feet to flee the scene without being caught, but the money on offer – $1,000 – was good, fantastic even, for what amounted to a morning’s work for the 19-year-old.

But when, on a snowy morning in early February, he opened the bag outside Rivne’s police station, he recoiled in horror. Instead of a paint canister, he saw something that looked like a homemade bomb, with protruding wires and a mobile phone attached to it, apparently a crude remote detonation mechanism.

Since the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, there has hardly been a more pressing issue for NATO than the defense of its eastern borders.

Over the past three years, five of the six NATO countries that share a border with Russia or Belarus — Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland— have already made significant investments to better secure these borders, for example with fences and surveillance systems.

But now, a new plan is in the works: land mines.

Kyiv has resisted drafting young men, anxious to protect the country’s long-term future. That means there is a lot of gray hair on the battlefield.

The call sign “Did” or “Grandpa” is so common in Ukraine’s army that two artillerymen in a four-man howitzer team on the eastern front use it. “I may be of age, but I like to keep moving—sitting at home or in a headquarters isn’t for me,” one of the two, Andriy Kukhar, said on a recent day hunched down in a small dugout near Chasiv Yar, in the country’s east.

Now 46, he listens carefully to the radio, awaiting his next instructions as he keeps an eye on his phone for news about his granddaughter back home. The other Did is his 53-year-old comrade Mykola Voskres, who has five grandchildren, most of whom now live abroad. He left his job working construction in Poland and signed up as a volunteer the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. He thinks the sacrifice is worth it. “The younger generation of Ukrainians should focus on building their lives and preparing to rebuild the country after the war,” he said.

The Kremlin is using nuns at a remote convent in the Baltic region to spread pro-Russian propaganda for its hybrid war on Europe, Estonia’s government has warned.

Estonian officials say the Pühtitsa Convent in eastern Estonia, which claims it has renounced all worldly affairs, is promoting a pro-Putin narrative that claims religious freedoms are under threat in the West.

Nuns at the Russian Orthodox convent are in an ongoing dispute with the Estonian government over a new law that requires them to sever ties with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the church’s spiritual leader and an ardent supporter of the war on Ukraine.

In a classroom in western Ukraine, a group of teenagers are thinking about their futures.

Seventeen-year-old Kira Yukhymenko had always planned to go to university in her home country, but in between sitting her final exams this month, she has been dreaming of leaving to study abroad.

“The war has helped us understand who we are,” she said during a discussion in an English lesson at her school, Lyceum 88, in Lviv. “It has broadened our horizons and also made us more independent.”

After 300 drones killed civilians overnight, President Zelensky called for ‘concrete action’ amid speculation that Putin will announce a new mass mobilisation

President Zelensky has urged the United States to “force Russia into peace” after the Kremlin launched one of its heaviest drone attacks on Ukraine overnight.

At least two people were killed and ten injured in Odesa, the Black Sea port city, as drones targeted residential buildings, a maternity ward, medical facilities and railway infrastructure, officials said.