Every week we wrap up the must-reads from our coverage of the Ukraine war, from news and features to analysis, visual guides and opinion.
Signs of shift in Russia’s war aims
Russia’s foreign minister said in televised remarks on Wednesday that Moscow’s military “tasks” now go beyond the eastern Donbas region to permanently occupying broad swaths of southern Ukraine. Sergei Lavrov said Russia might seek more territory along the frontlines in Ukraine, calling it a buffer against the Himars long-range rocket artillery provided by the US.
The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Andrew Roth, said Lavrov’s comments were the clearest signal yet that the Kremlin was preparing to launch a new round of annexations.
“Now the geography is different,” Lavrov said, in a change of rhetoric from the Russian government. “It’s not just Donetsk and Luhansk, it’s Kherson, Zaporizhzhia and a number of other territories. And this is an ongoing process, consistent and insistent.”
Ukraine is now seeking to establish a one-off tribunal to try Russia’s top regime members for the act of aggression, which could see it issuing an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin.
Ukraine and Russia agree to restart grain exports
Ukraine and Russia signed a UN-backed deal to allow the export of millions of tonnes of grain from blockaded Black Sea ports, potentially averting the threat of a catastrophic global food crisis.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said at a signing ceremony on Friday that the deal would open the way to significant volumes of food exports from Ukraine and alleviate a food and economic crisis in the developing world. He said that “the beacon of hope was shining bright in the Black Sea” and called on Russia and Ukraine to fully implement the accord.
In Kyiv, there is deep scepticism about Russia’s intentions but Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said Ukraine was trusting in the UN and Turkey – a key player in the negotiations – to police the agreement. Joanna Partridge looks at what challenges lie ahead in moving millions of tonnes of grain from the blockaded ports.
Ukrainian boy held hostage by Russia tells of cleaning up torture rooms
Vladislav Buryak, a 16-year-old Ukrainian boy, was separated from his family on 8 April at a checkpoint while attempting to flee the city of Melitopol. For 90 days he was held hostage by Russian soldiers and made to clear up interrogation rooms as he heard other prisoners being tortured in a nearby cell, he told Peter Beaumont.
“There were bloodstains and soaked bandages. I could hear the questioning too, at least three times week. ‘Do you have weapons? Who else has weapons?’ They were shouting and the people being tortured were yelling really loudly,” Vladislav said.
“People were being beaten up and tortured with electric shocks. If someone didn’t say something, the torture would continue, sometimes for several hours.”
The teenager was released after a months-long negotiation between his father, Oleg – a local Ukrainian official – and Russian soldiers, who wanted to exchange Vladislav for an individual of interest to the Russian military.
Separatists increase forced conscription as losses mount
Pro-Russia separatist forces have stepped up the forced conscription of men – including Ukrainian passport holders – in occupied areas of Donbas, Peter Beaumont and Artem Mazhulin report.
“Since 24 February we’ve seen men stopped in the street, having passports taken and forcibly sent to the army,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, a human rights campaigner from the Centre for Civil Liberties in Ukraine.
Matviichuk read out one letter she received from a man in the Luhansk region who had been hiding in his flat to avoid forced conscription. “He says: ‘How can I make Russia accountable in court? This is a violation of my rights. Since February I haven’t been able go out in the street because there are patrol cars in my town searching for men without exception. They are hunting us like stray cats. The Chechen [fighters] are helping them search for men on the list.”
‘They have come to destroy us’: Donbas Ukrainians join the fight
In Bakhmut, a frontline town in the Ukrainian-controlled Donetsk region, Viktor Shulik, a former headteacher, and his 23-year-old son Denys Shulik, who taught physical education at the same school, stand under the shade of a tree carrying rifles. They had just walked four kilometres through the wheat fields from their positions on the frontlines.
“War is not new to us but this is the war of wars,” Viktor tells Isobel Koshiw. “People need to understand that they have come here to destroy us. It is a cycle of history.
“We don’t have an apartment now, our block was set on fire by a missile, so we’re now homeless people. We don’t have the school any more because it was bombed and so we don’t have a place of work. We took up arms because, well, what else can we do?”
For the past eight years, he said, he and others like him have watched life for people in Russian-occupied Donbas deteriorate drastically, and he would do anything he could to prevent more of the region from coming under occupation.
Russia has declared that capturing the Donbas is one of its priorities and has been slowly bombarding and then capturing towns. It now holds about 75% of the region.
‘Russia stole our history’: Ukraine’s bitter struggle to keep the truth alive
For people like Taras Pshenychnyi, deputy dean of the history department at Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv, another, subtler battle is being fought away from the artillery exchanges on the frontlines.
It is a bitter war of memory between two versions of Ukraine’s past and its relationship to Russia, of which Ukraine was a part for centuries until it gained independence in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed.
On one side is a version of history promoted by Vladimir Putin, who has argued that Ukraine has no experience of “genuine statehood” outside the USSR and that, by seeking to abandon its Soviet legacy, it has delegitimised itself.
The Russian president’s version views Ukraine as not a proper country and Ukrainian as not a real language; rather, it is a place to be fought over, dominated and periodically plundered.
“Russia uses history as a weapon,” Pshenychnyi tells Peter Beaumont in Kyiv. “It has done it before. This is why the conflict is happening now: because Russia has stolen and misinterpreted the history of Ukraine.”
Valery Galan, founder of the Museum of the Establishment of the Ukrainian State, says his hope is that “after this horrifying aggression, people will open their eyes”.
“Museums are weapons against fake history. History is not like a rifle that you fire only once. It is a weapon that lasts for decades.”
