Every week we wrap up essential coverage of the war in Ukraine, from news and features to analysis, opinion and more.
Escape from Azovstal
It was May 2022 and Oleksandr Ivantsov was trapped. The Russians had seized the city of Mariupol. A small island of territory, the Azovstal steelworks, remained under Ukrainian control. For weeks, Ivantsov and his fellow soldiers had lived in a network of underground shelters, shared with a few civilians. Now this grim subterranean existence was coming to an end.
The complex’s food supplies had run out. Russian bombs fell continuously. There was no prospect of escape. Vladimir Putin had ordered a blockade so tight “that a fly can’t get through”. Under pressure from Kyiv the Ukrainian garrison, composed of 2,500 service personnel, some of them gravely wounded, had reluctantly agreed to surrender. The alternative was certain death.
Or was it? As his battalion prepared to go into Russian captivity, Ivantsov came up with an extraordinary plan. “I decided to hide,” he told Luke Harding. Instead of surrendering he would disappear, and take his chances, in the hope he could somehow make it back to Ukrainian-controlled territory, many miles away. “I put the probability of success at 1 in 1,000,” the 29-year-old admitted. “Everyone thought I was mad.”
Processing trauma with poetry
On 27 June, a Russian Iskander missile struck a bustling pizza restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. The attack claimed the lives of 13 people, including four children, and left 60 others wounded, some critically. The restaurant, a popular spot for local residents and international journalists, was at full capacity when the missiles hit.
Among those present that day was Anastasia Taylor-Lind, a British-Swedish poet and photojournalist, along with her translator and friend Dima, Lorenzo Tondo reported. They were in Kramatorsk to document a long-term project funded by the National Geographic Society, which involved reporting on the environmental impact of the war in Donbas.
Taylor-Lind had spent a decade documenting the war in Donbas, which began in 2014, but until that moment her encounters with violence had been as an observer, bearing witness to its impact on the lives of others. This was the first time she had experienced the horrors of war on a bodily level. It took her time to process the pain and trauma. Months later, her response as a poet was to pour her feelings on to paper.
Taylor-Lind’s poem, published by the Guardian, serves as a medium to unravel her fragile fragments of memory, arranging them chronologically in the first person and present tense.
The argument for seizing Russian funds
With the US and the EU failing to commit more than $100bn (£80bn) in aid to Ukraine in December, the idea of seizing Russian assets frozen by western countries has re-emerged as a potential solution, economists Joseph Stiglitz and Andrew Kosenko wrote.
Although seizing these assets would boost Ukrainian morale and finances, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic are wary. As the New York Times recently reported, top US officials fear that setting such a precedent would deter other countries from depositing their funds at the New York Federal Reserve or holding them in dollars.
But the concern that other governments might become wary of keeping their funds in the US for fear of future seizures overlooks some key points, Stiglitz and Kosenko argued. Seizing Russia’s frozen assets would not affect other countries’ assets or change the incentives of governments that are not planning a major war. Moreover, by not seizing these funds, western countries are signalling that governments waging brutal wars of aggression can violate international law and simultaneously benefit from it to escape the consequences of their actions.
Instead, G7 leaders should send a clear message: no country can have it both ways.
