This is Matthew Parish from the Lviv Herald, and I have the privilege today to interview "Kozak", who is a US citizen and a member of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Kozak, welcome to the Lviv Herald. Thank you. Please tell me about your life and background before the full-scale invasion. Before the full-scale invasion, I was working in logistics with a Ukrainian volunteer military formation that later became part of the regular armed forces. I arrived in Ukraine in 2019. My fam

Saturday 7 February 2026 President Zelensky’s remark on 7 February 2026 that Washington now expects the war to be “finished” by June 2026, is best read as a political timetable rather than a military forecast. He was describing an American deadline for an agreement, not reporting that either belligerent has quietly discovered a path to victory in four months.  The difference matters. Wars end in several distinct ways, and only one of them resembles the phrase “finished” as it

Saturday 7 February 2026 The war in Ukraine has now entered a phase in which endurance matters as much as manoeuvre. While attention often focuses on weapons deliveries, battlefield tactics and diplomatic initiatives, daily life in front line regions tells a more granular story. Soldiers and civilians living and working close to the fighting face overlapping pressures that cannot be resolved by military means alone. For them the role of non-governmental organisations and the

Saturday 7 February 2026 Lviv is often described as a rear city, yet it is more accurate to call her a hinge. She is a gateway for people displaced from the east and south, a logistics corridor for supplies moving towards the front, and a place where recovery, rehabilitation and rebuilding are being improvised in real time. In that hinge-space, non-governmental organisations have become a second civic administration: they shelter, feed, advise, transport, medicate, document,

Friday 6 February 2026 Today, 6 February 2026, Russian Lieutenant General Vladimir Stepanovich Alekseyev, one of the most senior officers in Russia’s military intelligence apparatus, was shot and seriously wounded in Moscow in what Russian authorities are treating as an attempted assassination. The episode is notable not simply because it strikes close to the summit of the Russian state but because it reinforces a pattern that has been steadily emerging since Russia’s full-sc

Friday 6 February 2026 Imperial thinking is often assumed to be a relic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a mode of thought buried alongside gunboat diplomacy, red-lined maps and the language of civilising missions. Yet in twenty-first-century Europe imperial assumptions have not vanished. They have been reworked, sanitised and, in some cases, aggressively revived. They continue to shape how power is imagined, how borders are contested and how states conceive t