**Pokrovsk: The Ukrainian City That Has the World on the Edge of Its Seats** Alright, folks, buckle up! We’re diving into the digital zeitgeist to unpack why “Ukraine war Pokrovsk” has become the latest trending topic that’s got the internet buzzing. If you’ve been online recently, you’ve probably seen it popping up in your feeds,…
KYIV—Somewhere between the third air-raid siren and the fourth espresso, you realize the war in Ukraine has become the planet’s most macabre subscription service: it autorenews every morning, drains the global wallet, and still hasn’t figured out how to skip the ads. Two years, five summits, and roughly 17,000 think-tank papers later, the front lines…
The planet’s most durable reality-TV franchise—let’s call it “Make America Gawk Again”—has been renewed for another season, and the season premiere is set in Kyiv. Once again, Donald Trump’s gravitational pull is bending diplomacy into late-night infomercial prose: “Act now, supplies of U.S. security guarantees are limited!” From Berlin to Bangkok, chancelleries that spent four…
Mudryk and the Global Theater of Transfer-Porn By Our Man in the Departure Lounge KYIV—On a crisp January morning, while half the planet was busy arguing whether the Doomsday Clock should simply be replaced by a livestream of Elon Musk’s Twitter feed, Mykhailo Mudryk was being shrink-wrapped into a Chelsea shirt faster than you can…
Russian Drones: Skyborne Ambassadors of a World That Forgot How to Sleep By the time the first Iranian-designed Shahed-136 tumbled onto a Kyiv kindergarten, the planet had already given up pretending that unmanned aircraft are merely “tools.” From the Sea of Okhotsk to the Sonoran Desert, Russian drones have become the twenty-first century’s most reliable…
Katya Kuropas: The Zelenskyy In-Law Who Accidentally Became Geopolitical Clickbait By Our Correspondent, somewhere between a Kyiv bunker and a Mediterranean yacht slip The world has many pressing questions—climate tipping points, supply-chain apocalypse, whether Elon Musk will eventually buy the moon—but this week the chattering classes have instead latched onto Katya Kuropas. For the uninitiated,…
In the grand theater of international relations, where every handshake is a potential dagger and every pipeline a geopolitical jugular, the sudden romance between Azerbaijan and Ukraine is less a love story than a mutually beneficial hostage situation. One country sits atop enough oil to make a Saudi prince blush, while the other has become…
Kyiv, Lviv, and the Lampedusa of the Mind A field dispatch from the cheap seats of the 21st century By the time you finish this sentence, another container of “lethal aid” will have cleared customs in Gdańsk, another oligarch will have relocated from Moscow to Dubai, and another earnest European energy minister will have discovered…
The 18:47 from Kharkiv to Kyiv is many things—overcrowded, chronically late, and lately a mobile refugee hostel—but until last week it had not qualified as a frontline. That changed somewhere east of Poltava when a single bullet, fired through a cracked window, ended the life of 29-year-old Olena Krasnova, a logistics officer turned volunteer turned…
A Knife, a Train, and the World’s Collateral Boredom International dispatch – Dave’s Locker, somewhere between Kyiv and Vienna The 18:42 to Vienna is usually a rolling monument to European efficiency: Wi-Fi that works just well enough to remind you your life is slipping by in 280-character increments, and dining-car schnitzel priced like a ransom…
**The World’s Most Dangerous Reality Show: Ukraine’s Geopolitical Theater** Two years into Europe’s most unnecessary war since someone decided the Habsburgs needed a slight nudge in 1914, Ukraine has become the planet’s most depressing reality television series—except the contestants can’t vote themselves off the island, and the producers are nuclear powers with questionable impulse control….
Paris, May – Somewhere between the baguette crumbs and the drone debris, the Franco-Ukrainian pas de deux has entered its third year, and the orchestra is still tuning the same dissonant chord. On the surface, Emmanuel Macron plays the dashing understudy to Volodymyr Zelensky’s blood-spattered lead, pledging Mirage jets, long-range missiles, and—because this is France—an…
