Lucile Brizard

Cloaked in freezing darkness as Russian ballistic missiles batter its power grid, Ukraine is virtually out of US-American Patriot interceptors. Desperate for a shield, Kyiv and the Ukrainian defense firm Fire Point are rushing a homemade, modular missile named FREYJA to break the Pentagon’s monopoly—only to collide with the brutal physics of a weapon that most likely will not be ready in time for winter.

The skies above eastern Ukraine no longer belong to pilots or artillery, but to the constant hum of suicide drones. In the corridor guarding Donetsk’s last fortress cities—Slovyansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka, and Kostiantynivka—Ukrainian defenders from the Rubizh Brigade and 1st Azov Corps rely on robotic resupply vehicles and underground shelters to survive what troops call the Kill Zone.

Inside Kyiv’s October Palace, steps from where 48 protesters were fatally shot during the Maidan Revolution, theatre director Vladyslav Troitskyi is confronting a crucial cultural conundrum. Confronting international institutions that reduce Ukraine to a stage for war and tragedy, the GogolFest founder lays out a radical strategy to position the country’s avant-garde art scene on its own terms.

Inside Kyiv’s Khanenko Museum, where evacuated galleries reflect the ongoing toll of the war in Ukraine, curator Lizaveta German has staged a vital encounter with the past. Hryhorii Havrylenko. New Life gathers the delicate ink drawings of a key figure in Ukraine’s “Sixtiers” movement who quietly resisted Soviet Socialist Realism.

The relentless pressure to out-innovate a brutal Russian advance has turned Ukraine into a high-stakes laboratory for battlefield AI and autonomous weapons. While some view the debate as a peacetime luxury, others take a more nuanced view. In a war for survival, will existence always trump ethics?

The weaponization of confusion. Beyond battlefield metrics, Russia’s cognitive warfare ecosystem uses cloned information websites, interactive video games, and synthetic media to paralyze Western decision-making and attempt at erasing Ukrainian identity.