Life in Ukraine

“I’m more than half Ukrainian now,” says Ram Dange with a smile. As a student, he came to Ukraine from India in the early ’90s and never left. India is his birthplace, but it is Ukraine where he built everything.

Eight Russian rockets have landed inside Mykolaiv Zoo since the full-scale war in Ukraine began. One—just meters from the enclosure of two tiger sisters.

Help doesn’t always begin with a slogan. Sometimes, it starts with a quiet question: “How are you today?” At Gen.Camp, a therapeutic retreat for Ukrainian children affected by Russia’s war, the response is often silence—shoulders hunched, eyes lowered. From that silence, the healing begins.

When the sun is high on June 1, four Dutch and four Ukrainian servicemen descend the porch of the Defense Ministry in the Netherlands. Ahead of them: 2,600 kilometers to Kyiv in just 21 days, a charity march to confront PTSD and raise funds for those still battling its invisible scars.

A group of men draped in blue and yellow flags steps off the bus into a crowd. “Welcome back! Thank you, guys!” echoes from all sides. Moments later, a woman runs in to embrace one of them. This is one of the places Ukraine’s former prisoners of war are brought after exchanges, with more defenders returning from Russian captivity on June 19.

The Vernadsky Research Base is Ukraine’s polar research station in Antarctica. But when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, even this icy frontier wasn’t untouched. Thirty-one polar scientists joined Ukraine’s Armed Forces. They’re now known, unofficially but proudly, as the Military Penguins. This is their story.