Page 80 - Features Blogs News Today

Retired U.S. Special Forces Colonel Liam Collins explains what the next phase of urban warfare could look like, how tough reforms helped Ukraine’s military, and why the war won’t end soon.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February, most national independent media have been shuttered or blocked by the Kremlin. Draconian censorship laws have been hastily enacted. Across the country, non-state local media fight to survive and serve their readers under the new conditions.

How long can Russia’s biggest tech company hold on in the face of the Kremlin’s unprecedented crackdown on free speech and information? “The future of Yandex depends on the future of Russia, not the other way around,” said one former board member who resigned from the company.

"Russia has turned the Ukrainian sky into a source of death for thousands of people," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said this month. An examination of satellite imagery indicates that Russia may be using as many as 40 air bases to bomb Ukraine.

The West hit Russia hard with sanctions after Moscow invaded Ukraine last month. Now Russians are getting worried about spiking drug prices and shortages of prescription medications.

A leaked crew list for a yacht Kremlin critics allege is Vladimir Putin's shows connections to other superyachts owned by Kremlin-connected oligarchs, as well as a Russian company that has benefited from state contracts.

They spent years building up their followers on Instagram. Now, the Russian influencers, photographers, artists, models, and others who relied on the social network face a deeply clouded future, as the state seeks to banish U.S.-based platforms and tighten Kremlin control over the war narrative.

Ukraine's president has compared the Russian assault on Mariupol to the WWII-era Nazi siege of Leningrad, a 900-day nightmare that left some 900,000 civilians dead. Few people are alive now who experienced the horrors of those times, but three who did have spoken out against the Russian invasion.

The Brookings Institution's Jessica Brandt talks about Moscow's decision to label Meta a “terrorist organization” and how the future of the Russian Internet is looking more like China's.

The artist behind a mural in Prague protesting the Russian invasion of Ukraine says the response to his work has been “huge.”