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Private Alexey Girkin massages his knee as he sits on a bed in the infirmary at a prisoner of war camp in western Ukraine, hundreds of miles away from the front line. The former Russian inmate, who was an assault infantryman of Russia’s 61st Naval Infantry Brigade before being captured, spends his time at the camp reading pulp fiction and hoping to be swapped in a prisoner exchange. Girkin had six years left to serve in a Russian prison in Perm Krai northeast of Moscow for drug dealing when a Russian army colonel arrived in May with a tempting offer: a pardon in exchange for six month...

Voting is underway in sham "regional elections" in occupied Ukrainian territories as Russia seeks to consolidate its control over these regions. The illegal so-called elections in the occupied territories come nearly a year after Russia held sham annexation referendums in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Luhansk, and Donetsk oblasts, which Moscow only partially controls, and nine years after Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. The sham elections have been widely condemned both in Ukraine and abroad, with officials saying the results will be rigged in Russia’s ...