A typical Capricorn, so stubborn, says his wife, Sveta. It was 2015, the war in Donbas was growing in intensity. I heard someone on TV complaining that Roma aren't defending their homeland. This pissed me off, and so I volunteered, says Ilchak. In the territorial recruitment centre in Uzhhorod the Ukrainian soldiers were surprised, but they had to take him.
Vladimir Putin is trapped. Despite staggering losses and mounting international pressure, the Russian President shows no sign of ending the war in Ukraine - and experts say he likely can't. The Kremlin's grip on power depends on projecting strength. Analysts warn that any attempt to pull back would be seen as weakness, sparking unrest among elites and ordinary Russians alike. "For Putin, capitulation isn't an option," said a senior European security source. "Backing down would be political suicide."
Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian author who writes in Russian and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, lives in the same Berlin apartment, with its high ceilings and spacious rooms, where EL PAIS visited her four years ago. The author of Voices from Chernobyl, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, and Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets continues to write by hand.
For Anastasiia, war is an everyday part of life. The 17-year-old lives in Kyiv, Ukraine's capital, where captured Russian tanks line the city's historic St. Michael's square, a daily minute of silence pays tribute to the war dead, and sirens pierce the air when a Russian missile attack is imminent. "The war has influenced us a lot. It changes our pace of life, the conditions in which we work," Anastasiia explains about the conflict now stretching into its third year.