Notes and Essays -- John Brown

Four years after Ukraine was invaded, many of the people who lived in institutional settings remain unaccounted for. From left, Oksana Oliinyk, Hanna Zamyshliaieva and Larysa Branytska at a news conference on Tuesday in Kyiv. Credit... Sasha Maslov for The New York Times By Carlotta Gall Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine The New York Times , June 23, 2026, 4:22 p.m. ET For four years, Hanna Zamyshliaieva has agonized over the fate of her severely disabled son, who disappeared in southern Ukraine soon after the Russian invasion. On Tuesday, she and two other women whose loved ones are among hundreds of Ukrainians missing from residential schools and other institutions made clear that they are not giving up.  “I am here to fight for the return of my child,” said Ms. Zamyshliaieva. “I don’t know where my son is, what’s going on with him, what condition he is in and if he’s still alive.” Ms. Zamyshliaieva, joined by another mother and a grandmother, had come to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, ...

Russian-installed authorities in Crimea have halted fuel distribution in vacation season as Ukraine isolates the peninsula. June 23, 2026 at 6:35 a.m. 7 min A gas station in Saki, Crimea, on Monday, closed amid a fuel crisis. (Alexey Pavlishak/Reuters) By Mary Ilyushina, David L. Stern and Natalia Abbakumova A middle-aged couple from Moscow and their teenage son began their summer vacation to the Black Sea beaches of Crimea this month by filling five-gallon gasoline canisters and stocking up on food — as if headed to a war zone. Because in many ways they were. Idealized as a land of Soviet-era youth camps and resorts, Crimea — the Ukrainian peninsula that Russia invaded and annexed illegally in 2014 — has become President Vladimir Putin’s prized possession, a symbol of his vision of Russia restored to superpower heights and a key logistics hub for his military operations across southeast Ukraine. Well into the fifth year of the war, however, that vision seems increasingly tenuous. [ j...

Evacuees from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, waited to be processed at a transit hub in Lozova, Ukraine, last month. Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times While Kyiv’s fortunes have brightened in other ways in the war, Moscow’s forces are raining bombs and drones on “fortress belt” cities like Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. By Cassandra Vinograd and Oleksandr Chubko   Reporting from Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in Ukraine  ’s Donetsk region, and from the Kharkiv region . The New York Times , June 22, 2026 Updated 11:57 a.m. ET see also BBC Nadiya Trofimchuk, 79, had lived in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk her whole life and never thought about leaving, even as war raged for years not 20 miles away. Yet there she was one recent morning at a makeshift evacuation center, sitting next to a small folding table with water and tea but touching neither, just focused on leaving. “We had a strike,” she explained, eyebrows raised over purple and gold cat-ey...