At 6:30am, the school day at Ivan Bohun High School in Kyiv begins. Students at the boarding school for boys and girls aged 15 to 17 wake up, make their beds, brush their teeth. At 7am, they go for a 20-minute run, followed by their first breakfast; they pour into a large cafeteria and eat eggs and toast quietly. At 8:20am, they stand in a line for roll-call, ready for their first lessons of the day. Ivan Bohun is a regular high school in some ways, with regular subjects, but the children are al...

As told to Anna Conkling

The two men had been hiking through the Carpathian mountains for two days when a storm began to rain down on them. It was September, and they had planned for the summer heat typical in Ukraine at this time of year, not for ten hours of pouring rain. ​The men, Danylo and his friend Andriy, were each carrying backpacks weighing more than 17kg, filled with food, equipment and medication. The previous day, they had been forced to leave behind the third member of their group, Ihor, who could not keep up with their pace. Danylo is 23 — too young for conscription into Ukraine’s armed forces, which takes place from age 25 — but Andriy is 34. Turning back was not an option.​

Three servicemen sit shirtless around a wooden picnic table in the side room of a Catholic church in Sloviansk, a city in eastern Ukraine. Their faces are red and their bodies are covered in sweat as they pass around a large blue bottle of water. The men are sitting in their underwear with a large white towel wrapped around them. They've just emerged from the church’s small sauna and are now taking a break before venturing back into the 90-degree heat. These men are among the few soldiers who kn...

As Russia’s war in Ukraine nears its fourth year, Kyiv appears to be slowly losing the Donbas, a region once known as the country’s industrial heartland and symbol of national resilience. Today, as dwindling Western aid and Moscow’s mounting manpower shift the balance of the war, this strategic region is being surrendered not through a single decisive battle, but piece by piece.

The roar of outgoing Ukrainian artillery tore through the air in Dobropillia last week, a town just six miles away from the eastern Donetsk front lines.  It signalled the final blow for the coal mines... The roar of outgoing Ukrainian artillery tore through the air in Dobropillia last week, a town just six miles away from the eastern Donetsk front lines.  It signalled the final blow for the coal mines...

Air raid sirens blare in Zolochiv, a small town in the Kharkiv region, where dozens of destroyed buildings line the streets that few civilians walk along. The alarms were not the first that day, and they would not be the last. Zolochiv is just 10 miles away from the nearest front lines but holds no strategic military value. Still, it is pummeled almost daily, and this air alert warned residents to seek cover immediately as a Russian Molniya drone flew over the town. Some residents sat outdoors...

In the back room of a morgue on the outskirts of Kyiv, the stench of rotten flesh hangs heavy in the air, its source a large white bag lying on a metal table. The mortician opens it, and inside is a smaller black bag containing a pair of mud-covered military boots, a mummified body, and a skull. This is all that is left of a Ukrainian soldier returned from captivity in Russia. Now begins the grueling work of finding out who he was. Since Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine began three and a ha...

Eight months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on October 6, 2022, Russian soldiers appeared at Olena Yahupova’s door and took her to a nearby police station for questioning. She suspected that her neighbors had told the soldiers that her husband was in Ukraine’s military and that she was sending him to Russian military positions and activity in Kamianka Dniprovska. In reality, Yahupova had little contact with her husband, often not hearing from him for weeks at a time. She had no idea if he wa...

The rolling hills of the Carpathian Mountains, crisp autumn mornings at Ukraine’s national parks, wild horses grazing on grass surrounded by a picturesque natural landscape — these were the subjects of nature photographer Denys Kryvyi’s pictures, before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. For more than a decade, Kryvyi’s passion for photography took him to the most secluded parts of his country, seemingly a world away from the geopolitical turmoil that would engulf the nation after Russia’s...

The gentle hum of hair dryers and the blare of techno music fills Kozir barbershop on a busy Wednesday afternoon. Outside, air raid sirens have just begun to bellow through the streets of Kramatorsk, a city just 23 kilometres from the front lines in eastern Ukraine, but inside, no one pays heed to the warnings. The stylists here have grown accustomed to the thunder-like roar of incoming missiles, and the men in their chairs are all off-duty soldiers who are stationed in nearby positions.In Ukrai...

3:04PM Analysis: Use of Storm Shadow puts Britain in Putin’s sights When British-made Storm Shadow missiles slammed into Russia just after lunch today, a Rubicon was crossed.This was the moment the Kremlin had been warning against for months.The message, from Vladimir Putin, has been simple, consistent, direct. He warned that if British missiles were fired at Russia, Britain would shift from being an ally of Ukra...

Ukrainians are scamming Russians out of their life savings in an underground operation that steals money from Moscow’s citizens and donates it directly to Kyiv’s military.

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Stuck in a crowded prison cell in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, 45-year-old Viktor faces a choice. He can stay where he is, serving out his sentence in the knowledge that a Russian bomb could hit the jail any day, or he can swap his cell for the dangers of the front lines, as a volunteer defending his country. “Better to go fight with weapons, than sit here,” he tells the Daily Beast.

A group of Ukrainian scammers called the Monetary Army is using fake dating profiles to defraud Russian men out of thousands of pounds, with some of the profits funnelling into Kyiv’s war effort.Alongside the dating profiles, the scammers use illegitimate websites and cryptocurrency transactions in a business that allows them to get rich quickly while avenging themselves on Moscow’s citizens.The Monetary Army was born in 2020, when young Ukrainian tech-workers took advantage of surging dating ap...

AS THE WAR in Ukraine rages on, the effects are omnipresent in the country. Even in the capital city of Kyiv, considered one of the “safe spots,” rockets zoom past buildings and drones are visible overhead. Yet Ukraine’s top athletes remain hell-bent on competing in this summer’s Olympic Games in Paris—the nation’s first Olympics since the February 2022 Russian invasion. In the months leading up to the event, Men’s Health reports on the ground to find out how—amid so much uncertainty and adversi...