The Russian Issues

When we opened this desk, we did so with a single conviction: that the war in Ukraine is not a footnote but the defining conflict of our generation, and that understanding it requires more than headlines. It requires history, context, and the willingness to follow a story across years and across borders. That conviction has not changed. If anything, the events of the last several years have only sharpened it. We have watched the disputes behind the war harden from political tensions into the largest land conflict in Europe since 1945, and we have reported every phase of that escalation.

Our coverage begins where the war began — not in February 2022, but in the long argument over sovereignty, borders, and identity that preceded it. The first hours of the invasion turned on a single airstrip outside Kyiv, and our account of the battle for Hostomel Airport traces how the failure of a single plan reshaped the entire conflict. From there, the war evolved into something nobody predicted: a grinding contest of attrition where drones and glide bombs displaced manned aircraft and cheap quadcopters began destroying million-dollar tanks.

But the present cannot be understood without the past. The economic legacy of the Soviet Union — the rapid rise and eventual collapse of the Soviet economy — still shapes how Russia funds, supplies, and sustains its wars. That legacy is geographic as much as economic. The question of how Russia became so vast and culturally diverse explains the borders, the republics, and the very logic of expansion that drives the present conflict. And the pattern of great powers drawing lines through other people's countries is not unique to Russia: the division of Korea into North and South shows the same Cold War hand at work, with consequences that outlast every generation that inherits them.

This announcement marks the next stage of that work. We are expanding our correspondent network, deepening our historical coverage, and committing to the same standard that has guided us from the first dispatch: independent, advertiser-free reporting that treats war not as spectacle but as the human event it is. The stories above are where we begin. The stories to come are where we continue.