Humanitarian convoy brings food and medicine to Russian-held city where people have suffered severe shortages

People living in the besieged Russian-held city of Oleshky in southern Ukraine were evacuated on Friday as part of a joint relief operation, the first of its kind in four years and eight months of war.

The city, which lies on the Russian-occupied side of the Dnipro River, opposite Kherson, has suffered months of serious food and medical shortages, leading to warnings of starvation for the few thousand people remaining there, including about 50 children.

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© Photograph: Facebook Official account of Kyrylo Budano/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Facebook Official account of Kyrylo Budano/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Facebook Official account of Kyrylo Budano/AFP/Getty Images

Humanitarian convoy brings food and medicine to Russian-held city where people have suffered severe shortages

People living in the besieged Russian-held city of Oleshky in southern Ukraine were evacuated on Friday as part of a joint relief operation, the first of its kind in four years and eight months of war.

The city, which lies on the Russian-occupied side of the Dnipro River, opposite Kherson, has suffered months of serious food and medical shortages, leading to warnings of starvation for the few thousand people remaining there, including about 50 children.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Facebook Official account of Kyrylo Budano/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Facebook Official account of Kyrylo Budano/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Facebook Official account of Kyrylo Budano/AFP/Getty Images

Journalists at the fiercely independent Novaya Gazeta, whose co-founder received the Nobel Peace Prize, said the government had orchestrated its demise.

© Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times

A humanitarian mission entered the devastated city of Oleshky on Friday, officials said, as Russia and Ukraine observed the most significant truce of the 4½-year war that began with Moscow's full-scale invasion of its neighbor.

That was almost three times as much as what businesses producing and refining oil in the United States made in the same period in 2025.

© The New York Times

Kentridge’s cine-musical creation, made to accompany Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, is a marvel of puppetry, dance and humour, exploring humanity, grief and idealism

The Baku international arts festival in Azerbaijan is showcasing an amazing cine-musical creation, perhaps the most amazing animation I have ever seen. Oh to Believe in Another World is an hour-long collage animation with live-action choreography by the 71-year-old South African artist and film-maker William Kentridge. It is shown with the live orchestral accompaniment of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, and this event is partly in honour of the 120th anniversary of Shostakovich’s birth this year, and partly to honour Shostakovich’s reportedly unrequited love (and lifelong friendship) for his student, Azerbaijani pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova.

The 10th symphony was inspired by Stalin and premiered shortly after his death, so it seems probable that Shostakovich had been at work on it for some time before this, long enough beforehand for at least some of the composition to have been conceived without any sense of Stalin’s death. Could part of it perhaps have been originally intended as an obediently dramatic tribute to Stalin? Yet the music arguably combines fear, awe, revulsion, and a hysterical reaction to the mad energy of Stalin’s genocidal tyranny, a darkly ambiguous respect for the great dictator whose victory in 1945 was a mainstay of the postwar dispensation; perhaps there is also a feeling in the music’s swirl that a great and terrible era has passed away, and with it a kind of grief at all that had been sacrificed to it.

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© Photograph: Pete Woodhead

© Photograph: Pete Woodhead

© Photograph: Pete Woodhead

Independent outlet, whose former editor Dmitry Muratov won Nobel prize, cites intolerable pressure from authorities

Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s best-known independent media outlets, has announced it will permanently close next month. The newspaper, whose former editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel peace prize in 2021, cited intolerable pressure, including being stripped of its newsroom, its donation platforms and its legal right to publish.

“This is not just our own story; it is the story of a country and a society that are being systematically crushed,” wrote its editor-in-chief, Sergei Sokolov, on the newspaper’s website.

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© Photograph: Toms Kalniņš/EPA

© Photograph: Toms Kalniņš/EPA

© Photograph: Toms Kalniņš/EPA

Independent outlet, whose former editor Dmitry Muratov won Nobel prize, cites intolerable pressure from authorities

Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s best-known independent media outlets, has announced it will permanently close next month. The newspaper, whose former editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel peace prize in 2021, cited intolerable pressure, including being stripped of its newsroom, its donation platforms and its legal right to publish.

“This is not just our own story; it is the story of a country and a society that are being systematically crushed,” wrote its editor-in-chief, Sergei Sokolov, on the newspaper’s website.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Toms Kalniņš/EPA

© Photograph: Toms Kalniņš/EPA

© Photograph: Toms Kalniņš/EPA