The light that refuses to die
Every morning at 9 AM Ukraine stops. Police step into main thoroughfares to halt traffic. Pedestrians stand stilled on the sidewalk, looking down. Shoppers pause outside the grocer, and soldiers in uniform holster their guns and put a hand to their heart.
Since March 2022, just weeks into the war, President Volodymyr Zelensky ordered a moment of silence to honor those killed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Four years later Ukrainians haven’t stopped observing one minute of silence nationwide. Every day.
Little of everyday life seems to change when Americans go to war. In Ukraine, war has transformed daily life, but not halted it. Children cram games and blankets in their backpacks in case they are forced into underground shelters to or from school. Every office and residential building has a designated shelter. During Fashion Week this spring, the latest collections from Ukrainian designers featured amputees and tributes to models and fashion industry figures killed or fighting on the front lines.
On the runways of both Kyiv and Paris this spring, designer Lilia Litkovska featured models wearing headlamps and lug boots, a nod to the persistent reality of nightly air raids, drone strikes, and cold with no electricity. Litkovska described how people flash the lights at one another during blackouts. She told Forbes, “you are talking without words, it’s like you are united. You are together. You are not alone.”
Such rituals are more than tokens of survival, they are signs of hope. They become ways of expressing a reality that life continues and will go on beyond a seemingly endless war. Litkovska dubbed her newest work this spring, “a collection about the light that refuses to die.”
More from the region:
Ukraine An estimated 100,000 Ukrainians have undergone amputations since the 2022 invasion, a casualty injury rate comparable to World War I. Yet war amputees are breaking the pain-trauma cycle, according to a new medical study from Northwestern University, with most regaining function and quality of life.
Sunday marked the 40th anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in northern Ukraine. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi called for urgent international support to repair a confinement dome damaged in a Russian drone strike last year. The United States announced this week it would put $100 million toward the project.
Nataliia Khodymchuk, 73 and a survivor of the Chernobyl accident, died just before the anniversary when a Russian drone slammed into the Kyiv apartment building where Soviet officials relocated her and her children after the disaster.
Near another Ukrainian nuclear reactor at Zaporizhzhia, a deadly strike on a Baptist church in April was a targeted strike against church workers and an affiliated U.S.-based aid organization, according to religious freedom advocates and eyewitnesses. The April 16 attack using a precision-guided bomb killed one, a church minister, and wounded 8. It gutted the building of The House of the Gospel Church, which served as a distribution point for aid with Illinois-based Mission Eurasia.
The Kyiv Post has a fact-check on U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s six-hour testimony before Congress this week, his first since the Iran War started.
Elsewhere:
Mali Al-Qaeda-linked militants launched coordinated attacks on Saturday across Mali, a West African country that’s one of the largest on the continent. They seized two major cities while simultaneously striking the heart of the capital, Bamako.
Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wal-Muslimin, or JNIM, and its Tuareg rebel allies this week continued operations to consolidate control over northern Mali, while JNIM tightened a blockade on Bamako aimed at toppling the Malian junta. The military government, which gained power during 2020 and 2021 coups, expelled French forces and aligns itself with Russia.
The conflict fuels ongoing displacement across northern Africa, and is raising global terrorism threat levels. Despite focus on Middle East jihadism, deaths in Africa’s Sahel region in recent years accounted for more than half of all terrorism-related deaths globally.
United Arab Emirates The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) will lose 13 percent of its production capacity starting today after the UAE announced Tuesday it will leave the cartel, which accounts for roughly 30 percent of worldwide oil production. Largely unconstrained by the blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, the UAE will have more freedom to maneuver apart from other Gulf countries as war in Iran rattles oil alliances.
Iran Today marks 60 days since President Donald Trump notified Congress about his attack on Iran, but the deadline for his legal authority to make a case for continuing the war will pass without action from Congress. Despite growing unpopularity among voters over the conflict, GOP leaders are letting Friday’s deadline pass without action—and lawmakers left town yesterday. The deadline comes with the war at an impasse, as Washington and Tehran trading threats amid a fragile ceasefire.
Lebanon “The fate of southern Lebanon will be the same as that of Gaza,” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said earlier this week. Before-and-after shots of Israel’s latest incursion show the extent of destruction: damage to water infrastructure, but also electricity networks and bridges, cutting off vital supplies and services for entire towns and villages.
Gaza Despite war and widespread destruction, half a million Palestinians cast their ballots for municipal and village councils across the West Bank and in the city of Deir al-Balah in the Gaza Strip. While 183 localities saw a mix of wins for the Palestinian Authority’s controlling Fatah party and independents, local control ultimately rests with Israel and its military control.
Myanmar The legal team of Aung San Suu Kyi plans to meet the detained former leader this weekend after she was transferred to house arrest in the capital by the military-backed government, a representative said on Friday. The Nobel laureate, who is 80, has been detained since the military ousted her civilian government in a coup in 2021. The coup triggered a deadly civil war that has engulfed much of the impoverished Southeast Asian nation, and Suu Kyi’s whereabouts had been unclear.
United Kingdom The terror threat level for the UK was raised from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’ for the first time in four years following the stabbing of two Jewish men in London on Wednesday. An official said it’s not “solely as a result of that attack” but in response to an increase in “broader Islamist and extreme right-wing threats.”
King Charles III brought a light wit and subtle jabs to a bitterly divided U.S. Capitol, speaking to a joint meeting of Congress about the Magna Carta and the importance of checks and balances. President Trump hosted the royal couple for a state dinner, and announced Thursday he would lift tariffs on Scottish whisky in their honor. And I don’t know but there was something heartening about the king visiting with park rangers in the Shenandoah Valley.
In London a pair of African distance runners broke through what was until Sunday one of the most unthinkable records in sports, shattering the long-unapproachable two-hour barrier in the 26.2-mile (42.2-kilometer) marathon.
Sabastian Sawe of Kenya won the London Marathon in 1 hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds, bettering the previous men’s world record by an astonishing 65 seconds. He beat Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, who was running his first marathon and finished in 1:59.41.
Ethiopa’s Tigst Assefa crossed the women’s finish line in 2:15:41, taking nine seconds off her world record set in the same event last year. Assefa and Sawe talked to The Athletic about what it took to get there.
On the homefront … I’m reading Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around by Justin E. Giboney, and practicing hope. This may look to you like a 100-year-old basement, and it is (mine). But there’s new life breaking through, the firstfruits of a harvest to come.
A remarkable update on Ukraine, including a 73-year-old woman living in an apartment where the Soviet government moved her to safety after Chernobyl, only to see her life end there, ignobly, with a drone attack on her same Kyiv home 40 years later by the same legacy government that relocated her there. Inhumanity, to the nth degree. For the love of God: STOP.
This was such a good post. I was on mission to Ukraine back in the 90's several times. I still have friends there. Their resilience and determination is amazing. Thank you for your presentation about what is happening behind the news we usually hear or see.