For full coverage of the crisis in Ukraine, visit Flashpoint Ukraine.
The latest developments in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. All times EDT.
12:04 a.m.: Russian forces continue their siege of Sievierodonetsk, an industrial city in eastern Ukraine, The New York Times reported. “A local official said on Wednesday that Russian forces controlled about 70 percent of the city, where only about 12,000 residents remain out of a prewar population of 100,000 after weeks of intense shelling.” the Times report said. “Ukrainian soldiers there are at risk of being surrounded. With bridges over the Seversky Donets River destroyed or under fire, resupply has become tenuous. Ukrainian officials have been candid about the army’s travails while arguing more rapid deliveries of Western weaponry will resolve them. Every day in the current heavy fighting, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with Newsmax this week, 60 to 100 Ukrainian soldiers are killed and another about 500 soldiers are wounded in combat.”
12:01 a.m.: When she helped launch The Kyiv Independent in November, chief editor Olga Rudenko had no idea that six months later she would be on the cover of Time magazine. But her team’s reporting on Russia’s war in Ukraine propelled their English-language site into the spotlight, with Time describing The Kyiv Independent as the “world’s primary source for reliable English-language journalism on that war.”
Rudenko says she feels she has a great responsibility to her audience, “to be the world’s window into Ukraine.” In this interview with VOA, she shares her commitment to fact-based reporting and how that has been essential in a war where disinformation is high, and journalists find themselves reporting on atrocities happening so close to home.