In the Review’s March 12 issue, Tim Judah reports from the cold winter in Ukraine, where the war with Russia has now been grinding on for four years:

In Kyiv it was −17 degrees Celsius (roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit), and the trees, with their bare branches coated in glistening ice, looked as if they had been turned to glass. The streetlights were on in some streets, but others were completely dark. [The novelist Andrey] Kurkov described the mood as “like when you get an overdose of bad news. You stop reacting, you just accept it.” He said he had stopped counting the children of friends who had been killed in the fighting and people he knew who had died after they had stopped seeking care when they were ill, “because they think that doctors should be paying attention to wounded soldiers, not to civilians.”

While the Russians bombard power stations and menace eastern Ukraine with FPV (first-person-view) drones, the Ukrainian economy has been suffering and young men have been leaving the country in droves to avoid being conscripted. And although many Ukrainians have proven resilient—engineering local solutions to the power, heat, and water outages, for example—Judah writes that “the last few months have been the hardest since the full-scale invasion began.”

Below, alongside Judah’s essay, are five recent articles from our archives about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Tim Judah
A Bitter Winter in Ukraine

Four years after their full-scale invasion, the Russians are trying to freeze Ukraine into submission by relentlessly attacking the country’s energy grid.

Linda Kinstler
‘Minimum Victory’

Weary of war and staring down the likelihood of an unjust peace, Ukrainian intellectuals are plotting out a road map for the future.

—December 20, 2025

Marci Shore
Kyiv: Death and Other Borders

“This was my fourth visit to Ukraine since the full-scale Russian invasion. I was there this time for the annual Kyiv Book Arsenal.… At times the discussions were interrupted by air raid sirens: then the book stands closed, speakers left the stage, and we descended underground. During one such spell in the bomb shelter, a Ukrainian student of mine from Yale named Nataliia, who had just arrived by train from Odessa, wanted to know whether this was a good time to discuss her comments on my book manuscript on phenomenology. It was.”

—August 22, 2025

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Aryeh Neier
Our Chamberlain?

Donald Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine has been even more inept and inexplicable than the appeasement of Hitler at Munich.

—March 3, 2025

Timothy Garton Ash
Ukraine in Our Future

“Ukraine is an independent, sovereign European state with its own history, identity, and sources of unity as well as diversity; a nation forged on an anvil of hard struggle; and a society embracing shared hopes for a better future.”

—February 23, 2023

Tim Judah
The Specter Facing Ukraine

“We have to ask, what did Vladimir Putin think he was doing when he annexed Crimea without having secure access to it? The answer seems to be that Putin blundered. In his statements we can see that he has a very old-fashioned and typically Russian patronizing view of Ukraine; he does not believe that the Ukrainians are a proper nation and hence, as Yevgenia Albats, a liberal journalist from Moscow told me, ‘the people in the Kremlin did not expect Ukrainians to fight back.’”

—October 23, 2014

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