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2 weeks ago | 
csmonitor.com | Howard LaFranchi
As Tetiana Heienko stood before the seated Russian officer who had summoned her for questioning, she felt something shift inside her. A member of the town council in her village outside her beloved city of Melitopol in eastern Ukraine, Mrs. Heienko was a figure of modest local authority. So not long after Russian forces occupied the city during the full-scale invasion in 2022, she was summoned for questioning.
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3 weeks ago | 
csmonitor.com | Howard LaFranchi
In Peru’s Amazon region, drug gangs running the coca trade in cooperation with Mexican cartels have over recent years expanded into illegal mining, especially for gold. In response, the U.S. Agency for International Development shifted some counternarcotics and development resources in Peru to buttress nongovernmental organizations combating illegal mining through environmental and sustainable-development initiatives.
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1 month ago | 
csmonitor.com | Howard LaFranchi
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1 month ago | 
csmonitor.com | Howard LaFranchi
As he watches over the iron ore and graphite production site’s aging equipment arrayed around him, Volodymyr Moroz recalls the glory days of the now-silent Zavalivskiy Mine in central Ukraine. “At one time you could count on getting a job at this mine,” he says. “People moved here” from other mining regions “because the pay and the schools were better.”The former mining equipment operator and truck driver now gets by on a few hours a week as a security guard.
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2 months ago | 
csmonitor.com | Howard LaFranchi
Nataliia Karpenko and her husband have farmed the rich soil of Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region for nearly four decades, raising a son and a daughter as season upon season they planted and harvested wheat, sunflower, and barley. Then, last Jan. 7 – Mrs. Karpenko says she will never forget that date – a glide bomb crashed into their town of Novopavlivka, signaling Russia’s advancing offensive out of the territory it occupies to the southeast.
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2 months ago | 
csmonitor.com | Howard LaFranchi
Yulia Koliadynska did not vote for Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ukraine’s presidential election in 2019. But when the owner of a central Kyiv paper goods and restaurant supply shop watched President Zelenskyy spar Friday with the U.S. president and vice president, she suddenly felt in her heart that Ukraine has the leader it needs for these very difficult times.
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2 months ago | 
csmonitor.com | Howard LaFranchi
A White House meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that was meant to set terms for bilateral cooperation collapsed Friday into anger and recriminations in full view of the world. The stunning clash left a deep sense of foreboding for the embattled Ukraine’s future, and hinted loudly at the U.S. shift away from an alliance-based foreign policy toward one of big-power politics.
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2 months ago | 
csmonitor.com | Howard LaFranchi
As with any close-knit family, the transatlantic partnership between the United States and Europe that was forged from a cataclysmic world war has passed through occasional rough moments. European powers’ refusal to join in President George W. Bush’s “war of choice” in Iraq in 2003 is one example. The fallout from President Barack Obama’s swipe at NATO partners as “free riders” unwilling to pay their fair share for their own security is another.
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2 months ago | 
csmonitor.com | Howard LaFranchi
Puppeteer Pavlo Saveliev opens the Sunday afternoon show with some questions for an audience that includes several dozen children. “Do you know how to behave in the theater?” he asks with faux seriousness, proceeding to a series of rapid-fire queries. “Can you eat candy?” he probes. The children respond firmly, “No!”Why We Wrote ThisA story focused onThe calamitous war in Ukraine has raged for three years.
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Feb 5, 2025 | 
csmonitor.com | Howard LaFranchi
Greenland, the Panama Canal, Canada as the 51st state – and now a rebuilt and redeveloped Gaza Strip? President Donald Trump’s bombshell proposal Tuesday for the United States to “own” a Gaza depopulated of its 2 million Palestinians and make it the “Riviera of the Middle East” is the latest – and perhaps most shocking – example of a new American manifest destiny.
