Lara Marlowe

1 week ago | irishtimes.com | Yulia Mykytenko |Lara Marlowe

The alert on my smartphone woke me at 4am on April 24th. My mother Tamara and my brother Bohdan sent almost simultaneous messages to say the Russians were attacking the western suburbs of Kyiv. It was extremely loud. They were moving to the corridors outside their respective apartments, to protect themselves from shrapnel and flying glass. I was on the front line in Donetsk and the two people I care about most were in greater danger than I was. The explosions continued for more than an hour.

2 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Lara Marlowe

Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Ozturk and Kseniia Petrova are foreign graduate students in their early 30s. All were in the US legally to study at Ivy League universities. Since February, they have been detained and threatened with deportation. Three are held in detention centres in Louisiana. Mahdawi’s whereabouts are uncertain. The Trump administration considers the three who criticised Israel’s war on Gaza anti-Semites and terrorist supporters.

3 weeks ago | irishtimes.com | Lara Marlowe

When the history of the 21st century is finally written, 2025 may stand out as the year the West split between liberal democrats and far-right nationalist populists who have come to power in the US and continue to gain momentum in Europe. The rise of the “reactionary international” constitutes a realignment as fundamental to the future of the world as the cold war. This time, the fault lines do not follow national boundaries, but divide societies from within.

1 month ago | irishtimes.com | Yulia Mykytenko |Lara Marlowe

For a month, I thought I might never see them again. I’ll use their call signs, because the names of enlisted men are not supposed to appear in newspapers. Frosty, Hrynia and Yakut are my brothers-in-arms from another platoon. Their harrowing escape under fire from beneath a collapsed building on the front line was the most important thing that happened to my company in March. Frosty’s cold demeanour earned him his nom de guerre.

2 months ago | irishtimes.com | Lara Marlowe

Soldiers from the German Bundeswehr knock on the door of a typical German house and tell its inhabitants: “You are aware of the terrible war in Ukraine and how horrible life has become for people there? We must take all your belongings and send them to Ukraine.” In the video, which went viral in Germany, the soldiers pack up the family’s belongings. When they have emptied the house, they salute a photograph of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, saying “Heil Zelenskiy”.