Seven months after the Ukrainian leader's iconic Vatican photo with Trump, peace with Russia still seems like a distant prospect.

Russia is pushing to take over all of eastern Ukraine's Donbas region, where one resident tells NPR that she feels her "life depends on how our guys at the front hold on."

But they spared civilian boats, even those carrying Russian oil from Russian ports to finance the Russian war on Ukraine. Only in the past two weeks has Ukraine set aside those rules of engagement. Amid the latest U.

KHARKIV, Ukraine -- When Russia’s full-scale invasion began nearly four years ago, a 26-year-old soldier known as Monka didn’t see a combat role she could do. But that changed as technology reshaped the battlefield and opened new paths.

Dressed head to toe in army fatigues, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday received the news he had been awaiting for more than a year: Russia had taken over the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk.

The move comes amid continuing conflict in Ukraine and mounting scrutiny of Russia’s treatment of children. Ukrainian authorities and the European Parliament estimate that almost 20,000 Ukrainian children have been forcibly transferred or deported to Russia and Belarus since Moscow began its full‑scale invasion in February 2022.

Russia is engaged in genocide by abducting Ukrainian children, several U.S. senators said and heard during a hearing in Washington on Wednesday.

According to reporting by the Kyiv Independent, Kateryna Rashevska of Ukraine’s Regional Center for Human Rights told a congressional subcommittee that at least two abducted Ukrainian children were moved to the Songdowon camp in North Korea.

Ukraine’s top negotiator is scheduled on Thursday to meet in Florida with U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, two days after the American's high-stakes meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, according to a senior administration official.

Exclusive drone footage obtained by The Associated Press shows a devastated Ukrainian town nearly encircled by Russian forces near the city that Moscow this week claimed to now control.

Talks between US and Ukrainian negotiators over a proposed peace deal with Russia ended in Miami this weekend, with few new developments and lingering questions over security guarantees and territorial issues,