‘It’s not life, it’s just hell’: Grief-stricken Ukrainians still determined after a year of war
In a windswept graveyard, Viktoria mourns her husband.
She stands sobbing amid row after row of freshly dug graves.
Each one is marked with a photograph and a regimental flag.
“You are my life. You’re my heart, my air, I love you,” she cries.
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Ruslan was killed a few days ago when he was hit by a tank round in eastern Ukraine.
His three-year-old twins still don’t understand their daddy is never coming home.
Viktoria says: “We just told them their father became a star in the sky, and their father is looking after them from the sky.”
“They’re asking me for a phone to call, and your heart starts bleeding, because you don’t know what to say, you don’t know how to explain to a child.
“I just tell them their dad is busy and can’t answer their call,” she adds, her voice trembling.
Viktoria still hasn’t told her children their father won’t be coming home
Ruslan, a tank commander, died in action last week
Ukraine does not disclose figures for its dead, but it is a number that’s rising fast.
And so too is the rate of casualties.
At a rehabilitation centre in Dnipro, soldiers try to overcome their injuries.
Oleh was lacerated by shrapnel and doctors have warned him he may still lose his limb.
Injured soldier Oleh Bonkin being treated at a rehabilitation centre
As his physiotherapist tries to manipulate more movement into the joint, he tells me that Russian aggression has only made this nation stronger.
“For a long time, Russia was trying to hide our history. That’s why we’ve become closer to each other, and we value life more than before.
“We value our families and loved ones. After the war ends, Ukraine will blossom once more. Definitely.”
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What Vladimir Putin thought would be a lightning-quick conquest has morphed into an exhausting duel of artillery – with no end in sight.
And the fighting in the Donbas over the past year has been absolutely relentless.
It also appears to be getting worse in the face of a new Russian offensive.
Alex Rossi reports from near Bakhmut in the Donbas
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Sky News looks back at some of the most powerful moments from the war in Ukraine
In places like Chasiv Yar, near Bakhmut, most people have left. It’s easy to understand why.
Every day now, the artillery is getting closer.
In the shattered and broken communities of this region people are weary – and mostly reliant on aid parcels to survive – as the fighting rages around them.
After a long year, the cost of this punishing war is increasingly only measured in pain and suffering.
Oleksandr, a pensioner, says he does not know sometimes how he keeps going.
“I’m not sleeping during the night, and not sleeping during the day, so I’m exhausted.
“It’s not life, it’s just hell – just suffering.
“I’m very sensitive and I’ve got health problems. I want to leave, but my wife doesn’t.”
Back at the graveyard, new plots are being excavated for soldiers that have not yet been killed in combat.
A military cemetery in eastern Ukraine
Viktoria is far from the only Ukrainian mourning the loss of a loved one.
It is a bleak picture.
And, of course, it is just one military cemetery – in a country which is bleeding for its survival.
The twin threats of climate change and Russian malign activity in the Arctic must be taken “deadly seriously,” David Lammy has warned.
Sky News joined him on the furthest reaching tour of the Arctic by a British foreign secretary.
We travelled to Svalbard – a Norwegian archipelago that is the most northern settled land on Earth, 400 miles from the North Pole.
It is at the heart of an Arctic region facing growing geopolitical tension and feeling the brunt of climate change.
Mr Lammy told us the geopolitics of the region must be taken “deadly seriously” due to climate change and “the threats we’re seeing from Russia”.
We witnessed the direct impact of climate change along Svalbard’s coastline and inland waterways. There is less ice, we were told, compared to the past.
David Lammy and Norway’s Foreign Minister Barth Eide view the melting Blomstrandbreen glacier. Pic: PA
The melting ice is opening up the Arctic and allowing Russia more freedom to manoeuvre.
“We do see Russia’s shadow fleet using these waters,” Mr Lammy said. “We do see increased activity from submarines with nuclear capability under our waters and we do see hybrid sabotage of undersea cables at this time.”
In Tromso, further south, the foreign secretary was briefed by Norwegian military commanders.
The foreign secretary visiting SvalSat, a satellite ground station which monitors climate in Svalbard. Pic: PA
Vice Admiral Rune Andersen, the Chief of Norwegian Joint Headquarters, told Sky News the Russian threat was explicit.
“Russia has stated that they are in confrontation with the West and are utilising a lot of hybrid methods to undermine Western security,” he said.
But it’s not just Vladimir Putin they’re worried about. Norwegian observers are concerned by US president Donald Trump’s strange relationship with the Russian leader too.
Norwegian observers are concerned about the Russian leader – and Trump being ‘too soft’ on him. Pic: AP
Karsten Friis, a Norwegian defence and security analyst, told Sky News: “If he’s too soft on Putin, if he is kind of normalising relations with Russia, I wouldn’t be surprised.
“I would expect Russia to push us, to test us, to push borders, to see what we can do as Europeans.”
Changes in the Arctic mean new challenges for the NATO military alliance – including stepping up activity to deter threats, most of all from Russia.
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In Iceland, we toured a NATO airbase with the foreign secretary.
There, he said maintaining robust presence in the Arctic was essential for western security.
“Let’s be clear, in this challenging geopolitical moment the high north and the Arctic is a heavily contested arena and we should be under no doubt that NATO and the UK need to protect it for our own national security.”
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This is also about distracting Russia, drawing away resources that could have been used in the war in Ukraine and deterring it in the future.
Because the more Arctic opens up, the more this once pristine wilderness is becoming the arena of national rivalry and potentially conflict.
World
‘What did they do to be burned and bombed?’: Charity calls on UK to offer Gaza children life-saving treatment
A British charity has written to the prime minister and foreign secretary, urging them to allow seriously ill children from Gaza into the UK to receive life-saving medical treatment.
Warning: This article contains images readers may find distressing
The co-founder of Project Pure Hope told Sky News it was way past the time for words.
“Now, we need action,” Omar Dinn said.
He’s identified two children inside Gaza who urgently need help and is appealing to the UK government to issue visas as a matter of urgency.
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Britain has taken only two patients from Gaza for medical treatment in 20 months of Israeli bombardment.
Children are among the bulk of the casualties in Gaza
“Most of the people affected by this catastrophe that’s unfolding in Gaza are children,” he continued. “And children are the most vulnerable.
“They have nothing to do with the politics, and we really just need to see them for what they are.
“They are children, just like my children, just like everybody’s children in this country – and we have the ability to help them.”
Sky News has been sent video blogs from British surgeons working in Gaza right now which show the conditions and difficulties they’re working under.
They prepare for potential immediate evacuation whilst facing long lists, mainly of children, needing life-saving emergency treatment day after day.
Dr Victoria Rose is a British surgeon working in southern Gaza’s last remaining hospital
Dr Victoria Rose told us: “Every time I come, I say it’s really bad, but this is on a completely different scale now. It’s mass casualties. It’s utter carnage.
“We are incapable of getting through this volume. We don’t have the personnel. We don’t have the medical supplies. And we really don’t have the facilities.
“We are the last standing hospital in the south of Gaza. We really are on our knees now.”
One of her patients is three-year-old Hatem, who was badly burned when an Israeli airstrike hit the family apartment.
Karam, aged one, has a birth defect that could be easily fixed with surgery
His pregnant mother and father were both killed, leaving him an orphan. He has 35 percent burns on his small body.
“It’s a massive burn for a little guy like this,” Dr Rose says. “He’s so adorable. His eyelids are burnt. His hands are burnt. His feet are burnt.”
Hatem’s grandfather barely leaves his hospital bedside. Hatem Senior told us: “What did these children do wrong to suffer such injuries? To be burned and bombed? We ask God to grant them healing.”
Hatem Senior
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The second child identified by the charity is Karam, who, aged one, is trying to survive in a tent in deeply unhygienic surroundings with a protruding intestine.
He’s suffering from a birth defect called Hirschsprung disease, which could be easily operated on with the right skills and equipment – unavailable to him in Gaza right now.
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Karam, aged one, has a birth defect that could be easily fixed with surgery
Karam’s mother Manal told our Gaza camera crew: “No matter how much I describe how much my son is suffering, I wouldn’t be able to describe it enough. I swear I am constantly crying.”
Children are among the bulk of casualties – some 16,000 have been killed, according to the latest figures from local health officials – and make up the majority of those being operated on, according to the British surgical team on the ground.
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