What are Russia's gains from the Iran war? 'We are not losers; we are winners' The group had reportedly been starving on the front line after up to 17 days without food deliveries and months without rotation. The fighters were holed up on the left, eastern bank of the Oskil River in the southeastern Donetsk region after Russian bombs destroyed the bridges connecting them to their brigade on the right bank. "They weren't listened to on the radio, or perhaps no one wanted to listen to them. My husband shouted and begged, saying there was no food and water," Silchuk wrote. She did not respond to Al Jazeera's request for an interview.

To stay or risk the'Road of Death' - Ukrainian civilians trapped in frontline city So, we're stuck here, says Ludmilla, over the phone from the rooftop of a fire-damaged house in southern Ukraine. People are trying their best to survive. Her frontline home city of Oleshky has, according to multiple accounts, been largely cut off from fresh supplies of food or medicine for months. Ludmilla describes being trapped there, and watching it decaying before her eyes. Ukraine's commissioner for human rights has warned of a humanitarian crisis.

Evidence is mounting that Elon Musk's decision to deny Russian forces access to his Starlink satellite-based internet service has blunted Moscow's advance, caused confusion among Russian soldiers and handed an advantage to Ukraine's defenders. And what can Ukraine's military achieve in the meantime? The Russians lost their ability to control the field, a Ukrainian drone operator who goes by the callsign Giovanni told us. I think they lost 50% of their capacity for offence, he said. That's what the numbers show.

Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Will sanctions against Russian oil giants hurt Putin? Is the fall of Pokrovsk, Ukraine's key eastern stronghold, inevitable? Pokrovsk, a key fortress and logistical hub for Ukrainian forces in the eastern region of Donbas, has been under siege for almost two years. But in recent weeks, tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have been storming the town around the clock, taking over the streets where buildings are mostly reduced to bombed-out, deserted ruins. They use reconnaissance drones and satellite images to identify gaps in Ukrainian defences and use tiny groups of soldiers who are attacked and killed in droves by Ukrainian drones .

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says he has visited troops near the town of Pokrovsk, where the fiercest front line battle between Russia and Ukraine is currently taking place. Zelensky posted photos showing him meeting personnel at a command post in the Dobropillya sector, some 20km (12 miles) north of Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region. Kyiv's top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskiy, said on Monday that Ukraine was increasing pressure on the Dobropillya front to force the enemy to disperse its forces and make it impossible to concentrate their main efforts in the Pokrovsk area. Russia has been trying to seize Pokrovsk - a strategic frontline town and logistic hub - for over a year. Although it has taken them months to approach the town's borders, Russian soldiers have now infiltrated it and on Friday, Zelensky said Russia had amassed 170,000 troops on its outskirts.

Drone teams competing for points under the'Army of Drones Bonus System' killed or wounded 18,000 Russian soldiers in September. Drone teams competing for points under the'Army of Drones Bonus System' killed or wounded 18,000 Russian soldiers in September. Ukrainian computer game-style drone attack system goes'viral' A computer game-style drone attack system has gone "viral" among Ukrainian military units and is being extended to reconnaissance, artillery and logistics operations, the nation's first deputy prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, has told the Guardian. Drone teams competing for points under the "Army of Drones Bonus System" killed or wounded 18,000 Russian soldiers in September, with 400 drone units now taking part in the competition, up from 95 in August, Ukrainian officials said. The system, which launched more than a year ago, rewards soldiers who achieve strikes with points that can be exchanged to buy more weapons in an "Amazon-for-war" online store called Brave1 filled with more than 100 different drones, autonomous vehicles and other drone war material.

Have Russians set up a military base in my childhood home? It was another busy day at work. Russian forces had attacked my home region of Zaporizhzhia again: a region in the south of Ukraine, split between the Russian invaders, who claim it all as theirs, and the defending Ukrainians. Sitting in my office in central London, I was feeling nostalgic. I decided to take a quick look at the latest satellite images of my childhood village - the poetically titled Verkhnya Krynytsya (or Upper Spring in English), in the Russian-occupied part of the region, just a few kilometres from the front lines.

Ukrainian soldiers carry a Vampire drone after a training flight on Feb. 8, 2025. Ukrainian soldiers carry a Vampire drone after a training flight on Feb. 8, 2025. One afternoon this spring, Mykhailo Fedorov, a minister in the wartime government of Ukraine, turned up the volume on his laptop and played a video to illustrate his latest innovation. Its purpose, he explained, was to make the experience of combat feel more like a video game to Ukrainian troops--or as he put it, "to gamify" the war. The clip showed a series of aerial strikes, each filmed from the vantage of a combat drone. One of them, apparently flying by night, had used its thermal-imaging camera to detect an enemy soldier in what looked like a field or forest.

Leonid Tymchenko spent the first month of Russia's invasion sitting in his dark government office after curfew. Unable to go home, Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs scrolled through Telegram, looking at thousands of videos and images of advancing Russian soldiers. When Tymchenko was offered a chance to test a new facial-recognition tool, he uploaded some of the photos to try it out. He could not believe the results. Every time Tymchenko added a photo of a Russian soldier, the software, made by the American facial-recognition company Clearview AI, seemed to come back with an exact hit, linking to pages that revealed the soldier's name, hometown, and social-media profile.

A Russian soldier was seen surrendering to a Ukrainian drone May 9 in edited video released by Ukraine's 92nd Mechanized Brigade. A Russian soldier whose surrender to Ukrainian forces was captured on drone camera, spoke for the first time about his experience. Ruslan Anitin, a draftee who was cornered alone by the Ukrainian military near the city of Bakhmut, surrendered by communicating via an aerial drone's camera. "It felt like it was never going to involve us at all," Anitin said of the conflict during an interview with the Wall Street Journal about his experience. A Russian soldier was seen surrendering to a Ukrainian drone May 9 in edited video released by Ukraine's 92nd Mechanized Brigade.