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KYIV, Ukraine A tall woman with blonde and pink hair and a small dachshund stood out among the crowd of police officers and volunteers at the checkpoint on the edge of Kyiv. She looked as if she were out for a stroll, but she had just survived a dangerous evacuation under mortar fire.

The woman, Sasha Myhova, 21, and her boyfriend, Stas Burykov, 19, were evacuated Friday from their home in Irpin, the northwestern suburb that has become one of the most fiercely contested areas in the three weeks of fighting since Russias invading troops advanced toward the capital and Ukrainian troops blocked their way.

It was dangerous, she said. They were bombing as we drove.

The heavy boom of artillery sounded again as she spoke. Shells were landing right in our yard, she said, pulling out a piece of metal shrapnel she had kept.

As the war in Ukraine settles into its fourth week, the suburbs on the edge of Kyiv have become important if unlikely front lines of the war, where the Russian and Ukrainian forces are stuck in a savage give-and-take at one of the gateways to the capital, in positions that have not really moved.

Blocked and badly mauled, Russian forces have nevertheless established positions around three sides of the capital. Ukrainian forces have successfully stalled them, and on Wednesday mounted a series of coordinated counterattacks to challenge those positions.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine hailed the defense of Kyiv, led by the commander of land forces, Oleksandr Syrsky, saying that Ukrainian forces had regained control of 30 settlements around the city in the counterattack. The enemy suffered significant losses and was driven away from the capital, he said.

Yet the mortar fire and gunfire was so heavy in Irpin that the Ukrainians stopped attempting further evacuations after the one that included Ms. Myhova. The Ukrainian counterattack seems to have been met by a ferocious response from Russian forces. Residents and volunteers helping evacuate them said Russian artillery fire and even machine gun fire had intensified over the last few days.

One man, Vitaliy Kalman, was standing beside his suitcase hoping for a lull in the fighting. He said he had tried to go back into the district to retrieve some clothes from his apartment but came under mortar fire just beyond the ruined bridge that marks the entrance into Irpin. The bridge was destroyed by Ukrainian troops to forestall advancement by Russian troops in the first days of the war.

They are very close, he said of the Russians. I saw the shell explode just near my house, and I ran back here with the evacuation team.

A volunteer member of the Territorial Defense Forces described the street fighting in Irpin as an all-out guerrilla war. On the attacking side are the Russian troops, which Western military analysts say are likely elite airborne Special Forces units.

Defending against them are local volunteers, many of whom had just been handed rifles a few days before the Russians arrived in their town, alongside veteran militia fighters and uniformed troops.

Street fighting had been raging for days, according to soldiers interviewed on the edge of the town on Saturday. As of then, Russians controlled one of the three main thoroughfares, one was contested and the third was under tenuous Ukrainian control.

The locals have been slipping out at night and shooting at Russian positions, said the volunteer, who asked only to be identified by his nickname, Spotter, for security reasons. Its understood that they will be taking no prisoners, he said of the firefights. These are people who have weapons and know the local area perfectly.

A doctor at a nearby hospital said it had received 25 wounded soldiers on Wednesday on the first day of the counterattack.

Ms. Myhova said Russian troops had twice entered her home in recent days. First, two soldiers who seemed to be scouts came into the yard, then three days ago, just before the Ukrainian counterattack, 10 Russian soldiers entered the house.

They searched everything, she said. They said they had picked up a telephone signal from the house.

The soldiers warned the family that if they informed anyone about the location of the Russian troops, they would shoot them. They pointed their guns at us, she said. They said, We can shoot you because we know your location.

When Mr. Burykovs 70-year-old grandfather, the owner of the house, began to remonstrate with them, the Russian soldiers told them that they were securing control over what was Russian land, citing the medieval kingdom of Kievan Rus, which Russia claims as its ancestral state.

My grandfather tried to argue, Mr. Burykov said. He said, Its rubbish that its your land. I was born here. Go away.

On Wednesday, the day Ukraine mounted its counter-strikes, residents said the shelling worsened dramatically. There were four explosions around the house that shook the doors, and the sound of gunfire from assault rifles in the yard, Ms. Myhova said.

When they learned that volunteers were evacuating an elderly woman nearby, the couple, along with a sister of Mr. Burykov, asked to get out. But Mr. Burykovs parents, grandfather and other siblings stayed behind.

They want to go when there is a green corridor, Ms. Myhova said, referring to a humanitarian evacuation with guarantees of safety. But there will not be any, she said, since even if one is agreed, they shoot at the cars.

The Ukrainian army and volunteers evacuated about 150 residents from Irpin on Thursday, many of them pensioners who were struggling to survive after the fighting disrupted water, gas and electricity.

They are out of strength, said a volunteer paramedic, Oleh Lutsenko, 32, who was on duty at the entrance to Irpin Thursday. He treated three wounded soldiers, one with severe wounds from artillery fire, among the evacuees, and his team also brought out the bodies of three dead civilians all grandmothers, as he called them. Maybe they died from hunger, he said.

As his team pulled out just before 5 p.m., they came under machine gun fire, he said. Despite two days of counterattack, they were still in range of Russian guns.

While Ukrainian troops had success in stalling the Russian advance as it lumbered down the main highways toward Kyiv, Russian units have continued pushing south on the eastern and western flanks of the capital in an attempt to encircle it, military analysts have said.

The long columns of tanks that had backed up on highways to the north of Irpin have now fanned out into villages and forests outside of Kyiv, according to the volunteer, Spotter, who was interviewed at a gas station in a western district of the capital.

In his mid 50s, with a salt and pepper beard, he carried a walkie-talkie and said he ran an ad hoc intelligence unit, collecting information on the Russians positions in the suburbs and outlying villages.

They are hiding tanks in villages between houses, he said, adding that soldiers were also quartering in homes to avoid the cold.

Their dispersal was complicating the Ukrainian counterattack, since the Russian armor was interspersed in villages, where civilians lived, even if most people have fled the area.

After two major ambushes on Russian positions outside Kyiv, in the suburban towns of Bucha and Brovary, which together left dozens of charred tanks on main roads, the armored vehicles are now avoiding traveling in columns, he said.

They are now digging in, Spotter said of Russian soldiers, as Ukraines artillery has been pounding them from the edge of Kyiv. They didnt expect this resistance.

Volunteers guarding the checkpoint on the main western highway that heads out of Kyiv to the city of Zhytomyr said Russian troops had seized control of the road and vehicles could no longer safely use the highway except to a nearby settlement of Chaika.

It was unclear, Spotter said, how far south Russian troops had moved after crossing the Zhytomyr highway, though it appeared the intention of the Russian forces was to keep encircling the capital and eventually seal off access routes.

The advance was now stalled. They are regrouping, he said.

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What Happened on Day 23 of Russias Invasion of Ukraine - The New York Times

In September,1949, two Ukrainian agents working with the C.I.A. landed near Lviv, in what was then the Soviet Union. They were the vanguard of an operation that would acquire the code name Redsox. Its aim was to connect with anti-Soviet insurgents fighting by the tens of thousands in Ukraine, as well as in smaller numbers elsewhere on Russias rim. Soviet moles betrayed the program, however, and at least three-quarters of the Redsox agents disappeared. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, Moscow had quelled Ukraines rebellion while forcibly displacing or killing hundreds of thousands of people. The C.I.A.s glancing intervention was ill-fated and tragic, an internal history concluded.

Since Vladimir Putin ordered Russias unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, on February24th, the United States has acted as if to redeem itself; the Biden Administration has led its NATO allies to airlift planeloads of Javelin anti-tank weapons and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukrainian forces, while pledging billions of dollars more in military assistance and imposing punishing sanctions on Russias economy and Putins lite. More than three weeks after the crisis began, the mood in Western capitals remains pugnacious and emotive. Last week, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, appeared by video before Canadas Parliament, and, the next day, he addressed a joint session of Congress. In both venues, politicians rose to applaud and chanted an improbably viral invocation of Ukrainian glory: Slava Ukraini!

Yet NATO has declined to provide Ukraine what Zelensky has repeatedly soughta no-fly zone to ground Russian warplanes or a transfer of fighter jetsfor fear that such actions would bring the U.S. and Russia into direct combat. We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine, Joe Biden reiterated on Twitter recently. A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent. The President is, of course, right about that, and yet, as Russian planes and artillery daily pound Ukrainian apartment buildings and hospitals, he can surely understand why Zelensky is pressing for more.

Zelensky has been justly celebrated for his personal courage and his adaptations of Churchillian rhetoric for the TikTok era. His presentation to Congress last week was a study in discomforting moral provocation. He invoked Pearl Harbor and September 11th to describe Ukraines daily experience under Russian missiles and bombs, then showed a graphic video depicting the recent deaths of children and other innocents. Later that day, Biden called Putin a war criminal and announced a new package of military supplies, including anti-aircraft systems and drones. The aid may help, but it cannot relieve Zelensky of the terrible predicaments he must manage in the weeks ahead. Ukraine may be facing a long war costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of its citizens, a war that may not be winnable, even with the most robust assistance that NATO is likely to provide. In any event, NATOs greatest priority is to strengthen its own defenses and dissuade Putin from attacking the alliance.

Zelenskys alternative may be to pursue a ceasefire deal with Putin that could require Ukraine to forswear future NATO membership, among other bitter concessions. In the light of Putins annexation of Crimea, in 2014, and his years-long armed support for pro-Russian enclaves in Ukraines east, such a deal would be unstable and unreliable. Still, Zelensky appears torn. Even as he asked Congress last week to do more for Ukraines war effort, he pleaded with Biden to lead the world to peace, and he recently signalled his willingness to bargain with Putin on Ukraines relationship with nato. The countrys past failure to win admission to the alliance is a truth that must be recognized, he said.

It has become common to describe Russias invasion as a watershed in history comparable to 9/11 or to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The war in Ukraine marks a turning point for our continent and our generation, President Emmanuel Macron, of France, said earlier this month. Perhaps, but some of this speculation about Europes destiny and the future of Great Power competition may be premature. Certainly, the war has already produced a humanitarian disaster of shocking and destabilizing dimensions. Three million Ukrainians have fled their country. The 1.8million of them who have gone to Poland constitute a population roughly the size of Warsaws. If the fighting drags on and Ukraine implodes, the country will export many more destitute people, and, as happened in the former Yugoslavia during the nineteen-nineties, it may also draw in opportunists, including mercenaries and extremists.

Meanwhile, Russias economy, according to the International Monetary Fund, could shrink by thirty-five per cent this year under the weight of Western sanctions. Putins oligarchs and enablers can endure the loss of super-yachts and private jets, but a sudden economic contraction on that scale would crush ordinary Russians and inevitably cost lives. (Our economy will need deep structural changes, Putin acknowledged last week, adding, They wont be easy.) Russias isolation from large swaths of global banking and trade, and its loss of access to advanced U.S. technologies, could last a long time, too: democracies often find it easier to impose sanctions than to remove them, even when the original cause of a conflict subsides. (Ask Cuba.) When the history of this era is written, Putins war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger, Biden said in his recent State of the Union address.

Still, some introspection may be in order. In his address, the President also declared that, in the battle between democracy and autocracies, democracies are rising to the moment. But Europe is troubled by illiberal populism, including in Poland. And Donald Trumpwho, just two days before Russia rolled into Ukraine, called Putins preparatory moves geniusretains a firm hold on the Republican Party, and appears to be all in for a relection campaign in 2024. As long as Trumps return to the White House is a possibility, Bidens declarations will require some asterisks.

Every night for three weeks now, Zelensky told Congress, various Ukrainian cities, Odessa and Kharkiv, Chernihiv and Sumy, Zhytomyr and Lviv, Mariupol and Dnipro, have endured attacks. We are asking for a reply, for an answer to this terror. Ukraine is an unlucky country, and the restoration of its independence and security may be a long and costly project, but it is one the U.S. cannot afford to abandon again.

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The Complexities of the Ukraine Dilemma - The New Yorker

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu attends a news conference after talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia March 16, 2022. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov/Pool

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ISTANBUL, March 20 (Reuters) - Turkey's foreign minister said in an interview published on Sunday that Russia and Ukraine were nearing agreement on "critical" issues and he was hopeful for a ceasefire if the two sides did not backtrack from progress achieved so far.

Russian forces invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. President Vladimir Putin has called Russia's actions a "special operation" meant to demilitarize Ukraine and purge it of what he sees as dangerous nationalists. Ukraine and the West say Putin launched an aggressive war of choice.

Foreign ministers Sergei Lavrov of Russia and Dmytro Kuleba of Ukraine met in the Turkish resort town of Antalya earlier this month with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu also attending. The discussions did not yield concrete results.

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But Cavusoglu, who also travelled to Russia and Ukraine last week for talks with Lavrov and Kuleba, told Turkish daily Hurriyet that there had been "rapprochement in the positions of both sides on important subjects, critical subjects".

"We can say we are hopeful for a ceasefire if the sides do not take a step back from the current positions," he said, without elaborating on the issues.

Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin, speaking to al Jazeera television, said the two sides were getting closer on four key issues. He cited Russia's demand for Ukraine to renounce ambitions to join NATO, demilitarisation, what Russia has referred to as "de-nazification", and the protection of the Russian language in Ukraine.

Ukraine and the West have dismissed Russian references to "neo-Nazis" in Ukraine's democratically elected leadership as baseless propaganda, and Kalin said such references were offensive to Kyiv.

Kyiv and Moscow reported some progress in talks last week toward a political formula that would guarantee Ukraine's security, while keeping it outside NATO, though each sides accused the other of dragging matters out. read more

Kalin said a permanent ceasefire could come only through a meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. But he said Putin felt that positions on the "strategic issues" of Crimea and Donbas were not close enough for a meeting.

Russia annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 while part of the eastern industrial Donbas region was seized by Russian-backed separatist forces that year.

NATO member Turkey shares a maritime border with Ukraine and Russia in the Black Sea, has good relations with both and has offered to mediate between them.

It has voiced support for Ukraine, but has also opposed far-reaching Western sanctions imposed on Moscow over the invasion.

While forging close ties with Russia on energy, defence and trade and relying heavily on Russian tourists, Turkey has sold drones to Ukraine, angering Moscow.

Turkey also opposes Russian policies in Syria and Libya, as well as Moscow's annexation of Crimea.

President Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly said Turkey will not abandon its relations with Russia or Ukraine, saying Ankara's ability to speak to both sides was an asset.

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Reporting by Ali Kucukgocmen; Editing by Mark Heinrich

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Turkey says Russia and Ukraine nearing agreement on 'critical' issues - Reuters

Officially, the port city of Kherson was one of the first in Ukraine to fall under Russian control.

It's a strategically valuable city, straddling both the Dnieper River and the Black Sea, and home to more than 280,000 people.

Analysts say controlling Kherson offers much to Russia's forces by both blocking Ukraine's access to the sea and linking the territories in Donetsk and Luhansk with the peninsula of Crimea.

But the occupation is not proving comfortable according to messages Sky News has received from a Ukrainian local resistance volunteer in the city on Friday, communicated through a contact in the UK.

Pictures taken over several days from the city show protesters carrying the Ukrainian flag filing past Russian vehicles emblazoned with the letter Z - and Russian soldiers aiming their weapons at civilians.

The messages offer a glimpse of life under Russian occupation. These are the volunteer's words:

Life in Kherson at the moment in relation to other cities is relatively calm.

Fights are going on in the vicinity of the city.

Kherson is completely occupied by Russian invaders.

The military is constantly moving around the city, but the Ukrainian flag continues to hang over the City Council.

The occupants tried to hold a fake referendum, but the population of the city came out to protest and frustrated all their plans.

Due to the complete blockade of the city, there are big problems with food supplies.

The big shops are closed. Mostly small retail outlets operate and agricultural products are brought from the suburbs.

Children sit in shelters; schools and kindergartens do not work. The outskirts of the city are destroyed, many victims among the local population.

The invaders are robbing stores. But life in the city goes on, people help each other.

And in general, the population of the city is patriotic. Glory to Ukraine!

Ukrainian television is turned off in the city today. It is possible to watch the broadcast of Ukrainian TV via the Internet.

Volunteers have organised in the city in different microdistricts, one of them includes me and my friends.

We deliver medicines and products to orphanages and hospitals that are given by businessmen and citizens who are not indifferent.

About the resistance by the occupiers, every day there are demonstrations under Ukrainian flags, thousands of citizens come out to protest.

Of course there are problems with water and electricity, but the city authorities are trying to repair the damage as much as possible.

What will happen next with food is not known, the occupiers do not let the humanitarian cargo pass.

They want the townspeople to take food from them, but no one takes their help. We all believe in the imminent victory of the Ukrainian army.

But a lot depends on the determination and support of our Western friends.

I will not write to you about the hostilities and the participation of me or any of my acquaintances in hostilities or resistance, for obvious reasons.

I can only say that on a signal the Earth will burn under the feet of the invaders.

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Ukraine war: A glimpse inside Kherson, the city occupied by Russian forces, through the eyes of a Ukrainian resistance volunteer - Sky News

Many have called the invasion of Ukraine the worlds first TikTok war, and experts say it is high time for the short video platform once known primarily for silly lip syncs and dance challenge to be taken seriously.

Some politicians are doing just that. In a speech, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, appealed to TikTokers as a group that could help end the war. Last week, Joe Biden spoke to dozens of top users on the app in a first-of-its kind meeting to brief the influencers on the conflict in Ukraine and how the US is addressing it.

But even as world leaders increasingly legitimize the platform, others continue to dismiss it as frivolous. The White House meeting was lampooned on Saturday Night Live in a skit, and mocked relentlessly on Twitter, while the Republican senator Josh Hawley scolded Biden for asking teenagers to do his job.

Experts say this mentality is a mistake.

TikTok is constantly overlooked and deprioritized by people who do not take the time to understand it, said Abbie Richards, an independent researcher who studies the app. Many of the problems we are seeing with it today stem from this false idea that it is just a dancing app.

Ukraine-related content on TikTok has exploded since the country was invaded on 24 February, with videos tagged #Ukraine surpassing 30.5bn views as of 17 March. One report from the New York Times found that, proportionally, Ukraine content on TikTok outpaces that on platforms more than twice its size.

With that dramatic rise came an influx of misinformation and disinformation. Videos of unrelated explosions were re-posted as if they were from Ukraine. Media uploaded from video games were passed off as footage of real-life events. Russian propaganda went viral before it could be removed.

We saw immediately from the start of the conflict that TikTok was structurally incompatible with the needs of the current moment regarding disinformation, Richards said.

TikTok has a number of features that make it uniquely susceptible to such issues, according to a paper published by Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media titled TikTok, the War on Ukraine, and 10 Features that Make the App Vulnerable to Misinformation.

Its core features prime it for remixing media, allowing users to upload videos and sound clips without attributing their origins, the paper said, which makes it difficult to contextualize and factcheck videos. This has created a digital atmosphere in which it is difficult even for seasoned journalists and researchers to discern truth from rumor, parody and fabrication, researchers added.

Design features within the app also create an easy pathway for misinformation, researchers say. Users post mostly under pseudonyms; the date of upload for videos is not prominently displayed, complicating attempts to contextualize content; and the newsfeed structure with each video taking up the entirety of a users screen makes it difficult to seek out additional sources.

Unlike on Facebook, where the users feed is filled primarily with content from friends and people they know, TikToks for you page is largely content from strangers determined by the companys opaque algorithm.

And the more a platform relies on algorithms rather than a chronological newsfeed, the more susceptible it can be to mis- and disinformation, experts say. That is because algorithms favor content that gets more engagement.

One thing that is common across all platforms is that algorithms are optimized to detect and exploit cognitive biases for more polarizing content, said Marc Faddoula, a researcher at the TikTok Observatory where he studies the platform and its content policies. Disinformation is very engaging for users, so it is more likely to appear on feeds.

These issues are exacerbated by the age and size of TikTok. The app is relatively young, launched in 2016, and has grown rapidly to 130m in the United States and more than 1bn globally. Though smaller than Facebook, which has 230m users in the US and 2.9bn globally, the platform is facing many of the same issues with fewer resources and less experience.

TikTok is continuing to evolve after it saw usership soar during the pandemic-induced lockdowns of 2020, said Emily Dreyfuss, a researcher at Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media who co-authored the research paper.

That is when we really started to see a shift from what people thought was just an app for teenagers to do viral dance tricks to a real part of the cultural conversation, she said.

TikTok has, like many other social media companies, scrambled to keep up with the onslaught of disinformation about the war in Ukraine.

It uses a combination of algorithms and human moderators to manage the platform, spokeswoman Jamie Favazza told the Guardian, with teams that speak more than 60 languages and dialects including Russian and Ukrainian. It has rushed out the launch of a state-controlled media policy to address propaganda put out by Russian entities.

We continue to respond to the war in Ukraine with increased safety and security resources to detect emerging threats and remove harmful misinformation, Favazza said.

Meanwhile TikTok added digital literacy tips on its Discover page to help our community evaluate and make decisions about the content they view online. It has for years voluntarily released transparency reports about what content it has removed.

But researchers say there is more to be done. Despite these moves, some state-controlled media accounts such as RT remain on the app, though access to them has been banned in the EU.

Richards, the TikTok researcher, noted that a disinformation campaign she studied for a recent report remains on the platform, with dozens of videos using the caption Russian Lives Matter continuing to rack up thousands of views.

In many ways TikTok has been far more responsive to criticism than its predecessors, including social media giants such as Facebook. But while the company is dutifully flagging misinformation and cracking down on Russian state content, reining in disinformation on a mass scale is becoming more complicated than ever as influencers power grows.

Well-followed accounts have an outsized influence on what media their followers consume, regardless of how much expertise they actually have in a given subject matter. Studies show consumers are substantially more likely to trust a recommendation from someone they follow on social media than a traditional advertisement, and the same goes for information shared online.

TikTok is driven by a culture that values individual creators and platform-specific microcelebrities, the Shorenstein Center paper argued, making influencers and people with large followings particularly susceptible to inadvertently sharing inaccurate or manipulated content.

Influencers have great incentive to enter the discourse about a breaking news event or ongoing crisis, since these posts can boost users profiles; even one viral video can popularize an entire account, the paper said.

Meanwhile, very few checks and balances exist in terms of how they operate in the online media space, said Dreyfuss, noting that they operate in similar media spaces as journalists with far less training or media literacy, such as how to factcheck false claims that even seasoned researchers struggle to detect.

There is no formal accountability for influencers and they are often catering only to the whims of their fans, Dreyfuss said.

Experts say it is urgent that legislators and the general public take this collision of massive influence with little accountability seriously. In inviting top influencers to the White House, the Biden administration took a meaningful step in that direction.

For their part, influencers are also recognizing the power that they hold. One 18-year-old TikTok star with more than 10.5m followers told the Washington Post she sees herself as a White House correspondent for Gen Z who is there to relay the information in a more digestible manner.

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TikTok was just a dancing app. Then the Ukraine war started - The Guardian