Daria Shulzhenko

The upcoming delivery is part of the support package Canada pledged earlier in June during the G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alberta.

Zelensky’s statement follows a recent report by the Wall Street Journal saying that the U.S. has quietly implemented a review process giving Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authority to bar Ukrainian long-range strikes inside Russia with American missiles.

Although this time Ukraine has not yet announced the number of people released, the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War (POWs) said among them were eight civilians, including Ukrainian journalists Dmytro Khyliuk and Mark Kaliush and former mayor of Kherson, Volodymyr Mykolaienko.

Ukrainian drones struck a natural gas terminal in Russia's Leningrad region and an oil refinery in Samara region on Aug. 24.

According to Zelensky, the defense ministers of Sweden, Denmark, Romania, Lithuania, and Latvia, as well as the U.K. Minister for Veterans Affairs, are also in Ukraine for Independence Day.

For Volodymyr Mykolaienko, the former mayor of Kherson, this year’s Independence Day became a second birthday — he regained his freedom after over three years in Russian captivity on Aug. 24.“For the past few years, I haven’t seen anything but bars and concrete walls,” Mykolaienko told journalists upon his release.“I always wondered what my second birthday would be like, and it turned out beautifully that it fell on Aug. 24.”Shortly after the full-scale invasion began in 2022, 65-year-old

Editor’s Note: This article contains graphic descriptions.In almost two years of Russian captivity, former Ukrainian marine Vladyslav Zadorin lost 60 kilograms — half his body weight — along with his gallbladder and nearly his toes. He returned home with lasting disabilities and deep trauma.Captured on the first day of the full-scale invasion in 2022 while defending the strategically important Snake Island, 35 kilometers off the coast of Ukraine’s Odesa Oblast, Zadorin was held in seven dete

For Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs), release from captivity can feel like escaping hell. But for Russian POWs, it might mean walking straight into another.Lengthy interrogations by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), criminal prosecution, and forced return to the front line are often what await Russian POWs after they return home, despite efforts from the Kremlin to disguise it."(Russian) propagandists film videos where the released POWs appear to be having fun on cue. But we under

Editor's Note: This story was originally published in The Kyiv Independent's first-ever print edition, titled "The Power Within." You can order a copy in our e-store.If there were four women named Yaryna Chornohuz, they would all be 30 years old, all born in Kyiv, yet each would follow a different path.One of them would be a combat medic on the front line, risking her life to liberate Ukraine from Russian aggression.Another would write poetry, weaving the beauty of the Ukrainian language i

Editor's note: This story was originally published in The Kyiv Independent's first-ever print edition, titled "The Power Within," in July 2025. You can order a copy in our e-store.Billions of flowers grow every year in Ukraine, but it only takes one to tell the story of its people in wartime.As a single rose grows and is nurtured, blossoms, and then is cut to be transported and sold in any one of Ukraine’s numerous flower shops, it encounters many lives and surroundings as it makes its journ