When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Alina Holovko, a resident of Dnipro, spent her days organizing volunteers to assemble Molotov cocktails as Russian forces threatened to reach the city. She and other volunteers founded Dobra Sprava, a humanitarian organization that evacuates civilians from frontline communities.
In the early months of the war, those evacuation drivers were overwhelmingly men, making repeated trips into cities such as Lysychansk, Rubizhne, Siversk and later Bakhmut. But as the war dragged on and Ukraine’s military demanded more manpower, many of those volunteers were mobilized into the armed forces.
More than four years of war have steadily reduced the pool of experienced civilian volunteers. A July 2026 CSIS analysis estimated R
ussia had suffered roughly 1.4 million battlefield casualties and Ukraine between 525,000 and 625,000 since the full-scale invasion.
An April 2026 Human Rights First report found that the trend extends beyond Dobra Sprava, documenting that volunteer groups across eastern Ukraine are turning to women to conduct evacuations as experienced male volunteers are mobilized or lost to Russian attacks.
Sam Neill, a smoothly elegant and versatile actor whose career moved from art film to blockbuster as he dodged velociraptors in "Jurassic Park" to playing Holly Hunter's husband in "The Piano," has died. He was 78.
One of the strictest abortion bans in the country will be on the ballot this November after Idaho’s secretary of state certified a ballot measure on Monday that would reverse the state’s abortion ban that prohibits the procedure at all stages of pregnancy.
Donald Trump has approved a sharp reduction in the size of two national monuments in Utah held sacred by many Native Americans, in the latest move to open US public land to corporate developers and the oil and gas industry.
An ICE officer has fatally shot a man in Maine during what authorities described as a routine removal operation, the state’s attorney general’s office confirmed on Monday afternoon. Here’s what we know so far:
One in four Israelis now engages in harmful substance use as the psychological fallout from Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its expanding wars across the Middle East reshapes daily life, according to research cited by Haaretz.
