By Matthew ParishFriday 2 October 2026There are national holidays that acquire their meaning retrospectively. They commemorate victories achieved long ago, revolutions whose participants have disappea...

By Matthew ParishFriday 2 October 2026There are many different kinds of foreigner in wartime Ukraine. There are diplomats who arrive in Kyiv with security details and carefully prepared schedules. The...

By Matthew ParishThursday 1 October 2026There is something wonderfully improbable about the origins of New Forest For Ukraine. In February 2022, as Russian troops poured across Ukraine’s borders and millions of people began fleeing their homes, a handful of people in a quiet corner of southern England decided that they ought to do something. They had no grand humanitarian infrastructure, no fleet of lorries and no particular idea that they were creating an organisation that would still be operat

By Matthew ParishThursday 1 October 2026There are moments in Kharkiv when one half expects Mel Gibson to appear at the wheel of a battered Australian muscle car, pursued down Sumska Street by a gang of marauders wearing motorcycle helmets, animal skins and inexplicably elaborate shoulder pads. The comparison would be unfair to Kharkiv, of course. Kharkiv has better coffee, considerably more attractive architecture and rather fewer people fighting one another over the last remaining supplies of p

By Matthew ParishThursday 1 October 2026There are books one expects to encounter in the Kharkiv Literary Museum. One expects Ukrainian poetry, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs and the personal...

By Matthew ParishThursday 1 October 2026There is something almost anachronistic about a blacksmith’s forge in a twenty-first-century war. Ukraine’s battlefields are crowded with technologies that woul...

By Matthew ParishThursday 1 October 2026Kharkiv changes after dark. This is true of every city, of course, but in Kharkiv the transformation can be unusually complete. Daylight Kharkiv is a city of co...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 30 September 2026There are museums that preserve the past and there are museums whose very existence represents an argument with it. The Kharkivsʹkyy Literaturnyy Muzey, occ...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 30 September 2026There is a particular sort of humanitarianism that emerges in Ukraine once one moves beyond the conference rooms, institutional logos and carefully drafted ...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 30 September 2026It is difficult to walk around central Kharkiv today without encountering ghosts. They are not merely the ghosts of the full-scale Russian invasion, althoug...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 30 September 2026There are two different versions of humanitarian assistance in wartime Ukraine. The first is the institutional version: international organisations, white v...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 30 September 2026There is something characteristic of Kharkiv in the story of Barbara Karinska. She was born there in 1886, into a prosperous merchant family, at a time when...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 30 September 2026There is an apartment building in Kharkiv that ought to be counted amongst the most important literary monuments in Europe. It has none of the architectural...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 30 September 2026There are streets in Kharkiv whose importance bears almost no relationship to their length. Gogol Street is one of them. Running for only a few hundred metr...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 30 September 2026There are buildings in Kharkiv that one passes repeatedly without quite appreciating how much history is contained behind their walls. Number 37 Sumska Stre...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 30 September 2026A conversation with Dr Maria Teplova about medicine, old age and caring for the people whom war leaves behindThere is a kind of medicine that attracts camer...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 30 September 2026There is something profoundly attractive about Rory Stewart. That is precisely what makes some of his political ideas worth examining carefully. He is intel...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 30 September 2026Natalie Imbruglia wants the people of Ukraine to know that they have not been forgotten.The Australian-British singer, songwriter and actress, whose career ...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 29 September 2026The departure of the head of Ukraine’s Centre for Countering Disinformation looks mysterious at first sight. Look a little more closely, however, and it may t...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 29 September 2026Human beings have spent most of their history trying not to die. Religion has promised resurrection, medicine has prolonged life and civilisation itself might...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 29 September 2026There is an odd problem in describing Kharkiv in wartime. If one spends several days in the city, drinking coffee, taking taxis, visiting restaurants, walking...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 29 September 2026There is something almost offensively ordinary about the photograph. A woman walks through a London street wearing an elegant skirt, jacket and hat, carrying what appears to be a letter. Her shoes are wholly unsuitable for climbing across rubble, while beside her stands a pillar box, that most mundane and reassuring of British objects, apparently still awaiting the day’s post. Behind her, however, buildings have been ripped open and masonry lies scattere

By Matthew ParishTuesday 29 September 2026There are people in Kharkiv whose biographies have been divided by war, and there are others for whom the war seems instead to have gathered together the diff...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 29 September 2026There are parts of Kharkiv where the war is measured not primarily in maps, communiqués or diplomatic statements, but in meals. In Saltivka, the vast resident...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 29 September 2026Germany has suddenly acquired a political problem that is considerably larger than Friedrich Merz. During September 2026, the Alternative für Deutschland has ...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 29 September 2026There is a particular moment in certain bars in Kharkiv when you realise that the evening has escaped from human control. Nobody has made a decision to this e...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 29 September 2026There is a familiar joke about artificial intelligence that becomes less funny with every passing year. One day we will create a machine intelligent enough to...

By Matthew ParishMonday 28 September 2026There is something almost timeless about the infantryman. Alexander the Great would have recognised him, Napoleon would have recognised him and the soldiers wh...

By Matthew ParishMonday 28 September 2026There is a particular sort of person whom one encounters repeatedly in Ukraine after more than four years of full-scale war. They are not soldiers, at least no...

By Matthew ParishMonday 28 September 2026At about two o’clock in the morning, an explosion tore through a street in Kharkiv. A projectile had apparently struck the roadway outside Panda, a small cloth...

By Matthew ParishMonday 28 September 2026The Lviv Herald interviews the head of rehabilitation at Kharkiv’s Sytenko Institute about blast injuries, prosthetics, virtual reality, the limits of early re...

By Matthew ParishMonday 28 September 2026There comes a moment in the life of almost every foreign man who has spent too long in wartime Ukraine when he begins to believe that he understands the countr...

By Matthew ParishMonday 28 September 2026There is something wonderfully improbable about Macclesfield Ukrainian Aid. In February 2022, as millions of Ukrainians fled westwards before the advancing Rus...

By Matthew ParishMonday 28 September 2026Somewhere in Kharkiv there is a warehouse whose address it would be unwise to print. There are many such places in Ukraine, buildings without brass plaques, re...

By Matthew ParishMonday 28 September 2026In an earlier Lviv Herald interview, I spoke with Yana and Zhenya, a couple from Kupiansk who remained in their home through occupation, liberation and the ret...

By Matthew ParishMonday 28 September 2026There is a moment in certain Kharkiv evenings when civilisation quietly ends. Nobody announces this. There is no revolution, no barricade and no solemn declara...

By Matthew ParishMatthew Parish, Editor-in-Chief of the Lviv Herald, talks to former CIA operations officer Sean M. Wiswesser about Russian intelligence, recruitment, surveillance, kompromat and the m...

By Matthew ParishSunday 27 September 2026War is not generally considered an aphrodisiac, although history suggests that it frequently behaves like one. Wherever soldiers, journalists, volunteers, dipl...

By Matthew ParishSunday 27 September 2026For most of military history, the archetypal soldier has been a young man. There were obvious reasons for this. War demanded marching enormous distances carryi...

By Matthew ParishSunday 27 September 2026Kharkiv at night has acquired the peculiar quality of a city that is simultaneously alive and waiting to be destroyed. There are cities in wartime in which eve...

By Matthew ParishSaturday 26 September 2026Dr Matthew Parish interviews Paulina, a 14-year-old girl from Kharkiv whose childhood, education and sporting ambitions have been transformed by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Once a competitive figure skater, she was forced to abandon the ice after Kharkiv’s skating facilities became unavailable during the war. She has since taken up aerial acrobatics, while continuing to study, volunteer and build a life in the city she refuses to abandon.Ma

By Matthew ParishSaturday 26 September 2026There are businesses that adapt to war, and there are businesses that cease, in any meaningful sense, to be businesses at all. Route 66, a vehicle repair wor...

By Matthew ParishSaturday 26 September 2026Kharkiv is a city that has learned to live simultaneously with normality and catastrophe. People go to work, children grow up, couples fall in love and babie...

By Matthew ParishSaturday 26 September 2026One of the less remarked-upon transformations produced by Ukraine’s long war with Russia has been the emergence of women as a substantial component of the co...

By Matthew ParishSaturday 26 September 2026Something rather remarkable has happened in Central Europe over the course of a few days. Hungary, which initially reacted to Ukraine’s new Carpathian Eight ...

By Matthew ParishSaturday 26 September 2026There is something strangely appropriate about imagining Prime Minister’s Questions conducted before a House of Commons populated entirely by teddy bears. Th...

By Matthew ParishFriday 25 September 2026The proposition that Vladimir Putin must now escalate his conflict with NATO sounds, at first sight, like a prediction of an imminent Russian invasion of NATO ...

By Matthew ParishFriday 27 September 2026There is a point on the roads east and south of Kharkiv where the landscape begins to change. The villages become smaller, the traffic becomes stranger and the...

By Matthew ParishFriday 25 September 2026There is never quite enough time for an interview close to the front line. Conversations that might ordinarily take an hour are compressed into minutes. People...