By Matthew ParishSunday 11 October 2026Following our earlier examination of the controversies surrounding the Japanese humanitarian activist Fuminori Tsuchiko, the Lviv Herald has received his persona...

By Matthew ParishSunday 11 October 2026Lviv has always been an international city. Its architectural splendour, its history as a crossroads of empires and its position as the cultural capital of weste...

By Matthew ParishSaturday 10 October 2026There are moments in the history of technology when an apparently obscure technical event reveals something fundamental about the relationship between humanity...

By Matthew ParishSaturday 10 October 2026Foreign volunteers have been part of Ukraine’s defence since the first days of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. They have come for different reasons and with widely differing backgrounds: some driven by political conviction, some by military vocation, some by a sense that the war in Ukraine represents a struggle extending far beyond Ukraine’s borders.Rooster belongs firmly to the military tradition. A 25-year-old Frenchman and former member

By Matthew ParishSaturday 10 October 2026There is something peculiarly revealing about the spectacle of the President of the United States negotiating with the President of the Russian Federation over...

By Matthew ParishSaturday 10 October 2026The young come in at half past nine,With cigarettes and borrowed cheer,And order vodka, beer or wine,As though the point of life were here.Outside, the trams c...

By Matthew ParishFriday 9 October 2026There is a comforting theory about drone warfare. It holds that distance sanitises killing. The drone operator sits behind a screen, perhaps kilometres from the p...

By Matthew ParishFriday 9 October 2026On the evening of 6 October 2026, a vast oil tanker caught fire in the Black Sea off the Russian resort city of Sochi. Flames engulfed its decks, black smoke rose...

By Matthew ParishThursday 8 October 2026For Ukraine, there are certain European capitals whose politics matter disproportionately. Warsaw matters because Poland is the geographical bridge between Ukra...

By Matthew ParishThursday 8 October 2026Artificial intelligence is often described as a threat to human creativity. The more interesting possibility is that it may prove to be one of its greatest acce...

By Matthew ParishThursday 8 October 2026There are grand ways of describing patriotism, and there are potatoes. The history of Ukraine’s war is full of speeches about sovereignty, national identity, Eu...

By Matthew ParishThursday 8 October 2026Human rights are easiest to defend when they are least under pressure. In peacetime, the language of rights can acquire an almost administrative character: stat...

By Matthew ParishThursday 8 October 2026There is a particular sort of loneliness to being drunk on the streets of Kharkiv after midnight. In peacetime, the drunk is part of the familiar furniture of a...

By Matthew ParishThursday 8 October 2026On 5 October 2026, musicians in Kharkiv gathered not merely to commemorate a distinguished teacher and clarinettist, but to demonstrate one of the more remarkab...

By Matthew ParishThursday 8 October 2026There are many ways of understanding Ukraine’s war against Russia. It is a war for national survival, because the Russian state has repeatedly denied the legiti...

By Matthew ParishThursday 8 October 2026There comes a moment in the life of almost every foreign man who has spent too long in wartime Ukraine when he begins to entertain an exceptionally dangerous th...

By Matthew ParishThursday 8 October 2026There are diplomatic visits to Kyiv, and then there are visits whose composition matters more than anything said at the press conference afterwards. The arrival...

By Matthew ParishThursday 8 October 2026There is a dangerous habit in European political discussion of treating the 1930s as a museum exhibit. We look at black-and-white photographs of torchlit marche...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 7 October 2026One of the less discussed puzzles of Ukraine’s vast wartime displacement is geographical. When civilians are evacuated from dangerous communities in Donetsk, L...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 7 October 2026One of the stranger consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that Vladimir Putin may ultimately have inflicted more damage upon the Russian language tha...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 7 October 2026There is something faintly disappointing about most technological revolutions. They are announced with trumpets and predictions of the imminent transformation ...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 7 October 2026There is something particularly terrible about a missile striking an apartment building in the early morning. War ordinarily announces itself through the vocab...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 7 October 2026Kharkiv is an extraordinarily beautiful city, although it does not always reveal itself immediately as such. Its centre contains monumental architecture, enorm...

By Matthew ParishWednesday 7 October 2026There are several ways of travelling from Kharkiv to Lviv, but whichever one you choose you are not merely crossing Ukraine. You are passing between civilisati...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 6 October 2026Noah Sims, the American former MasterChef contestant who has become a familiar figure in the world of humanitarian cooking in Ukraine, recently told this author ...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 6 October 2026There is a tendency, when discussing humanitarian assistance in Ukraine, to think in enormous numbers. Governments announce packages worth hundreds of millions o...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 6 October 2026Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651 in the shadow of the English Civil War. Vladimir Putin has spent much of his political career invoking, explicitly or other...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 6 October 2026There is a recurring problem with Western analysis of Russia’s war against Ukraine. We like things that can be counted. Tanks can be counted, artillery shells ca...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 6 October 2026One of the more peculiar experiences of talking regularly to a frontier large language model is that it can seem to know you. You begin a conversation about Kant...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 6 October 2026War produces injuries that can be photographed and injuries that cannot. A shattered apartment block can be recorded, measured and reconstructed. A soldier who h...

By Matthew ParishTuesday 6 October 2026An American soldier on combat, loss, mental health, stray cats, coffee and why he continues to fight for UkraineThere is something improbable about Saint’s journ...

By Matthew ParishMonday 5 October 2026There comes a point in every foreigner’s acquaintance with Kharkiv when a question presents itself with irresistible force: why is everyone here completely crazy?...

By Matthew ParishMonday 5 October 2026At approximately three o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, 5 October 2026, two enormous explosions shook central and southern Kharkiv. One of them struck the comp...

By Matthew ParishMonday 5 October 2026There is something appropriately musical about the name Operation Vivaldi. Modern warfare in Ukraine has acquired its own peculiar rhythm: drones circle overhead,...

By Matthew ParishMonday 5 October 2026The sirens had been going half an hour,The street was black, the soldiers gone away;Kharkiv endured beneath its concrete towersThe usual end to an unusual day.I r...

By Matthew ParishMonday 5 October 2026There comes a point in every evening in Kharkiv when a perfectly ordinary bar begins to acquire the atmosphere of a meeting whose purpose nobody has explained to ...

By Matthew ParishSunday 4 October 2026There is something peculiarly unsettling about a luxury hotel without guests. An abandoned factory makes sense: its machinery is silent because nobody is manufact...

By Matthew ParishSunday 4 October 2026There are many strange things in wartime Ukraine. There are coffee shops operating during air raids, pensioners calmly walking tiny dogs while explosions reverber...

By Matthew ParishSunday 4 October 2026In Kharkiv, a city where air-raid alarms, explosions and Russian attacks have become features of everyday existence, another war is being fought quietly and persi...

By Matthew ParishSunday 4 October 2026War creates unlikely heroes. It also creates arguments about heroes, because humanitarian work conducted in the extraordinary circumstances of a city under bombar...

By Matthew ParishSunday 4 October 2026The Peaceful Haven of Kharkiv charitable foundation emerged from the extraordinary civic mobilisation that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Feb...

By Matthew ParishSunday 4 October 2026There is a tendency, when thinking about humanitarian work in wartime Ukraine, to imagine the dramatic moment. A van careers down a battered road towards a villag...

By Matthew ParishSunday 4 October 2026There is a particular occupational hazard associated with journalism in wartime Kharkiv: one begins to imagine that everybody one meets has a story to tell. This ...

By Matthew ParishSunday 4 October 2026There is an expression sometimes heard among soldiers in Ukraine that a man has “gone crazy”. It is not a medical expression and it can encompass almost anything:...

By Matthew ParishSunday 4 October 2026There are phrases that become so familiar in wartime that their familiarity conceals their gravity. Slava Ukraini — ‘Glory to Ukraine’ — is one of them. Since Rus...

By Matthew ParishSunday 4 October 2026There are places in war whose military significance becomes almost inseparable from their symbolism. Lyman, a modest city in the north of Donetsk Oblast surrounde...

By Dr Matthew Parish, Editor-in-Chief, the Lviv HeraldThere is a tendency, particularly among those of us who write about wars rather than fight in them, to impose a narrative upon military experience...

By Matthew ParishSaturday 3 October 2026There is a natural tendency to imagine an evacuation as having an ending. A person is taken from a village under bombardment, from a town increasingly within ra...

By Matthew ParishSaturday 3 October 2026There was a time, not very long ago, when travelling to Kramatorsk was an uncomfortable but relatively ordinary part of working in eastern Ukraine. Journalists ...

By Matthew ParishSaturday 3 October 2026There are occasions in wartime when the most elementary tasks become unexpectedly complicated. You are not trying to cross the front line, find a military headq...