International Glance
Maryna Mytsiuk spends her free time at a shooting range outside Kyiv, hyper-focused on hitting her targets. She's got to practice. She's waiting for a call that, any day, will send her to war.
"Of course, I'd like to be in a combat position," said Mytsiuk, a 27-year-old folklore scholar who speaks Japanese and works at a nonprofit. "With my build and height, I'm not a natural fit for that … so I'm training very hard."
She is among a growing number of Ukrainian women joining the military as Russia's full-scale war on the country nears its fourth year, and troops remain in short supply. This comes as an end to the fighting appears no closer than it was when President Trump took office in January vowing to quickly broker peace.
Mytsiuk said the Ukrainian military has become much more receptive to women since the early days of the full-scale invasion, when Ukrainian men were lining up at recruitment centers to become soldiers.
She wanted to sign up, too, but was told she would be best off in the kitchen, she said, "where I could make dumplings."
Mytsiuk, however, plowed ahead. She enrolled at a military university for a second degree, graduating this summer. She looked into several brigades and applied to those with special forces units. She had difficult conversations with her mother and her boyfriend, a soldier. Both strongly oppose her decision.
The US navy has announced that the USS Gerald R Ford, regarded as the world’s newest and largest aircraft carrier, has entered the area of responsibility of the US Southern Command, which covers Latin America and the Caribbean.
More than 69,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war so far, Gaza health officials said Saturday, as both sides completed the latest exchange of bodies under the terms of the tenuous ceasefire.
Lithuania’s top diplomat, Kęstutis Budrys, delivered a stark message to Western allies from NATO’s eastern flank during his Monday visit to Washington: The era of self-deterrence is over.
When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2bn cloud-computing deal in 2021, their customer – the Israeli government – had an unusual demand: agree to use a secret code as part of The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world, was born out of Israel’s concerns that data it moves into the global corporations’ cloud platforms could end up in the hands of foreign law enforcement authorities.
