August 29, 2024, was the fifth anniversary of the IX convocation Verkhovna Rada work. For more than two and a half of those years, it has been functioning in the conditions of the full-scale Russian invasion. This convocation of the parliament has already been working for 1828 days, and due to the martial law, it will definitely become the longest one in Ukrainian history.

For many, political success is a drudgery stretched for decades but Volodymyr Zelensky's had a fast track to the position of head of state. A few minutes before the New Year 2019, he announced his political ambitions on the air of the 1+1 channel, and less than 5 months later, on May 20, 2019, he was inaugurated as the President of Ukraine. Voters highly appreciated the large number of election promises of the former showman, and in the second round of elections, they gave him a record 73.22% of the vote. As the youngest guarantor of the Constitution in the history of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, together with the Servant of the People party, also managed to achieve another fantastic success – his political party gained 254 mandates in the parliamentary elections and formed a one-party coalition first time ever in Ukraine’s history.

In October 2022, the Kremlin launched what was then the most comprehensive bombing campaign of the war. For the next five months, waves of Russian missiles and drones struck Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure on an almost daily basis. The attacks aimed to break Ukraine’s resistance by making life as unbearable as possible for tens of millions of Ukrainian civilians.

The collapse of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure last year due to Russia’s war brought the entire country to its knees. And while Ukraine was, for the most part, spared from widespread blackouts this winter, Russian forces are once again targeting critical infrastructure.

Demographic and migration crises are some of the major challenges caused by the full-scale invasion. In fact, the Kremlin has sent Ukraine's human capital situation into a steep dive. However, demographic problems are not new for our country, they have been challenging us for a long time now.  The 1990s optimistic advertising slogan of “We are 52 million” has never been true to fact. Today, it looks like from a different reality.

Today, millions of Ukrainian people stay out of country because of the full-scale Russian aggression. The numbers keep growing. According to the Ukrainian border guard service, every month, about 40,000 Ukrainian citizens are leaving with no return. According to the UN, the numbers are even higher: over 200,000.

On March, 31, 2023, Vladimir Putin approved an updated concept for Russia’s foreign policy. He declared that it resulted in a "weighted document to be a basis for our mid-term and long-term practical steps."

In a previous article, OPORA wrote that the State Duma of the Russian Federation is literally obsessed with Ukraine. Since January, 1, 2014, our country has been mentioned more than 7,000  times in the transcripts of the meetings of this authority. Instead, in this blog, we explored specific narratives that have been on within the walls of the State Duma since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion. In addition, we were interested in whether Russian deputies produced their own propagan...

It is no secret that Putin is obsessed with the idea to restore the Soviet Union or create a new version of the Russian empire. Such narratives have been promoted in Russian society for years. The key goal of this propaganda was to regain Ukraine under the control of Russia. Thus, armed with the motto of Leon Trotsky “Without Ukraine, there is no Russia!”, the state machine of the kremlin built a completely oxymoronic image of our state. They use the labels of the “brotherly people”, “the you...

Do you think russia takes everyone for fools? Why else to hold a "pseudo-referendum" in the occupied territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson Oblasts? It has not been recognized by virtually any country in the world, and the fact of holding some kind of voting will not force Ukraine to refuse to reclaim its own territories. The question seems rhetorical. But as they commonly say, the fool is rich in his thoughts. Now, Ukrainians know exactly who this expression describes.

Surprisingly, in more than three months of the russian-Ukrainian war, none of the russian high-ranking officials was able to explain what the term meant in relation to Ukraine. Furthermore, the words of putin's secretary, dmitry peskov, "denazification means that ideally, Ukraine should be liberated from the Nazis" can hardly be considered exhaustive.