Russia has begun using a powerful aerial bomb that has decimated Ukrainian defenses and tilted the balance on the front lines. It has done so by converting a basic Soviet-era weapon into a gliding bomb that can cause a crater fifteen meters wide.

The bomb is the FAB-1500, essentially a 1.5-tonne weapon of which nearly half comprises high explosives. It is delivered from above by fighter jets from a distance of some 60-70 kilometers, out of range of many Ukrainian air defenses. The FAB-1500 is another example of how Russia is fighting its war in Ukraine, inflicting massive destruction before trying to take territory.

Recent videos from the battlelines in Donetsk region have illustrated the immense power of these bombs as they have hit thermal power plants, factories and tower blocks – places from which the Ukrainians coordinate their defenses.

The FAB-1500 is directed towards its target by a guidance system and pop-out wings that allow it to glide towards its target. Joseph Trevithick, who has written about the development of the bomb for TheWarZone, says they “offer a new and far more destructive stand-off strike option for many of Russia’s tactical jets that also help pilots stay further away from enemy defenses.”

“Why they are using the FAB-1500? Because the damage done by it is very serious. If you survive, you are guaranteed to have a contusion.”

“It puts a lot of pressure on soldiers’ morale.  Not all of our guys can withstand it. While they are more or less used to the FAB-500 by now, but the FAB-1500 is hell.”

The use of FAB bombs has become a critical element in the Russian offensive in Donetsk region, especially in razing to the ground Ukrainian defenses in and around Avdiivka, which fell in February.

The FAB-1500 is the most powerful in a family of Soviet-era ‘dumb bombs’ now being converted at a plant near Moscow into a cheap but potent version of a missile.

Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, says that “while manufacturing the glide kits is a bottleneck, the basic explosive package is something they have in huge numbers.”

So the Russians have very heavy firepower to bring to bear on fixed defenses, increasing Ukrainian casualties, though not as yet enough to fundamentally change the frontlines.

Russian military bloggers began referring to the weapon last September when its accuracy was being tested. The Fighterbomber telegram channel noted that “after many months of trials and errors,” a FAB-1500 had “accurately” hit its “combat target” for the first time.

Fighterbomber, which is close to the Russian military and has nearly half-a-million subscribers, claimed that the newly developed glide kit had increased the range of the bombs. It also said the  FAB-1500 was accurate to within five meters.

Within a few weeks, both Ukrainian and Russian sources spoke of the use of the massive bomb in Kherson in the south and Kharkiv in the north.

Then in January, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu was seen toured the plant of the JSC Tactical Missiles Corporation – a major arms manufacturer – in the Moscow region, being shown the wrap-around wings developed for the bomb. According to the Ministry video, the company said it had developed “a high-precision” munition converting old free-fall bombs into weapons that would glide to their target.

The director of the plant proudly reported to Shoigu that productivity had increased by 40% as it had shifted to 24/7 production.

Bronk notes that the converted FAB bombs can only be used against fixed targets, but in the grinding attritional war in the east, the main Ukrainian positions are generally known to the Russians.

The Russian planes dispatching these bombs are not invulnerable. The Ukrainian air force has claimed that it has brought down several Su-34 fighters in recent weeks. But most Ukrainian air defenses do not have the range to hit planes some 70 kilometers away.

“The attack aviation Su-35 and Su-34 bombers don’t approach as close as they would like to. Still, if we had more long-range air-defense we would be able to take down these jets further [from our frontlines],” Ihnat added.

Bronk says the development of the glide bombs has given the Russians a way to use their tactical air force (as opposed to long-range bombers) more effectively after its limited role in the first phase of the war.  He says the US Patriot complex is just about the only defense that has the range to counter the threat, but the Ukrainians have a limited number. And the missiles used by Patriots are in short supply given the delay in the US Congress passing a further package of military aid for Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials from President Volodymyr Zelensky downwards have almost daily pleaded for longer range air defense weapons to fend off the Russian aerial threat. The F-16 combat aircraft on which Ukrainian pilots are now training are unlikely to take to the skies over Ukraine until the second half of the year but may force Russian combat aircraft to stay further away.

In the meantime, Ukrainian forces on the frontlines, especially in Donetsk, are exposed to a blitz of Russian air strikes – sometimes more than 100 in a day, according to the Ukrainian General Staff.

Just as the Russians previously wiped out Ukrainian positions with intensive artillery, they are now using a seemingly inexhaustible supply of these devastating bombs to leave Ukrainian forces with nothing to defend and nowhere to shelter.

Indonesia’s transport ministry will launch an investigation after two Batik Air pilots fell asleep during a recent flight, according to state news agency Antara, citing the ministry’s civil aviation director-general M Kristi Endah Murni.

According to a preliminary report released Saturday by the National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT), both the pilot and co-pilot fell asleep simultaneously for 28 minutes during a flight from Kendari in Southeast Sulawesi province to the capital Jakarta on January 25, causing navigational errors as “the aircraft was not in the correct flight path.”

None on board – including 153 passengers and four flight attendants – were injured during the flight, and there was no damage to the aircraft, the KNKT preliminary report said.

The flight, BTK6723, lasted two hours and 35 minutes, and successfully landed in Jakarta, according to Antara and the preliminary report.

According to the report, the second-in-command pilot had notified his co-pilot earlier in the day that he had not had “proper rest.”

In the flight before the incident, the second-in-command was able to sleep “for about 30 minutes.” After the aircraft departed Kendari and reached cruising altitude, the pilot-in-command asked for permission to also rest and the second-in-command took over the aircraft. Around 90 minutes into the flight, the second-in-command then “inadvertently fell asleep,” according to the report.

Twelve minutes after the last recorded transmission by the co-pilot, the Jakarta area control center (ACC) tried to reach the aircraft, but there was no reply from the pilots, it said. Around 28 minutes after the last recorded transmission, the pilot-in-command woke up and realized the plane was not in the correct flight path. At that point, he woke up the second-in-command and responded to the ACC, it said.

The preliminary report detailed that the pilot-in-command told the ACC that the flight had experienced a “radio communication problem” that had been resolved.

The report did not reveal the names of the pilots, but identified the pilot-in-command as a 32-year-old Indonesian male and the second-in-command as a 28-year-old Indonesian male. The second-in-command had one-month-old twins and “had to wake up several times to help his wife take care of the babies,” the report said.

“We will conduct an investigation and review of the night flight operation in Indonesia regarding the Fatigue Risk Management for Batik Air and other flight operators,” Murni said in a statement, according to Antara.

Flight crews of BTK6723 have also been grounded according to standard operating procedure pending further investigation, she added, according to the news agency.

She also said the agency will dispatch a flight inspector authorized on Resolution of Safety Issue (RSI) to investigate the cause of the incident and recommend mitigation measures to flight operators and supervisors, Antara reported.

The first official photograph of Catherine, Princess of Wales, since she underwent abdominal surgery in January has been released by her and her husband, William, Prince of Wales.

Kate is seen seated outside, surrounded by her three children, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, in the photo credited to the Prince of Wales.

“Thank you for your kind wishes and continued support over the last two months. Wishing everyone a Happy Mother’s Day,” a post on their official Instagram account said alongside the photo. The message was signed off by “C”.

Sunday marks Mother’s Day in the UK.

The 42-year-old, who is recovering from surgery at home in Windsor, is unlikely to return to public duties until Easter, Kensington Palace said in January.

The palace did not reveal what her surgery was for, but said that it was noncancerous.

Kate’s absence from the public eye and William pulling out of an important family event late last month over an undisclosed personal matter have contributed to a wave of gossip and speculation.

Kensington Palace made the rare move of pushing back against the rumours on Kate’s whereabouts and health, with a spokesperson saying in February that the palace “made it clear in January the timelines of the Princess’ recovery and we’d only be providing significant updates. That guidance stands.”

Her father-in-law, King Charles III, underwent surgery for a benign enlarged prostate in January, before revealing in February that he had a form of cancer. Buckingham Palace did not say what kind but said he is receiving treatment.

Iran’s “repression of peaceful protests” and “institutional discrimination against women and girls” has led to human rights violations, some of which amount to “crimes against humanity,” according to a United Nations’ report.

Such violations and crimes include “extrajudicial and unlawful killings and murder, unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution,” the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) said in a press release Friday.

It cited a report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, a task force set up by the UN Human Rights Council to look at claims of deteriorating human rights conditions in Iran.

The report said these violations came about in the context of the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman Jina Mahsa Amini in September 2022 after she was arrested for allegedly not observing Iran’s mandatory hijab law.

She became the face of women calling for greater rights and freedoms curtailed since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Protests erupted across Iran again in September last year on the first anniversary of her death.

The mission said it found that physical violence while in custody of the morality police, a unit dedicated to enforcing strict dress codes for women, such as wearing the compulsory headscarf, led to Mahsa Amini’s “unlawful death.”

“Rather than investigating this unlawful death promptly, effectively, and thoroughly – as required under international human rights law – the government actively obfuscated the truth, and denied justice,” the UN press release read.

In a government crackdown against the country-wide protests, Iran mobilized “the entire security apparatus of the state to repress” protesters, the UN Office said, adding that as many as 551 protesters are thought to have been killed by security forces, among them at least 49 women and 68 children.

The UN report found that state authorities at the highest levels “encouraged, sanctioned and endorsed human rights violations through statements justifying the acts and conduct of the security forces.”

Authorities in Iran have also obstructed repatriation efforts of victims and their families, the UN said the mission found, adding that victims face a justice system lacking “independence, transparency and accountability.”

Chair of the Fact-Finding Mission Sara Hossain urged Iran’s government to stop repressing peaceful protesters, particularly women and girls.

“These acts form part of a widespread and systematic attack directed against the civilian population in Iran, namely against women, girls, boys and men who have demanded freedom, equality, dignity and accountability,” she said, according to the OHCHR.

The US has joined several other countries in airdropping aid into Gaza, which is grappling with a humanitarian crisis.

With aid deliveries on land falling far short of the numbers needed to ward off famine in the enclave, it is hoped these airdrops will provide a lifeline to people in Gaza.

But the UN and aid agencies have questioned how effective they will be at alleviating the situation, and their risks were shown starkly on Friday when malfunctioning parachutes caused aid pallets to hurtle from the sky at breakneck speed, killing five unsuspecting civilians.

We’ve been taking a closer look at the use of airdrops in warzones.

What are airdrops?

The UN carried out its first airdrop in August 1973 and since then they have been used by aid agencies and governments  to deliver food to conflict zones across the globe.

Packages of food and medicines are wrapped typically with six layers of packaging to provide protection and sewn together using a handheld stitching machine. Agencies use different colors  to denote the contents of the packages with the World Food Programme using white for cereals, red for pulses and blue or green for specialized nutritious food.

Packages are then loaded onto aircraft before being dropped via parachute anywhere from 300 to up to 5,600 meters above, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).

This is not the first time the US government has carried out airdrops over conflict zones. In 2001, the US dropped food packets over Afghanistan accompanied by leaflets explaining how civilians could tell the difference between airdrops and cluster bombs. In 2014, when Islamic State was at its peak in Iraq, the US dropped aid into areas where food and water supplies had been cut.

Do they work?

Airdrops evade the often rigorous examinations carried out at land checkpoints, so are undoubtedly a speedy way of getting supplies into a conflict zone.

But despite this advantage, aid agencies say their drawbacks overwhelmingly outweigh their benefits.

For starters, they are more expensive. Airdrops cost up to seven times as much as land deliveries, the WFP says. They also have much more limited delivery capacity.  For example, one truck is capable of delivering nearly 10 times the amount one aircraft could deliver- roughly 20 to 30 metric tonnes, according to the UN.

“Humanitarian workers always complain that airdrops are good photo opportunities but a lousy way to deliver aid,” Richard Gowan, the International Crisis Group’s UN Director said.

Experts have also questioned whether countries  have plans in place for the aid once it reaches the ground. The UN special rapporteur for food, Michael Fakrhi says airdrops usually culminate in chaos.

“You’re throwing aid into the wind to people who’ve been starving and have been denied humanitarian access. This will create chaos, predictably, and we cannot blame the people for that,” Fakrhi said Friday.

Palestinians have voiced some practical concerns. Mahmoud Shalabi who is senior program manager of NGO, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), said some meals needed microwaves when “we don’t even have electricity right now.” Speaking from the city of  Beit Lahia in northern Gaza, Shalabi said most packages have only contained enough food for just two to three meals.

A Palestinian journalist based in northern Gaza, Abdel Qader Al Sabbah said the wrong type of meals were being sent, calling instead for “flour, rice, oil, salt, and other seeds and beans, so people here can benefit from these and prepare several meals.”

So why are airdrops being carried out?

Aid agencies have consistently said not enough aid is reaching Gaza.

Even before the war, Israel restricted access and to and from Gaza, stringently controlling the entry of goods through land crossings. After Israel imposed a “complete siege” on Gaza following the October 7 attacks controls have significantly tightened further.

Israel has been carrying out security checks on goods entering its own crossing into Gaza, Kerem Shalom but also on goods that passed through Israeli crossings before transiting onto Egypt’s entry point into Gaza, the Rafah crossing.

An average of 95 aid trucks per day entered Gaza between October 10 and February 1, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, down from 500 commercial and aid trucks a day before the war. It is the challenges of getting aid via road that has prompted countries to carry out recent airdrops, to the dismay of organizations such as the UN who say they should only be used when all other options have been exhausted.

“When countries use airdrops and these maritime piers is usually if not always in situations when you want to deliver humanitarian aid into enemy territory. That’s when you use these methods of last resort,” Special Rapporteur for Food, Michael Fakhri said Friday.

A former US Aid official, Dave Harden, described airdrops to Gaza as “dangerous” and “expensive” ventures which are “primarily for the Biden administration’s benefit – to paper over a massive policy failure.”

As the threat of famine looms larger and larger, aid agencies such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) are calling on the US to instead focus on pressuring Israel to allow more aid into Gaza via road.

“This is not a logistics problem; it is a political problem. Rather than look to the US military to build a work-around, the US should insist on immediate humanitarian access using the roads and entry points that already exist,” Avril Benoît, US Executive Director for MSF emphasized in a Friday statement.

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, has said she experienced “cruel” online bullying and abuse, the “bulk” of which occurred during her pregnancies.

Speaking on stage at an event at the South by Southwest festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas, on Friday, Meghan said, “I keep my distance from (social media) right now just for my own wellbeing.”

“The bulk of the bullying and abuse that I was experiencing in social media and online was when I was pregnant with Archie and with Lili, and with a newborn,” she continued.

“And you just think about that and you have to really wrap your head around why people would be so hateful. It’s not catty. It’s cruel,” she added.

The duchess gave birth to Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, her first child with husband Prince Harry, on May 6, 2019. The couple then welcomed Lilibet “Lili” Diana Mountbatten-Windsor on June 4, 2021.

In March 2019, the British royal family royal told social media users to show “courtesy, kindness and respect” when interacting with its online posts, after repeated cases of online abuse directed at Meghan and Kate, Duchess of Cambridge. This followed Kensington Palace asking social media firms for help in combating the boom in abuse, which included sexist and racist comments.

The palace staff also began devoting more resources to filtering and deleting comments targeting Meghan, and blocking abusive Twitter and Instagram accounts.

“In the digital space and in certain sectors of the media, we have forgotten about our humanity. And that has got to change,” Meghan went on to say. “Because I understand there’s a bottom line, and I understand that a lot of money is being made there. But even if it’s making dollars, it doesn’t make sense.”

Meghan and Harry relocated with Archie to California after stepping back from the British royal family in 2020, and have frequently criticized press intrusion into their lives in the UK and US. The couple filed a lawsuit in California that year over paparazzi photographs of their then-toddler, Archie.

A two-year stop-start process exploring options to secure the release of Navalny began to accelerate when Abramovich visited Moscow in recent months, two of the sources said.

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had also embraced early efforts to win Navalny’s freedom, according to several sources.

Abramovich, who is sanctioned in the West and spends much of his time in the United Arab Emirates, met a US official as ideas for the complex exchange involving as many as seven people took shape, according to one source close to the process. Abramovich has kept a connection with the Kremlin since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and was instrumental in early efforts at negotiating an end to the conflict.

The source familiar with Abramovich’s involvement said he was “flabbergasted” to hear that Navalny had died even as he pursued the exchange.

On February 27, 11 days after Navalny’s death, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov side-stepped questions about Abramovich’s involvement. Asked whether he knew whether Abramovich had discussed a prisoner swap with Putin, he said: “You can ask Abramovich’s representatives. This is not a question to us.”

Even so, the proposal was still at an informal stage, according to several sources familiar with the process, and a deal did not appear imminent.

“The offer can only be made once it’s been accepted informally. That’s how it works in these negotiations,” he said.

“Navalny’s release was not imminent before his sudden death,” the official added.

An Aspen meeting

Back in the summer of 2022, Hillary Clinton was approached by Christo Grozev, who has worked with the Navalny team for several years, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado.

Navalny adviser Pevchikh also said the Russian convicted of murdering a Chechen dissident in Berlin in 2019 was included in a proposed deal. Pevchikh said that “in early February, Putin was offered to exchange Vadim Krasikov, a killer and an FSB officer who is serving a sentence for murder in Berlin, for two American citizens and Alexey Navalny.”

German prosecutors said that Krasikov was sent by the Russian security services with a false identity to carry out the killing. He was sentenced to life in prison after his conviction in a Berlin court.

The Kremlin denied that he had been working on behalf of the state. But without naming Krasikov, Putin last month floated the idea of securing the release of a Russian “patriot” who he said was serving a life sentence for “liquidating a bandit” in Europe. Speaking to Tucker Carlson in Moscow, Putin implied the deal would be in exchange for the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who has been charged with espionage in Russia.

The final framework of the proposed deal is unclear, but an individual close to the Navalny team said that an expanded proposal included the possible release of both Gershkovich and another American imprisoned in Russia, Paul Whelan, in addition to Navalny.

“We had to find a way to package the German asset [Krasikov] into an American negotiation,” the source close to the Navalny team said. The Russians had initially proposed that a German-Russian dual citizen held in Russia on espionage charges be exchanged for Krasikov, an offer flatly refused by the Germans.

It became a complex triangular arrangement, he said. “It had to be explained to the Americans that the only way for them to get Whelan and Gershkovich is if the Russians get Krasikov. But the Germans would only hand over Krasikov in exchange for Navalny.”

“There are other places bad Russians are. The question was how to get everybody aligned, so various ideas were being thrown around,” the diplomat added. “You have to be creative.”

Another Russian who could be included is Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, an alleged Russian spy who has been charged by the US Department of Justice with fraud and other crimes and is being held in Brazil. Russian and American extradition requests have been declined by Brazilian authorities.

Abramovich, according to multiple sources, did not chicken out. But exactly when and how he delivered the informal proposal to the Kremlin, or to President Putin himself, is still not confirmed. Ultimately, the process did not move swiftly enough to save Navalny.

And his aides remain convinced that Putin ordered the killing of the opposition leader, a claim the Kremlin denies.

This story has been updated to include further comment from a US official.

On February 26, one of Russia’s longest-serving human rights activists stood up at the end of his trial in a Moscow court and offered his uncensored verdict on Russian democracy.

“The state in our country is once again controlling not only social, political and economic life, but is now claiming full control over culture, scientific thought, and is inserting itself in private life. It’s becoming all-pervasive,” said Oleg Orlov, a 70-year-old who was on trial for “discrediting the army.”

Powerful voices like Orlov’s are becoming a rarity in Russia, where high-profile opponents to President Vladimir Putin and his ruling elite are now mostly either in exile, in prison, or dead.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 accelerated a process already two decades in the making — the erosion of democratic freedoms, media independence and civil society at home. With the war now in its third year, and Putin set to be re-installed for a fifth term in a tightly-controlled election next week, there are signs that this process is picking up speed once again.

Orlov, co-founder and co-chair of Memorial, a Nobel Prize-winning human rights organization set up in the Soviet Union’s twilight years, knew he had nothing to lose.

The day after his speech in court, he was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Discrediting the army is just one of several new offenses added to Russia’s penal code since the invasion of Ukraine.

Orlov’s so-called crime was committed just over a year earlier, when he  published an article in a French online newspaper titled “They Wanted Fascism, They Got It.” After his sentencing, Amnesty International called him a “prisoner of conscience” and called for his immediate release.

Russian human rights group OVD-Info says more than 260 people are currently serving jail terms in the country for crimes related to taking an anti-war stance. The group has recorded almost 20,000 detentions, and while most of those were at the beginning of the war, there is still a steady stream. They’re not large numbers in a country of 140 million people, said OVD-Info lawyer and analyst Darya Korolenko, but just enough to make for an effective deterrent.

And it’s not just known opposition figures or activists who are being targeted.

The wartime censorship laws — discrediting the army, or the more serious offense of knowingly spreading “false” information about the army — have turned social media into a minefield.

Platforms are closely monitored by the FSB, which acts as Russia’s secret service, said Konstantin Eggert, an exiled Russian journalist who was among many added to Russia’s ever-growing list of “foreign agents” last year. He believes the grip on social media will tighten further.

Evgeniya Mayboroda, a pensioner in her early 70s from Shakhty, a town less than 50 km (around 30 miles) from the Ukrainian border, found herself unable to conform to that uniform ideology. According to OVD-Info, she was  arrested and fined in early 2023 for alleged anti-war social media posts.

In January, she was jailed for five and a half years for spreading “false” information about the army. Russian independent news outlet Mediazona reported she was convicted after two reposts on VKontakte — Russia’s version of Facebook — including one about Russian troop deaths.

In this climate, old practices are creeping in, like Soviet-style denunciations. In early February, 67-year-old Moscow pediatrician Nadezhda Buyanova was accused by a young patient’s mother of calling her husband — who had recently been killed in the war — a “legitimate target for Ukraine.”

The woman filed an official report and Buyanova was arrested, her modest Moscow apartment ransacked by police.

Russia’s powerful investigative committee ordered a criminal case be opened on charges of spreading false information about the army. Buyanova, who denies the charges, is out on bail, but is now suing to try to get her job back.

“The climate is fed by the mainstream media that everyone is a spy and a traitor, foreign agent, everyone wants to destroy Russia, destroy your home,” said Korolenko. “People fear that they will lose what they care about. So they try to protect this.”

‘Deeper and deeper into this darkness’

With mainstream Russian media now entirely state-controlled, the authorities are targeting other forms of expression — the arts, literature and culture. Orlov argued in his courtroom speech that this is yet more proof of Russia “sinking deeper and deeper into this darkness” at an ever-quickening pace.

He listed evidence from the last four months alone, including: the branding of the LGBTQ movement as extremist, new rules prohibiting students at Moscow’s prestigious Higher School of Economics from citing people on Russia’s growing list of “foreign agents” in their work, and the effective banning of many modern authors.

One of those authors is Grigory Chkhartishvili, who goes by the pen name Boris Akunin. One of Russia’s most popular modern literary figures, a master of the historical detective genre, he’s been living in exile since 2014 — but that has not insulated him from Russia’s crackdown. In December, Akunin was added to Russia’s “terrorist and extremist list” for allegedly justifying extremism and spreading false information about the Russian army.

Despite Akunin’s regular public criticism of Putin and the war, that move was apparently triggered by what he sees as an orchestrated setup — a prank call by Russians posing as Ukrainians, later posted online, in which he was tricked into expressing his opposition to the war and his willingness to help Ukraine.

In response, his main publisher in Russia announced it would not be releasing new copies of his books, and a major network of bookstores pulled them off its shelves. In January, Akunin was labeled a foreign agent, and in early February a Moscow court issued an arrest warrant for him for allegedly justifying terrorism and spreading false information about the Russian army.

“The Russia that I remember was not like this,” he said. “It was a troubled, chaotic democracy, an interesting country where a lot of things were happening. Now, it has become totally Kafkaesque, Orwellian.”

For many in Russia’s disparate dissident community, the death of Alexey Navalny, Putin’s most prominent critic, was the last stop on the country’s journey back to authoritarianism. Akunin said he believes it is clear evidence the Kremlin is no longer even trying to hide the lengths it will go to stamp out dissent.

Russia did not make the mass arrests or carry out a violent crackdown at Navalny’s funeral last week, as many of the activist’s supporters had feared, but no one should be fooled by that, said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and expert on the Russian intelligence services.

Borrowing an effective tool from the days of Covid-19 regulations, he said, Russian authorities simply relied on surveillance from Moscow’s many facial recognition cameras, as well as plainclothes officers from the Center for Combating Extremism, a unit of Russia’s interior ministry.

Arrests of those who laid flowers at makeshift memorials and attended Navalny’s funeral have continued for days after the event, and in one case, according to OVD-Info, a Moscow resident arrested on March 5 was told he had been spotted on security camera footage.

Soldatov said this is this reaction stems from an official paranoia in Putin’s Russia, an “an incessant obsession with the fragility of the state,” fueled by history and made worse by the war in Ukraine, as well as the impending election.

It all goes back to the “two historical traumas of 1917 and 1991,” he said — the Bolshevik revolution and the collapse of the USSR.

“They don’t understand why two Russian empires basically collapsed for no apparent reason,” he said. “So everything you can do to prevent this is justifiable.”

In his final words to the Moscow court, Orlov echoed that sentiment.

“The authorities are even at war with the deceased Navalny,” he said. “They fear him, even when he is dead.”

Most of the men in Oksana Rubanyak’s platoon are at least 10 years older than her. Before the war, having a young woman in charge of an all-male Ukrainian military unit might have given the troops pause. But as the platoon prepares for a frontline deployment at a time Ukraine is desperately trying to hold off Russian advances, things like gender and age no longer matter that much, Rubanyak said.

It’s a huge change compared to when she first joined the army two years ago.

The number of women in the military has increased significantly since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, with more than 62,000 women currently serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, according to official statistics. More than 5,000 are serving in the combat zone, like Rubanyak, who is now 21.

Rubanyak was 19 when she joined the Ukrainian army as a volunteer. She served near Bakhmut and was, as now, the only woman in her platoon. She operated a heavy machine gun and, while she did everything the men did, she said she experienced some level of bias – such as some men trying to stop her from carrying heavy weapons.

“I heard people saying behind my back that I must be someone’s daughter, that my father would promote me and so on. It was something new for many people. Everyone was trying to find a catch, that just didn’t exist,” she said.

And while she said that there have been many positive changes in the past two years, there is still work to do. “Everything takes time,” she said. “Although all the conditions for women to serve in the army are there now, if they choose to.”

Working two jobs

As more and more Ukrainians join the war effort, the country’s women are increasingly stepping in – and not just in the military.

The Ukrainian government doesn’t disclose how many people have signed up to the armed forces in the last two years. However, it’s clear that hundreds of thousands have swapped their day jobs for military service.

With new waves of military conscription expected soon, employers are facing a new problem: how to fill the vacancies left by the men drafted. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of women have left the country, seeking refuge abroad.

According to the National Bank of Ukraine, employers nationwide are currently facing a shortage of about 60,000 skilled workers, an increase of some 20,000 since 2021.

With so many unfilled vacancies, women are often picking up the slack. A number of Ukrainian organizations and companies are offering training courses for women for some of the jobs conventionally thought of as male roles.

Halyna Shevchenko knows this firsthand. She works in a repair department of the Ukrainian Railways in the Poltava region. Before the war, she managed a team of 10 men who repaired complex parts of railway cars. When two of her colleagues were mobilized, the company couldn’t find anyone to fill their specialized positions.

So, Shevchenko started to learn the technical skills and now does some of the repairs herself. With women making up 40% of Ukrainian Railways’ employees, she is likely not the only one.

The new tasks – and the war – have significantly increased her workload.

The railways have carried more than 40 million passengers and huge amounts of cargo since the war began. The company has also introduced all sorts of new, military-focused services, including evacuation trains for wounded soldiers.

All of that means that Shevchenko’s team has to carry out more repairs.

“I am a techie, just like my colleagues. That’s why we communicate with the guys on an equal footing. We complement each other and consult on complex repairs,” she said.

War and the economy

Kernel, one of Ukraine’s largest agricultural producers and exporters, has also started to look for solutions to the worker shortages.

The company has also started training women to be boiler operators – a job women didn’t tend to do before the war.

“We piloted this project… to prove that women can work in conventionally male occupations. It was a successful experiment, and all the women continue to work,” she said.

Shevchenko said she is determined to keep doing the “man’s job” of fixing railway cars for as long as is needed. She has built up a good rapport with her team and said she feels respected by them.

“As long as I have enough health and strength, I will do everything to help my colleagues as much as possible – until the end, until we win,” she said.

A bold plan to genetically engineer a version of the woolly mammoth, the tusked ice age giant that disappeared 4,000 years ago, is making some progress, according to the scientists involved.

The long-term goal is to create a living, walking elephant-mammoth hybrid that would be visually indistinguishable from its extinct forerunner and — if released into its natural habitat in sufficient numbers — could potentially help restore the fragile Arctic tundra ecosystem.

Resurrecting the extinct species has been a pet project of Harvard University geneticist George Church for more than a decade. The plan gained traction in February 2021 when Church cofounded Dallas-based Colossal Biosciences with entrepreneur Ben Lamm and received an infusion of cash and an ensuing glare of publicity later that year.

Many challenging tasks, such as developing an artificial womb capable of gestating a baby elephant, remain. But Colossal Biosciences said on Wednesday that it had made a “momentous step” forward.

Church and Eriona Hysolli, Colossal’s head of biological sciences, revealed they had reprogrammed cells from an Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, into an embryonic state — the first time stem cells have been derived from elephant cells. The team plans to publish the work in a scientific journal, but the research hasn’t yet undergone peer review.

These modified cells, known as induced pluripotent stem cells or iPSCs, can be further teased in the lab to grow into any kind of elephant cell — an important tool as the researchers model, test and refine the scores of genetic changes they need to make to give an Asian elephant the genetic traits it needs to survive in the Arctic. These include a woolly coat, a layer of insulating fat and smaller ears.

“So what’s beautiful about the cells is they can potentially renew indefinitely and differentiate into any cell type of the body,” said Hysolli, who is the company’s lead scientist on the mammoth project.

The stem cells will also make it easier for conservation scientists to study the Asian elephant’s unique biology. For their size, the creatures are uniquely resistant to cancer — for reasons that are not well understood. A key obstacle for the team in making the elephant cell lines was to inhibit genes that are thought to confer that cancer resistance.

Cellular research techniques pioneered by Colossal have opened up a new avenue for saving the endangered elephant, said Oliver Ryder, director of conservation genetics at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

“The intention to produce iPSCs from elephants has been out there for years. It has been difficult to accomplish,” said Ryder, who was not involved in the research. “The impact on conservation is going to be in the realm of genetic rescue and assisted reproduction,” he added.

For obvious reasons, it’s hard to study naturally occurring elephant embryos. The stem cells would allow scientists to create model elephant embryos that will lift the curtain on how an elephant develops into a fetus — a “very valuable asset,” Ryder said.

Engineering a woolly mammoth hybrid

The elephant stem cells also hold the key to the mammoth’s rebirth. Once edited to have mammoth-like genetic traits, the elephant’s cells could be used to make eggs and sperm and an embryo that could be implanted into some kind of artificial womb. However, that will take years of work.

Given an initial six-year deadline set by Colossal, the team plans to first employ existing cloning techniques similar to those used in 1996 to make Dolly the sheep, inserting genetically edited cells into a donor egg that would be gestated by a surrogate elephant mom. However, even though that technology has been around for a while, the results are hit and miss. And many question whether it is ethical to use endangered animals as surrogates given the likelihood of failed attempts.

“I think the first engineered elephant will be the major milestone and that may be consistent with Ben’s (Lamm) prediction of six years from 2021,” Church said. “The second thing that will make us happy is we have one that’s really cold resistant. Then the third one will be if we can do it in a way that’s scalable, that doesn’t involve surrogates. That’s an unknown distance out,” Church said.

The research team at Colossal has already analyzed the genomes of 53 woolly mammoths from ancient DNA recovered from fossils. The wide-ranging specimens from animals that lived in different places at different points in the past helped the scientists understand exactly which genes make a mammoth unique.

“We’ve come a long way. Mammoth DNA quality is almost as good as the elephant and both of them are almost as good as (DNA extracted from) humans,” Church said.

Church and Hysolli didn’t say exactly how many genetic changes they expect to make to Asian elephant DNA to make a creature that resembles a mammoth capable of withstanding Arctic temperatures. The geneticists also want to engineer a mammoth with no tusks, so the animals don’t fall prey to poachers.

Church, who has been at the forefront of work to genetically engineer pigs with organs compatible with the human body for transplants, said it is possible to make 69 edits at one time in pigs. The number of modifications needed to make an Asian elephant resistant to the cold would be broadly similar, he said.

The potential role of resurrected mammoths

Colossal has longed claimed that mammoths, should they return to the grasslands in the planet’s northernmost reaches in sufficient numbers, would help slow down permafrost thaw.

Some scientists believe that, before their extinction, grazing animals such as mammoths, horses and bison kept the earth frozen underneath by tramping down the grass, knocking down trees and compacting snow.

One small study in Siberia published in 2020 suggested that the presence of large mammals such as horses, bison, yak and reindeer resulted in lower soil temperatures in the protected area where they were kept compared with land outside that boundary. However, it’s hard to imagine herds of cold-adapted elephants making a significant impact on a region that’s warming faster than anywhere else in the world, other experts have said.

Colossal also announced plans to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger in 2022 and the dodo in 2023, but its work on the mammoth been going on longest.