battlefield medicine

Russian soldiers on the Zaporizhzhya front have had all medications not in the standard first-aid kit confiscated. As a result, their medical kits now contain only minimal supplies for bandaging and pain relief, the Atesh guerrilla movement reported on Telegram on Nov. 10, citing its agents in the Russian Armed Forces' 503rd Motor Rifle Regiment.

On an October evening in Kharkiv, the Kharkiv Literary Museum hosted a poetry night in my residency apartment at Slovo Hause — the same building where the Ukrainian avant-garde once lived, wrote, and later died under Stalin’s repression. This time, the readers weren’t academics or professional writers. They were soldiers of Ukraine’s 2nd International Legion — men and women who fight by day and write by night. Their poems were raw, sparse, often unpolished — but honest.