Russia’s war on Ukraine has significantly changed the day-to-day routines of my life over the past year. Like most diaspora Ukrainians, I am deeply affected by the tragedy that is unfolding in my ancestral homeland and I have been motivated to do all I can to help my fellow countrymen in their time of greatest need.
Amongst other things I have become involved with the local Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) efforts to aid Ukrainian refugees being resettled in Canada. I have been helping to raise funds to support these refugees. I have been ferrying newly arrived refugees from the airport to their host families. I have been helping them deal with the administrative red tape of getting health services coverage, obtaining government financial assistance, finding jobs and the more mundane requirements of getting food and groceries.
Being a journalist of sorts, I have also undertaken to writing a daily summary blog on Facebook of what is happening in the war. Each morning after waking up and making myself a coffee, I sit down at my computer and check my primary news sources for the latest updates as to what transpired in Ukraine over the past 24 hours. I then put together a brief summary of the most significant developments and post it on my Facebook page where it is read by the many hundreds of followers that look upon me as a trusted source of information on all things Ukrainian.
I have many sources in both the English and Ukrainian languages for news that I can trust. Of the major news media in Europe and North America, I regularly follow the reporting done by CNN (www.cnn.com) in the U.S., the BBC (www.bbc.com) in the U.K. and Al Jazeera (www.aljazeera.com) in the Middle East. The Guardian newspaper (www.theguardian.com) in the U.K. has also been providing consistently good coverage of the war.
In Ukraine, I check the daily summaries put out in the English language by the Kyiv Independent (www.kyivindependent.com) and the Kyiv Post (www.kyivpost.com) newspapers published online out of Kyiv. As for Ukrainian language sources, I like the Ukrainian Pravda portal (www.pravda.com.ua), as well as the Ukr.net site (www.ukr.net/ua/), the tsn.ua site, the Ukrinform site (www.ukrinform.ua) and the Unian press service (www.unian.ua). I should add that the UCC puts out an e-mailed “Daily Briefing” that you can subscribe to, that seemingly uses much of the same sources of information as I do.
One of my favourite sites is (www.liveuamap.com) which is a continuously updated map of Ukraine that you can zoom in on, showing all of the latest military actions including shellings, bombings, missile and drone attacks, ground assaults and other relevant military activities.
For more detailed analysis and expert opinions, I often turn to the Atlantic Council think tank in the U.S. (www.atlanticcouncil.org), which has a number of highly knowledgeable and respected analysts. These provide more in-depth perspectives on what is going on in the war. There are also a number of private individuals with specialized expertise. Foremost of these on the military and tactical side is Tom Cooper who provides very detailed analysis on all the latest military activities of both sides on www.medium.com as well as on his Facebook page (www.facebook.com/keksifarm.hayday). He has probably the best network of sources at the heart of the action on the front lines, and his incisive assessments of what is happening as well as to why it is happening makes for fascinating reading.
There are a large number of groups and pages on Facebook that provide a lot of current news and content on the Ukraine war. These include:
Truth from Ukraine in English
Ukraine’s Fight For Freedom
Ukraine War in English
The Ukrainian Canadian Group
Euromaidan, War In Ukraine
With modern communication and media technology being what it is, we have no shortage of information as to what is happening in the war, and in fact often more than we can realistically digest. That is why I make an effort to do the research and provide daily summaries of the most relevant developments in the war on a daily basis for my followers. I hope these are both informative and useful.
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