Here's what you've helped us achieve in the past week

Pictured: Part of the Kyiv Independent team with our reporter Artur Korniienko (center), who is a member of the Territorial Defense Force, and has been away defending the country since Feb. 24.

Hello to the Kyiv Independent Community! 

We'd like to say thank you to everyone who has stayed with us and welcome to the 87 new patrons that joined us this week. Your support keeps us going.

Here are some highlights from the last week at the Kyiv Independent:

• Our reporter Artur Korniienko stopped by the office today. Artur joined the Territorial Defense forces on the day of the invasion, Feb. 24, and this is the first time we've seen him since he left. He is still in service.

• We dealt with a DDOS attack. On Monday evening (Kyiv time), there was a DDOS attack on the Kyiv Independent website. A "distributed denial-of-service" attack is a cybercrime where a website is flooded with network traffic in order to overwhelm the website and make it inaccessible. Our website was down for around an hour. We managed to curb the attack in the end.

• Experts say that the next few months will define the war's outcome, which Illia Ponomarenko covers in "Battle to end the war: Ukraine's chance to get edge over Russia." 

• We wrote two stories about the horrors of Russian occupation. Daria Shulzhenko's story "'Torturing people is fun for them.' 16-year-old Ukrainian recalls his 3 months in Russian captivity" focuses on teenager Vladyslav Buryak and what he endured. Alexander Khrebet covers forced conscription in Russian-occupied Donetsk – a war crime under the Geneva Conventions – and how some men manage to escape.

• Another important story was Natalia Datskevych's "As Russia’s war continues, Ukrainian businesses struggle to compensate damages." 

• We also looked at a turning point in Russia's sea blockade in Alexander Query's "Ukrainian grain freed as first ship crosses Black Sea."

Thank you for standing by our side as we are bringing independent, locally-sourced news about Ukraine to the world.