| The correspondent Joshua Yaffa has been reporting on the war in Ukraine, where he’s visited bomb shelters, hospitals, and family homes that have faced Russian assault. This week, he reëntered the country, and sent us this note: On Monday, I entered Ukraine from Poland, at the same border crossing that I had used to leave the country two weeks earlier. I was heading against the flow of traffic: a crowd of Ukrainian families—women, children, the elderly—waited in line for their chance to enter Poland. Across the border, in Lviv, a city that wears its Polish and Austrian history with inviting charm, I boarded a night train to Kyiv. The capital felt transformed since I last saw it. Perhaps it was the arrival of spring which, along with a relative lull in missile attacks and shelling in the center of town, brought people back out into the streets. In early March, the city felt tense, empty, and besieged; this week, it felt tentatively reborn, scarred but alive—and, most of all, hopeful. One of my favorite bakeries and cafés in Podil, a historic neighborhood on the floodplain of the Dnieper River, had reopened. Across town, I sat outside with a friend, a Ukrainian journalist, over a pizza. Russia had announced that it was pulling forces back from Kyiv and the surrounding region, a piece of news that was, in part, confirmed by military experts, even as most everyone I spoke to viewed it warily. My first night in Kyiv, I could hear the distant thud of artillery echoing from the outskirts of town. The basic military facts remained true: Russia had tried, and failed, to seize the capital city in the early days of the war, and was now begrudgingly coming around to that reality. But it was far from done with what Vladimir Putin has called Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. The horrific siege of Mariupol continues, as does the relentless pounding of the Donbas, in the country’s east. Chernihiv, a hundred miles north of Kyiv, was supposedly among those assaulted cities which Russia said it would withdraw from—yet the bombs and rockets continued to fall. Ukraine’s resistance to the invasion has been remarkable, surpassing what many experts expected. Peace, however, remains elusive. The heroism of Ukrainians is undeniable. So, too, is their suffering. —Joshua Yaffa Read Yaffa’s previous reporting:
• Why do so many Russians say they support the war in Ukraine?
• What the Russian invasion has done to Ukraine
• Inside Kyiv’s metro, a citywide bomb shelter | 
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