Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv was preparing to perform Puccini’s “Turandot” at the Metropolitan Opera this month when she saw the news: a Russian drone had hit a building in Odessa, not far from her in-laws’ home.

She called her family to make sure they were safe. But images of the attack, which included the victims of a young mother and children, lingered in her mind. As she conducted that evening, she felt the pain of war more acutely, she said, praying to herself as Liù, a selfless servant, died in the opera’s final act and the chorus fell silent.

“At that moment I saw all the suffering of the war,” she said. “How do you explain such sadness? How do you explain who should live and who should die?

Since the invasion, Lyniv, 46, the first Ukrainian conductor to perform at the Met, has used her platform to denounce the Russian government. She has also set out to promote Ukrainian culture, champion works by Ukrainian composers and tour Europe with the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, an ensemble she founded in 2016.

The war has raised difficult questions for artists and cultural institutions. Russian artists are under pressure to speak out against President Vladimir V. Putin. Ukrainians have also faced questions, including whether they should perform Russian works or appear alongside Russian artists.

Lyniv, who now lives in Dusseldorf, Germany, sometimes felt caught in the middle. She protested last month when a festival in Vienna announced plans to combine her performance with a concert led by conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has come under scrutiny for his connections to Russia. (The festival canceled his performance.)

She also drew criticism in Ukraine for continuing to perform Russian music and collaborate with Russian artists, such as soprano Elena Pankratova, who sings the title role in the Met’s “Turandot,” which Lyniv conducts through April 19.

Lyniv defended her work saying: “We can’t be against each other just because of nationalities” and added that it was important for great composers to be heard.

“The masterpieces of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and Prokofiev – these are not Putin’s property,” she said. “We cannot allow politicians to abuse the music and the arts. Tchaikovsky would be against this war, I am sure.’

The choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, who grew up in Kiev and recently created a ballet about the war, met Lyniv after seeing her passionate posts on social media, where she wrote memories of young victims and posted photos of bombed buildings.

“She has an unwavering inner strength,” he said. “She knows what she’s doing, and she’s very determined. It’s just beautiful to observe such a full-fledged artist and character.”

Lyniv, who trained in the opera houses of Ukraine and later with Kirill Petrenko at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, has been praised for the sensitivity of her conducting.

She has also emerged as something of a pioneer in a field that is still very male-dominated. In 2021, she conducted “Der Fliegende Holländer” at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, becoming the first woman to conduct there in its 145-year history. And in 2022, she took over as music director of the Teatro Comunale in Bologna, Italy, the first woman to hold that role.

Lyniv received a warm welcome at the Met, whose leaders have been critical of the war and have made efforts to promote Ukrainian artists and culture. Her portrait now hangs in a gallery alongside a dozen other Ukrainian artists who have performed at the Met, starting with the mezzo-soprano Ina Bourskaya, who made her debut in Bizet’s “Carmen” in 1923.

Peter Gelb, general manager of the Met, said Lyniv had brought energy and focus to the house’s beloved production of ‘Turandot’.

“She’s very clear about what she wants,” he said. “There is always a danger that a work that has been performed so often becomes outdated. But these performances feel fresh and alive.”

Born into a family of musicians in Brody, a city in western Ukraine, Lyniv grew up playing the piano, flute and violin, and singing in choirs. By the time she was four, she knew she wanted to be a musician.

After conducting a school orchestra at the age of 16, a teacher told her that even if she was not Arturo Toscanini, the famous maestro, she could have a good career.

She enrolled to direct studies at an academy in Lviv, and was the only woman in the department. Her family questioned her choice and said that conducting was not a good profession for women. Some colleagues warned that her career would be limited to youth ensembles and choirs.

“But I haven’t heard any orchestral musicians say, ‘We can’t play with you because you’re a woman,’” she said. “So I thought, OK, I’ll keep going, and just try to think in small steps.”

In 2004, at the age of 26, she entered the world stage when she placed third at the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg, Germany. (Gustavo Dudamel, now a superstar conductor, took first place that year.)

After the competition, she enrolled at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber in Dresden to hone her skills. Ekkehard Klemm, her teacher there, said she came as a “gemstone that still needed to be polished.”

“I could see that she had enormous talent, an unstoppable will and a lot of energy and creativity,” he said, adding: “She combines her art with the challenges of the times – that is the greatest treasure of her talent. ”

She took a job as a conductor at the Odesa Opera and won commissions at European opera houses, including the Graz Opera in Austria, where she was chief conductor from 2017 to 2020.

Then came her Bayreuth debut. “The fact that I am a woman,” she told Deutsche Welle at the time, “does not make the score any easier or more difficult.”

The festival invited her in 2022, but also last summer, when she was joined by Nathalie Stutzmann, who directs the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. The couple had theirs photo taken in a room full of portraits of conductors who have appeared in Bayreuth, smiling in front of a sea of ​​male faces.

Lyniv’s success at Bayreuth, Stutzmann said, “at least proved that the mentality had changed in a good way.”

“The fact that we both made it,” she added, “also means it’s not that risky to invite a woman there.”

At the Met, Lyniv has approached “Turandot” as a scholar, poring over scores, photographs of the 1926 premiere, and texts about Puccini.

Soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, who sings the role of Liù, said that while it was clear that Lyniv “is connected to Ukraine with her heart and soul,” she focused on the music.

“You feel very safe when she’s down,” she said. “She gives a positive energy and her gestures are very precise.”

After her Met debut last month, Lyniv sent a video of the extended applause for “Turandot” to her parents in Ukraine. She visited them last Christmas, on her first trip home since the war began. She watched her father conduct Christmas carols at a church in Brody and ate her mother’s sweet varenyky, dumplings filled with berries, a favorite dish.

On the phone after that first night at the Met, she told her parents that her dream was to take them to New York.

“I hope there will come a day when the war will end,” she said. “I hope life can get back to normal.”

Anna Tsybko contributed to the reporting.

Ukraine fired a volley of exploding drones at Moscow and other targets on Sunday on the final day of Russia’s presidential election, local authorities said, continuing a series of attacks over the past week timed for the election.

The attacks combine strategic goals — diverting Russian forces from the front lines in Ukraine and destroying energy infrastructure — with a political goal of undermining President Vladimir V. Putin’s long-cultivated image as a leader who protects Russia.

In recent days, ground attacks along the Russian border appeared to be the most disruptive attack. On Sunday, Russian officials said Ukraine had attacked seven regions of the country. The Russian military said it shot down 35 exploding drones.

An oil refinery was set on fire in the Krasnodar region of southern Russia and air defense forces shot down two drones flying towards Moscow, Russian officials said.

Krasnodar Region Governor Veniamin Kondratyev said debris from drones shot down by the army had ignited the fire at the oil refinery.

Four drones were shot down in the Yaroslavl region, northeast of Moscow, according to local authorities.

There was no immediate comment from the Ukrainian military on the attacks in Russia.

In his late-night address to Ukrainians on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky praised domestic arms production that has grown to include the production of long-range weapons that can hit targets deep inside Russia.

“These weeks have shown to many that the Russian war machine has vulnerabilities that we can reach with our weapons.” said Mr. Zelensky. “What our own drones are capable of is a true Ukrainian long-range capability.”

Sunday’s drone strikes came amid ongoing clashes along a border area between Ukraine’s Sumy and Kharkiv regions and Russia’s Belgorod and Kursk regions.

Three groups of Russian exiles, backed by Ukrainian military intelligence, have been attacking along the border since Tuesday, in what could be the biggest ground attack on Russia since the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Russia has responded by bombing the cities and towns in Ukraine where the exile groups operate. The Ukrainian army reported on Sunday 69 attacks in the past day in the Sumy region.

Elsewhere, two rockets hit the city of Mykolaiv, in southern Ukraine, Vitaliy Kim, the head of the regional military government, told Ukrainian news media on Sunday. At least five people were injured, authorities said. In Nikopol, a city in southern Ukraine, an exploding drone hit a gas station, injuring three people. And authorities in the Odesa region in the south reported drone strikes that damaged agricultural warehouses but no casualties.

The Kremlin has fired its top naval commander in the biggest fallout yet from a series of devastating attacks by Ukraine on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, a Ukrainian and a Western official said.

Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov, head of the Russian Navy for the past five years, was relieved of his command and replaced by the head of Russia’s Northern Fleet.

Russian publications reported on Sunday, based on anonymous sources, that Admiral Yevmenov had been fired. The Financial Times quotes Ukrainian officials: reported the development on Monday. However, the Russian government has refused to confirm the personnel changes.

U.S. officials have concluded that while Kiev’s counteroffensive last year in eastern and southern Ukraine largely failed, its attacks on the Crimean Peninsula and attacks on the Black Sea Fleet were unexpectedly effective.

The victories are all the more surprising because Ukraine does not have a traditional navy or fleet of warships. Instead, Ukraine has used naval drones and missiles to attack Russian ships.

U.S. officials believe Ukraine has sunk 15 Russian ships in the past six months. European officials have said the naval victories have reopened the western Black Sea, allowing Ukraine to once again ship grain from Odesa.

A Ukrainian military intelligence official said the removal of Admiral Yevmenov from command was directly related to the loss of Russian ships.

Ukraine estimates that a third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, which once numbered 80 ships, has been destroyed since the war began two years ago. The sinking of the Moskva, Russia’s flagship, in April 2022 with a Ukrainian-built missile was one of Kiev’s great symbolic victories.

But the more recent campaign has been just as important for practical gains. As a result of the attacks, Russia has withdrawn its fleet from the Ukrainian coast and the western Black Sea.

Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said on Tuesday that the Ukrainian army had “effectively won the war for control of the western half of the Black Sea.”

“And Ukrainian grain is now flowing again through the Bosphorus to Africa and China, which are Ukraine’s traditional markets,” Mr. Sikorski told reporters in Washington at a breakfast hosted by The Christian Science Monitor.

At a Senate hearing on Monday, CIA Director William J. Burns said Ukraine could carry out more attacks against Crimea and the Black Sea Fleet if the United States provided additional military assistance.

“Ukraine can continue to exact costs against Russia, not only with deep penetration attacks on Crimea, but also against its Black Sea Fleet, and can continue this success, which has resulted in the sinking of fifteen Russian ships over the course of the past six months.” Mr. Burns, who wrote in an article this year that Ukraine should redouble such tactics.

Ukrainian military analysts said the decision to replace the top naval commander made sense as Russian efforts to defend its fleet from attack have failed.

“What have the Russians done to increase the effectiveness of countering our attacks?” Oleksandr Kovalenko, a military analyst, told Ukrainian news media. “Nothing. They currently have no effective solution to increase the security of their warships. The only viable solution they could implement was flights from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk.”

Russian publications have reported that Admiral Yevmenov will be replaced by the head of the Russian Northern Fleet, Admiral Aleksandr A. Moiseyev. However, Admiral Yevmenov is still listed as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy on the Russian Army’s official website.

“There are decrees that are classified as secret,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov told reporters on Monday. “I can’t comment on them. No public decrees have been published on this matter.”

Instead, the Russian military has made statements about naval operations, including a statement on Tuesday about Russian naval vessels taking part in joint exercises with Iran and China in the Gulf of Oman.

It is not the first time that questions about the leadership of the Russian Navy have gone unanswered in public.

In February, Russian Telegram channels that track the country’s military reported that the top officer of the Black Sea Fleet had been removed, but he is still listed as the fleet’s commander on the Russian military’s website.

Last year, Ukrainian authorities claimed to have killed the same commander, but Russia quickly distributed images of him giving an interview to prove he was alive.

On the front lines just outside Bakhmut, Ukraine, a 32-year-old Ukrainian artillery platoon commander rocked back and forth in the passenger seat of a beaten-up Lada while another soldier navigated the car through a dense forest, sometimes mowing. cutting down young trees. When they reached their destination, a small village less than two miles from the Russian lines, only ruined houses remained, their shattered roofs visible in the moonlight.

The commander, a female soldier who uses the call sign Witch, is a former lawyer who, along with two of her brothers and her mother, joined the army the day after Russia invaded in February 2022. Her first combat experience came in the suburbs. of Kiev that year, and much of what she has learned about weapons systems since then has been self-taught and on-the-fly.

Since the beginning of 2023, Witch has been with her platoon at the 241st Brigade in the area around Bakhmut and oversees all artillery systems. She is determined to stay in the army even when the war is over. “People who want to join the armed forces need to understand that it is a way of life,” she said.

As Ukraine struggles with intense Russian attacks and losses mount, there has been a wave of women enlisting and increasingly volunteering for combat roles. The Ukrainian military has also made a concerted effort to recruit more women to fill its ranks.

Currently, about 65,000 women serve in the Ukrainian armed forces, an increase of about 30 percent since the start of the war. About 45,000 serve as military personnel, and the rest hold civilian positions, according to the Defense Department. Just over 4,000 are in combat positions.

Unlike Ukrainian men, there is no compulsory military service for women; However, women with a medical or pharmaceutical degree must register for the service.

These women are filling a growing number of positions in the military: combat medics in assault units; senior gunners; snipers; commanders of tank units and artillery batteries; and at least one medevac team co-pilot who dreams of becoming Ukraine’s first female attack helicopter pilot. Dozens have been injured in the battle, and some have been killed or captured.

Along the front lines, they operate under the same blanket of fear and hardship as male soldiers. In the damp, fortified shelter where Witch and one of her mortar teams spent most of their days, they waited in near darkness in the basement. Switching on the lights would mean that the crew would not be able to quickly adjust their eyes to the dark if they had to go outside to shoot.

Farther north, a commander with the call sign Tesla, a former Ukrainian folk singer, sat hunched on a stool in the bare house that served as field headquarters for the 32nd Mechanized Brigade. Russian forces in the Kupiansk region rained artillery fire on Ukrainian lines.

Tesla simultaneously sent text messages and voice notes to the soldiers in her unit as she spoke to the second-in-command about the battlefield plan. Her oversized pants were rolled up, revealing neon orange socks with cartoon avocados on them.

She attempted to divert Russian fire on another battalion to her own soldiers’ position so that the other unit could evacuate a comrade who had been badly wounded. “Three tourniquets on three different limbs,” came a voice message, she said.

“Send one more,” Tesla ordered through a ballot, ordering her soldiers to fire again. “When you’re done, let me know.”

Shortly after a Russian attack began in October, overwhelming Ukrainian lines, 24 of its artillery-trained soldiers were ordered to reinforce infantry forces, which are always closest to Russian lines. Tesla talked to them before they were deployed and felt helpless.

“The worst part is that I have instructed them on completely different things in artillery, and then they are sent to the infantry,” she said. “And imagine them standing there looking at you as their commander, knowing they’re going to be sent into the worst situation.”

Of the 24 sent forward, 15 were wounded, Tesla said, and one was captured during the fighting. The incident continued to weigh on Tesla’s conscience, but she kept her concerns to herself. Her mother still did not know that Tesla led an artillery battery, thinking that her daughter worked as an instructor at an academy, a safe distance from the front.

Until 2018, women were banned from holding combat positions in the Ukrainian army, although some ignored the rules. Restrictions have been relaxed since the Russian invasion. The induction of thousands more female soldiers into the military is largely seen as a welcome step for the country, whose efforts to join NATO and the European Union are still under review.

The downside is that the military has not been able to adapt quickly enough to accommodate them. Female soldiers say there is still a dire lack of women’s clothing and boots, properly fitted body armor and feminine hygiene products. That allows women to acquire many items themselves.

As a result, organizations like Veteranka and Zemliachky have helped fill the gap by raising money for items tailor-made for women.

But the problems go deeper, into issues of gender-related inequality and discrimination.

Many women who served in combat roles said male soldiers and immediate superiors largely did not discriminate on the basis of gender – although sexual innuendos and inappropriate comments still occur.

Rather, it is senior commanders, often holdovers from the Soviet era, who look down on women in the military, especially those in combat roles. In some cases, women choose to join newly formed brigades with younger, more dynamic commanders.

“I didn’t want to join a brigade that was created many years ago because I knew they wouldn’t listen to me as a young officer and as a woman,” Tesla said.

In one case, a brigade commander was so outraged by a woman commanding an artillery battery that he directly belittled her. “You crawl back to me on your knees and beg to leave when you realize the job is too difficult, and I won’t let you leave your post,” she recalled him saying, requesting anonymity to speak candidly about to talk about a sensitive topic. .

Claims of sexual harassment have also surfaced. According to some women, there are no official channels for reporting harassment other than to battalion commanders, who must then decide whether to follow up. In some cases, female soldiers say, witnesses may refuse to testify for fear of repercussions.

These barriers, as well as the potential to harm their military careers, discourage women from reporting harassment, female soldiers said.

Diana Davitian, a Defense Department spokeswoman, said the military launched a hotline Jan. 1 for soldiers to report sexual harassment. The reports would be investigated, she said, and action would be taken if the allegations were found to be true.

The ministry also said it planned to create a separate unit dedicated to ensuring gender equality and providing educational programs, including a unit focused on combating war-related sexual violence.

Back in the basement, Tesla received a call from the command post: it was time to shoot. The team scrambled into a partially covered courtyard a few yards away, where a mortar barrel lay ready.

There was silence as Kuzya, 20, a senior rifleman in the mortar platoon, looked through the scope and read the coordinates on her phone. “Firework!” someone shouted. Several more rounds were broadcast before the team scrambled back into the basement to await a possible return of the Russians.

Just months earlier, Kuzya’s friend was killed during the fighting. She and Witch, who has a seven-year-old son whom she has barely seen in the past year, seemed to find comfort in each other’s company. The two women trained at the same judo club in Kiev, the capital, and the day after the invasion they went to the recruitment office together to register.

For many women, war and the desire to go into battle feels like something they have been preparing for for years. Foxy, 24, a former barista turned gunman and medic, volunteered to make camouflage netting after school during her teenage years before working with wounded veterans. She joined the army last year after weeks of training.

Her battalion commander gave her two options: “You are a woman. You can work with documents or cook borscht,” Foxy recalls. “I had no choice but to complete the paperwork until I changed battalions.”

She subsequently became part of a mortar team in some of the most intense frontline fighting in Bakhmut, and was treated as an equal by her team. “Although I faced a certain amount of sexism early on,” she said, “I feel like I don’t have to prove anything or convince anyone of what I can do.”

That’s a sentiment echoed by Kateryna, 21, a lieutenant and pilot of an Mi-8 medical evacuation helicopter. Kateryna has yet to fly her first medevac mission, but she hopes to become Ukraine’s first female fighter pilot.

Ukrainian society is also gradually overcoming its skepticism toward women serving in the military. For now, it is up to the new generation of women and their allies who will also be better able to tackle discrimination and sexual harassment.

Evelina Riabenko reporting contributed.

Hiding for days in the basement of a kindergarten in Bucha, the suburb of Kiev that became that synonymous with Russian war crimesOksana Semenik had time to think.

Outside, Russian troops raged through the city, killing civilians who ventured onto the street. Knowing she might not make it, Ms. Semenik, an art historian, reflected on the Ukrainian artworks she had long wanted to write about — and which were now in danger of disappearing.

That time she spent in Bucha dated back to the early days of the full-scale invasion of Russia, but even then, two years ago, she had already seen reports of destroyed museums. Precious folk paintings by her favorite artist, Maria Primachenko, had gone up in flames. Moscow, she realized, waged a war against Ukrainian culture.

‘They destroy works of art. They destroy museums. They are destroying the architecture,” Ms. Semenik recalled as she thought in the basement. She promised that if she escaped from Bucha, she would not allow Ukrainian art to fall into oblivion. “It was like, ‘There’s a war. You can die at any moment. You shouldn’t put off all this research any longer.’”

Since then, Ms. Semenik, 26, has worked to fulfill that vow.

After fleeing Bucha on foot, she began “Ukrainian art history”, an English-language account on the social platform X, where she has been posting daily for the past 21 months about the lives and works of long-overlooked Ukrainian artists. Her posts, which often have more than 100,000 views, have become an important source for learning about Ukrainian art.

But perhaps an even more important achievement has been her work to push world-class museums to reconsider their classifications.

Using her online popularity to open doors, Ms. Semenik has lobbied them to reclassify art long considered Russian — because it dates from the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union — as Ukrainian.

She calls her efforts “decolonizing Ukrainian art.”

Thanks to her and other activists, institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art have done just that many works of art and artists relabeledoverhauling decades of practice that critics say aligned Ukrainian culture with that of its former Russian ruler.

As Russia tries to erase Ukrainian identity, with art as the main targetMs Semenik’s work has been crucial in raising awareness of the country’s cultural heritage at a critical time, art world figures say. The Kremlin’s claim that the Ukrainian nation is a fiction.

“Russia says, ‘Hey, show us your culture. You don’t have one. Ukraine is not a nation,” Ms. Semenik said in a recent interview. “That’s what I’m fighting against.”

Ms. Semenik, a reserved woman with dyed red hair, still remembers the day she first read about the Ukrainian roots of Kazimir Malevich, the Kiev-born painter and a major pioneer of abstract art. Malevich has long been described as Russian, but in his diaries he identified himself as Ukrainian.

“Really, is that true?” she recalled thinking about her discovery around 2016, which sparked her interest in Ukrainian art.

Ms. Semenik worked as a cultural journalist for several years before enrolling in a master’s degree in art at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2021. She completed her master’s thesis on the representation of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukrainian art. , last year.

When she launched her This included the avant-garde artist Oleksandra Eksterthe 19th century painter Illia Repin and of course Malevich.

Many shared a common story: they were born, lived or worked in Ukraine; and they had been oppressed, exiled or murdered by Russia. Yet the world had remembered them as Russians, because of Moscow’s long-standing efforts to include Ukrainian culture as Russian heritage.

Ms. Semenik wants to debunk these myths by “writing about Ukrainian artists who were ‘stolen’ by the Russians,” she says. wrote shortly after she launched her account.

Oleksandra Kovalchuk, deputy director of the Odesa Museum of Fine Arts, said Ms Semenik’s efforts were “very important to show that Ukraine has a long history” and to counter Moscow’s narrative that Ukraine has always been part of Russia refute. “Art is a testimony to that.”

But Ms. Semenik knew that this story had been spread for a long time and was deeply entrenched in art institutions. So when she was offered a fellowship at Rutgers University in the fall of 2022, she decided to spend part of it studying the collections of Western museums and identifying what she believed to be errors in the labeling of Ukrainian art.

She started at the Zimmerli Art Museum, which is part of Rutgers University and has the largest collection of Soviet nonconformist art in the world, works created outside the official state system and the preferred style of socialist realism. She spent weeks researching the artists’ birthplaces and workplaces.

“Oksana came in and saw work with the Russian label and she said, ‘They’re Ukrainian!’” recalls Maura Reilly, Zimmerli’s director. “So we were like, ‘Yes, please fix it for us!’ She has done an incredible job.”

Ms. Semenik then turned her sights to other museums. What she discovered shocked her.

The Museum of Modern Art. The Met. The Jewish Museum. According to each of them, there were dozens of mislabeled Ukrainian works of art reports she has compiled.

Ms Semenik sent emails to the museums urging them to correct the labels, attaching spreadsheets detailing the artists she said had been misdescribed. The museum’s responses were often non-binding and irritated her.

In an email to the Brooklyn Museum, she pointed out that a landscape painting by Repin, set in what is now Ukraine, “Winter scene, Russia.”

“It’s like having a painting set in India during British colonial rule and calling it ‘British Landscape,'” she said, anger evident in her voice.

Several museums, including the Brooklyn Museum, said in written comments that they were reviewing their labels, but that the task was complicated by the overlapping identities of some artists. For example, Malevich was born in Ukraine to Polish parents and lived in Russia for many years.

Ms. Semenik said she was “not trying to erase all other identities and simply call these artists Ukrainian,” but that an all-Russian label amounted to complicity in Russia’s appropriation of Ukrainian culture.

Ultimately, Ms. Semenik decided to publicly highlight the museums on social media. Her posts were shared widely online, in a kind of name-and-shame operation. Other Ukrainian activists also harassed Western museums to review their collections. It didn’t take long for Ms. Semenik to notice changes in the museums’ labels.

“I have great news,” she said wrote on X early last year, while sheltering in Kiev during a Russian airstrike: The Met had recognized Repin as Ukrainian.

The Brooklyn Museum dropped the label identifying him as Russian, and instead listed his birthplace as present-day Ukraine. Other institutions, such as the National Gallery in London and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, have also made changes.

“Without Oksana’s efforts it certainly could have taken longer,” said Ms. Kovalchuk, who helped push the Met to change their labels.

Ms. Semenik said she sometimes starts her art discussions with the question, “Why don’t you know any Ukrainian artists?”

“Maybe one day I won’t have to ask that question,” she said.

About 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began two years ago, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday, acknowledging a concrete figure for Ukraine’s toll for the first time in the war.

“This is a great loss for us,” Mr Zelensky said at a news conference in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. But he declined to reveal the number of wounded or missing, saying Russia could use the information to gauge Ukraine’s active military forces.

Mr. Zelensky’s count could not be independently verified. It differs sharply from estimates by U.S. officials, who last summer put losses much higher and said nearly 70,000 Ukrainians had been killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded. Russian military losses were about twice as high, officials said.

Mr. Zelenskiy’s unusual admission came as his country’s armed forces now find themselves on the back foot along most of the 900-kilometer (560-mile) front line as Russian forces launch attacks in the east and south. Ukraine’s military leaders have long said they need more troops to push back against Russia’s brutal attacks; a mobilization bill that could pave the way for a large-scale force of up to 500,000 troops is making its way through the Ukrainian parliament.

Ukrainian soldiers go missing after the fall of Avdiivka

Hundreds of Ukrainian troops may have been captured or disappeared by Russia during Ukraine's chaotic withdrawal from the eastern city of Avdiivka. The loss could be a blow to Ukraine's already weakening morale.

The Russian capture of the small town was seen as a symbolic loss for Ukraine: Avdiivka had become an emotional center of the fighting. But the US had said it was not a significant strategic setback.

The capture of hundreds of soldiers could change that. Two soldiers with knowledge of the retreat estimated that 850 to 1,000 soldiers appear to have been captured or missing, a range that Western officials said seemed accurate. Unverified videos posted on social media also showed Russian troops executing Ukrainian troops in and around the city.

Ukraine already needed more troops, and the country cannot afford to lose experienced fighters. The country also wants to mobilize another 500,000 people, an effort that has already met with political resistance and is stalled in parliament. The arrest of hundreds of soldiers could complicate recruitment efforts, and military officials have tried to downplay both the number and significance of the missing soldiers.

Analysis: Some Ukrainian soldiers and Western officials said the withdrawal was poorly planned and started too late. These failures were directly responsible for the missing soldiers, they say.

Julian Assange's final appeal?

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been in a British prison for almost five years, fighting a US extradition warrant. A hearing in London that started yesterday and will continue today could be his last chance to stay in Britain.

Assange's wife, Stella Assange, says his health has deteriorated in prison, and his lawyers say he faces espionage charges in the US that could carry up to 175 years in prison. Lawyers for the US have said it was more likely he would be sentenced to four to six years.

Background: The allegations date back to events in 2010, when WikiLeaks published documents leaked by Chelsea Manning, an Army intelligence analyst, that exposed hidden diplomatic dealings and contained revelations about civilian deaths in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US draws up a ceasefire deal

For the third time, the US used its veto power against the UN Security Council to overturn a resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas. Algeria put forward the resolution and diplomats and U.N. officials have said a ceasefire is necessary if Gaza is to get the aid it needs.

But in a shift, the US has drafted an alternative resolution, which is still in the early stages of negotiations. It calls for a temporary cessation of fighting “as soon as practicable” – and for the release of hostages. It also states that the Israeli army should not carry out an offensive in Rafah, southern Gaza, under the current circumstances.

Reasoning: The US said the resolution would jeopardize negotiating efforts to reach a deal on the release of hostages in exchange for a temporary ceasefire. Those negotiations failed.

Other developments:

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A death that still haunts gamers

In 1997, Final Fantasy VII shocked players with a plot twist: a key character, Aerith, was killed. It was an unthinkable idea when games were known for giving playable characters extra lives. When Aerith died, so did a narrative trope that had limited the medium's dramatic potential.

Now the game's creator is returning to that pivotal moment. Final Fantasy VII is being remade. The second part, Rebirth, will be released on February 29. It's expected to end with Aerith's death – or, perhaps, some speculate, her rescue. Fans are desperate to find out.