BlackSeaRoamer

I had first visited Moldova in July 2022, travelling down from Iaşi (pronounced Yash), in Romania, and spending a couple of days in Chişinău...

In the weeks before my arrival back in Ukraine in mid-July 2025, the country had been subjected to some of the most intense Russian missile ...

I travelled down from Kyiv to Uzhhorod on an overnight train in August 2024. Situated on the River Uzh, on the border with Slovakia, Uzhhoro...

A couple of days before my arrival in Kyiv in July 2024, a Russian missile had hit a children’s hospital in the centre of the city. Amid Rus...

I had last visited Odessa in the summer of 2022, just a few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (see post of 2 August 2023)...

I arrived in Kharkiv by minibus from Dnipro on a hot summer’s day at the end of June 2024. I had briefly visited the city a year earlier (se...

I had spent two months in Dnipro as an election observer in 2006. At that time, it had been called Dnipropetrovsk, in honour of the Ukrainia...