Here's what you helped us achieve in the past week (Patreon)

Dear KI community members, 

This past week, we celebrated Independence Day. It was a different holiday than usual, since Aug. 24 also marked sixth months since Russia launched its full-scale invasion. 

If you were able to celebrate Independence Day, we'd love to hear about it – feel free to leave a comment below. 

Finally, a huge welcome to the 193 members that joined this week! We're so glad you're with us. And, thank you to everyone for your continued support.

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

We published a memorial page for fallen soldiers. "They are why Ukraine stands" features photos of those who have died defending Ukraine and some of their stories written by Daria Shulzhenko.

Another page we launched for Independence Day is "Explaining Ukraine" – articles that explain Ukrainian historical events and cultural figures, so the world can better understand the country. We've published five articles so far and will continue to update this section.

One of our most popular stories was Illia Ponomarenko's "6 months of war: How Russia got derailed in Ukraine," which looks at the major developments since February 24.

The occupation and shelling of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant continues to be a point of concern. Francis Farrell's debut article covers life on the front line of Russia’s nuclear brinkmanship, and Asami Terajima writes about the plant being disconnected from the power grid.

We made an appearance on BBC News. Last week, we told you that BBC came to film our morning meeting for a story in connection with Independence Day. You can watch the BBC segment, which is in English, on YouTube. Our Editor-in-Chief Olga Rudenko also spoke about the KI in an interview with the BBC program HARDtalk, which is available to UK viewers here.

We got a new camera and lighting setup, which we were able to use for out Story Spotlight on Thursday. We wanted to improve the quality of our community events.

This week, the final episode of our podcast "Did the War End?" aired. The finale to the series looks at Russian-occupied Crimea and what the future might hold.

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