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Vanya, a Ukrainian soldier, pulled up his T-shirt to reveal a nasty scar that he got while fighting in the war in Ukraine — he said that he was hit half a millimeter from his heart.
Vanya is staying at Lisova Polyana, or Forest Glade, a veterans’ mental health and rehabilitation center in a quiet, wooded area just 30 minutes from downtown Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital.
(None of the soldiers that The World spoke to for this story are identified by their full names because they are on active duty and in many cases, returning to the front lines.)
Vanya has been at Forest Glade for four days and said that he was hoping he would be better by now, though he didn’t share the details of his treatment or recovery.
He is among the 220 men and women being treated at the center, which is run by the Ministry of Health; it works on “invisible wounds,” including stress disorders, depression, anxiety, PTSD and traumatic brain injuries. They also treat people who were tortured or held in captivity.
After nearly 1,000 days, Russia’s war against Ukraine is causing mental health issues for soldiers and civilians alike. Ukraine’s Health Ministry estimates that 15 million people will need psychological support in the future — or 40% of the population.
The Ukrainian government said it’s in the process of developing a comprehensive new veterans policy that includes psychological care and career support for people transitioning back to civilian life. In the meantime, mental health professionals are scrambling to modernize an outdated system to accommodate the vast needs.
Kseniia Voznitsyna, the chief doctor at Forest Glade, said that Ukraine has experienced psychologists, but even they may need additional skills training to deal with military trauma.
“This is happening now with a lot of trainings in Ukraine — this process is happening widely,” she said.
At Forest Glade, she explained, they take an integrative approach: “It’s a bio-psycho-social approach. We have a big team. Psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, physical therapists, speech therapists.”
Clinical case managers work individually with the soldiers, ensuring that they show up for appointments, and they plan excursions for them, Voznitsyna said. Patients receive plenty of complementary methods of treatment, including everything from acupuncture to yoga to art rehabilitation classes.
Forest Glade has a long waitlist, and patients usually stay for several weeks before returning to military service.
Soldier Volodymyr, speaking in front of a group of other men in line to get a haircut, referenced the physical therapy, but not the mental health treatment he was receiving at the center.
“It’s great,” he said. “I was treated here, it’s a little easier on my foot, easier on my back.”
He could stay longer, he said, but as platoon leader, he was eager to get back to his men in eastern Ukraine.
War trauma ‘is not for one day’
For many Ukrainians, seeking out mental health care means overcoming long-held stigmas going back to the Soviet period when political opposition figures were often sent to psych wards.
“Because Soviets used this as an instrument, this is a huge stigma towards psychiatry,” said Dr. Orest Suvalo, executive director of the Institute of Mental Health of the Ukrainian Catholic University. “We even still feel it now, after 30 years of Ukrainian independence.”
Meanwhile, demand is only growing. PTSD isn’t the only consequence of traumatic experiences. Ukrainians are also dealing with depression, substance abuse, loss and anxiety.
“It’s important to pay attention to the trauma-informed approach to train people and explain to people in many different specialties how to speak with people,” he said. “Because we are predicting that everyone could have some kind of traumatic experience.”
Dr. Oleh Berezyuk at Unbroken, a national rehabilitation center in Lviv, said that the country’s mental health challenges are multilayered; there is the sheer number of people who need help, plus, the brutal nature of their trauma.
“We have to care for every soldier, for every civilian who suffered from the war trauma, which is very important because war trauma, it’s not for one day,” he said. “And you cannot treat it just by one simple intervention. You have to prepare people to live in a different reality.”
That’s why Unbroken is treating mental and physical trauma together in the general hospital, a successful model that they are recommending to other hospitals, Berezyuk said.
Others, like Victor Dosenko, a professor of pathophysiology at the Bogomolets Institute of Physiology in Kyiv, are working specifically on PTSD.
Dosenko is studying biomarkers and how to detect PTSD.
“It’s a bad opportunity, but medicine, medical progress moves forward when there are challenges,” said Dosenko, who has also been advocating for a PTSD center in Ukraine.
The importance of preparing a family
Veterans need to return to an understanding society where they can find work and medical help, said Tetiana Kril, head of the mental health program and psychological support centers Razom With You.
When her husband returned home from fighting in 2017 after Russia’s earlier invasion of eastern Ukraine, “I realized how important it is to prepare a family,” she said. “Because every soldier returns to his family. And today, there are already 3.5 million veterans in Ukraine, and by the end of the war, we expect there will be 5 million.”
Yrii Liashuk, who works for Razom for Ukraine, said that when he was discharged from the military last year due to an injury, his family was supportive. His wife became his “personal psychologist,” he said.
He joined the military in 2012 and had thought it would be his lifelong career.
He stays busy with a job as a security officer and running a company that makes drones. He believes veteran reintegration will be one of the biggest challenges ahead.
“Society needs to be prepared for the fact that heroes with unique challenges will live with us,” Liashuk said. “We need to understand this.”
The post ‘We have to care for every soldier, for every civilian’: Ukraine faces major mental health challenges as a result of war trauma appeared first on The World from PRX.
Vishwanath Srikantiah, an urban planner in Bengaluru, India’s tech hub, sat on the edge of a 50-year-old water well in a quiet neighborhood near the airport.
When Vishwanath first encountered the well several years ago, he said it was full of garbage. His organization, Biome Environmental Trust, helped clean and restore the well, which is now adorned with artwork. It also has a protective metal cover and a pulley for residents to draw water for washing or bathing.
“Even during the crisis when there was no water in the city, this well always had water,” Vishwanath said, referring to a looming water emergency in Bengaluru earlier this year.
Vishwanath’s organization brings many of these humble wells back to life through the Million Wells for Bengaluru project. Vishwanath estimated that they’ve gotten to around 280,000 of them over the past decade.
Small, shallow wells could hold the key to alleviating Bengaluru’s ongoing water problems. Using age-old, well-digging techniques, they help residents tap into a forgotten water source: the shallow aquifer.
For centuries, Indians depended on open wells. However, with the advent of deep drilling technology, traditional wells fell out of use.
Now, in an era of climate change, Vishwanath said, wells are a simple yet effective choice to make the city more water-secure: “Truly, it’s a low, shallow-hanging fruit.”
Today, Bengaluru gets most of its water from the Cauvery River, about 60 miles away and at a lower elevation than the city. The municipal piped network delivers this water to homes. But newer parts of the ever-expanding city don’t have government water connections yet.
“The infrastructure is barely able to match the city’s growth, and so, where the piped network does not reach, the dependency is completely on groundwater,” Vishwanath said.
Groundwater is pumped up from great depths through borewells — narrow shafts that dig as deep as 1,800 feet below the ground to extract water, much farther down than traditional wells. Bengaluru has an indiscriminate number of borewells, and new ones are being drilled constantly.
“When you go deeper into the ground, the water becomes more saline, more unreliable, and the borewells tend to dry out,” Vishwanath said.
That’s precisely what happened earlier this year — many of the city’s borewells ran dry. Traditional, open wells, on the other hand, go less than 100 feet below the ground. This part of the earth is like a sponge, Vishwanath said: “It can hold water and release water, provided we understand the recharge zones and make sure that rainwater percolates.”
Water from a well requires much less energy because it only needs to be drawn up to 20 feet or 30 feet.
“It’s very energy efficient. It’s cheap water. It has less carbon emissions,” Vishwanath said.
The Million Wells initiative harnesses the knowledge of traditional well-diggers called Mannu Vaddars, many of whom lost work when India shifted to mechanically dug borewells.
Sahana Goswami is a senior program manager for urban water and climate resilience at the World Resources Institute India.
“This sort of campaign is very important because you’re widening our scope and saying, ‘Here’s another resource that we can tap into when we need,’” she said.
After all, relying too much on one source of water is at the root of Bengaluru’s water problems.
“You should have a diverse set of sources of water,” Goswami said. “So, if one is diminished, you still have the other one that you can draw from.”
In the face of climate change, she said, solutions like the Million Wells initiative become all the more urgent, especially as summers in Bengaluru are getting hotter and rainfall is becoming more erratic.
At the same time, the city is urbanizing rapidly.
“The way we have developed, we have all these paved surfaces. The natural capacity of water to get absorbed into the ground is also getting diminished,” Goswami said. “We have had more incidences of acute rainfall but short duration, high rainfall, which usually flows away. So, how much water has been absorbed into the ground has been a bit lesser.”
Capturing rainwater is essential to recharge the shallow aquifer, something lakes do naturally. While Bengaluru has many lakes, some are drying up.
But Vishwanath pointed to the successful rehabilitation of Sihineeru Kere (“Sweet Water Lake”) on the outskirts of Bengaluru, and a nearby well. The Environmental Foundation of India intervened in 2022, filling it with rainwater and treated wastewater.
Through Vishwanath’s Biome Environmental Trust, a treatment plant next to the lake purifies water from the shallow aquifer, which will soon be supplied directly to locals, and well-diggers cleaned and de-silted the well.
Vishwanath described the collaboration as a success, but he’s eager to see it replicated because climate change “is coming like a tsunami, so we don’t have time to be able to deal with it,” he said. “So, that’s the impatience that I feel as much as the satisfaction.”
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Katsumi Kusumoto has become a celebrity chef in Japan for his awareness of the environmental pressures on food systems and his adaptation of menus to be less reliant on mass-produced animal protein.
Thinking outside the bento box got Chef Kusumoto to partner with a high-tech food company in Israel called Forsea.
“The Japanese consumed 160,000 metric tons of eel in 2000. Today, they consume only 30,000, and that’s because it’s just not available,” said Roee Nir, co-founder and CEO of Forsea.
Nir says most eel varieties are in short supply as endangered and protected species. Eels are also expensive because they are raised for several years before harvesting.
Earlier this year, The World staff visited Israel and saw what Forsea was working on.
“What we do is grow mini-tissues called organoids, and we basically mimic the natural development of cells,” Nir said. “Our tissue is a natural composition of fat, muscle and the actual extracellular matrix.”
The “extracellular matrix” is animal flesh, but developed in a stainless steel bioreactor.
“We’re not an eel company. We’re a cultivated meat company focused on fish and seafood, and our first product is the meat of the freshwater eel.”
Roee Nir, co-founder and CEO of Forsea
“We’re not an eel company,” said Nir. “We’re a cultivated meat company focused on fish and seafood, and our first product is the meat of the freshwater eel.”
In its current research and development phase, Forsea’s operations occur on one floor in a building in Rehovot, just outside Tel Aviv.
The eventual eel meat is developed right down the hall from Nir’s office.
Moria Shimoni, another of Forsea’s co-founders and chief technology officer, gave The World a tour of the area.
“This is where the magic happens,” said Shimoni before correcting herself. “Actually, all of the places … is where the magic happens: It starts with the cell isolation, it continues with the media development. This is actually the media. The media inside the bio-reactor is the media we developed.”
When Shimoni says “media,” she means the complex formula that feeds the eel cells that grow in the bioreactor.
In that sense, the magic really does happen in the bioreactors: stainless-steel tanks that mimic each cell line’s temperature, oxygen and nutritional needs as the team at Forsea trial-and-errors their way to something that tastes like unagi.
Nir said that cultivated meat grown in a lab has many benefits over conventional fish farming, but there’s one big thing: “The aquaculture that has been helping close the supply-demand gap for decades has been quite impactful for the environment,” he said. “And what’s expected to close the supply-demand gap of fish and seafood is cultivated meat.”
Cultivated meat also eliminates the need to grow animal-feed crops. As far as climate change emissions, various studies have shown that cultivated beef could improve the situation over real cows. However, other studies suggest that the infrastructure around cultivated beef could actually increase those emissions.
There are other benefits the cultivated eel industry is promoting, like a massive drop in microplastic pollution as a result of abandoning fishing nets.
But all of these positives depend on one big obstacle.
Faraz Harsini, a senior scientist at the Washington, DC-based Good Food Institute, who focuses on developing lab-grown meat, said, “With cultivated meat, the challenge is really to scale it up.”
Right now, the cultivated meat industry has proof of concept. But there’s a way to go still before you find cultivated eel in a cooler in the produce department.
Harsini said that better, more cost-effective bioreactors and cheaper media will be required to feed the cells.
But if that happens, Harsini will be optimistic about the benefits.
“This is something people don’t realize: The United Nations says that the top drivers of the next pandemic are due to increased demand for animal protein.”
Faraz Harsini, senior scientist at the Good Food Institute
“This is something people don’t realize: The United Nations says that the top drivers of the next pandemic are due to increased demand for animal protein,” he said.
In other words, as the production of conventional chicken, pork and beef is increasingly industrialized to feed the world’s growing population, the probability of another outbreak of some disease — avian flu, swine flu or COVID-19 — will increase.
Cultivated meat lowers that risk.
“Because it’s a process that is completely under control, you are constantly sampling and testing for any microbes and contamination, and if you have contamination, you just waste a batch,” Harsini said.
Farmers pump their livestock with antibiotics to prevent infections and to make them grow faster. Cultivated meat also eliminates the need for antibiotics.
And Harsini, like many scientists, is deeply concerned about where continued reliance on antibiotics in the current food system will take the planet.
“According to WHO’s former director, it’s going to be the end of modern medicine when we have [an] antibiotic-resistant pandemic,” he said. “Again, that’s a problem completely mitigated with cultivated meat.”
Israel has become an incubator for companies on the cutting edge of cultivated meat. Just down the road from Forsea is Aleph Farms, which is working on cultivated beef.
No fewer than half a dozen cultivated meat operations are scattered around the country.
Tami Tvash, vice president for research and development at Aleph Farms, showed The World several new creations, including what can only be described as “beef ink,” a combination of muscle and fat cells designed to smell and even sound like steak when it’s on a hot skillet.
“And with this ink,” Tvash said, “we’re actually printing a steak, so we can print areas with muscle cells, we can do areas with fat components in a steak.”
Aleph Farms is working on a minute-steak, and once that gets scaled up, thicker cuts of meat will follow.
Why is this all happening in Israel?
Faraz Harsini of the Good Food Institute, which has an affiliate office there, says the Israeli government has actively supported food innovation because “Israel relies heavily on importing meat, and so for them, it’s a matter of national security.”
It likely should be one for the rest of the world, too.
This work is something Nir at Forsea is excited to do every day.
“How many industries do you know that are targeting two of the world’s biggest problems: nutrition and climate?” he said.
Nir expects Forsea’s first product will reach the market late next year or early 2026.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified a last name. The original version had Faraz Farsini, but the correct name is Faraz Harsini, which has been updated to reflect this.
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In Namibia, a plant colloquially known as the encroaching bush is threatening the land with desertification. In addition, the country faces a growing housing shortage. MycoHAB, a nonprofit in Namibia, has found a solution to both problems for the price of one.
Chris Maurer is an architect behind MycoHAB, which aims to combat the housing crisis and climate change by researching and producing sustainable building materials.
The organization has found a process that can take the encroaching bush, use it as the substrate — like soil but for growing mushrooms — and use the mushrooms to feed people. Then, the waste material is used to build bricks for new houses.
Maurer spoke to The World’s co-host, Carolyn Beeler, to learn more.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
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Days ago, a story started making the rounds on social media. It claimed that Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, had recently purchased a $4.8 million Bugatti Tourbillon while she was visiting Paris for D-Day celebrations in June.
An unnamed source in the story said she used American military aid money to pay for the car, and the story included what it said was an invoice for the vehicle. The Bugatti dealership in Paris said it was a lie, but by the time they released a statement, it was too late. The story had already gone viral.
These are the kinds of disinformation campaigns that Antibot4Navalny, an anonymous group of disinformation researchers, have been flagging since last fall in a bid to blunt Moscow’s efforts to confuse and misinform.
The “Click Here” podcast from Recorded Future News spoke recently by encrypted app with one of the leaders of the group about efforts to unmask Russian bots, their work with global researchers on disinformation and why some people are saying Antibot4Navalny is punching way above its weight as it takes on the Kremlin.
Then in late October of last year, we uncovered a massive bot campaign. Bots [computer software] were posting and reposting a highly produced Russian-language video that was clearly aimed at changing the narrative of the war in Ukraine.
It was saying two things at the same time: One, that Russia and Ukraine were brothers, and two, that the fighting was essentially breaking up a family. We assumed that it was targeting Russian and Ukrainian audiences.
But a short time later, we could see that the very same bots had widened the aperture and had started to target France, Germany, the US, Israel and Ukraine all at the very same time. They started promoting fake articles that were meant to convince people to stop sending Western aid to Ukraine.
This seemed to present an opportunity to use all our experience tracking internal Russian information campaigns and help Western audiences know what to expect.
We identified the bots behind the campaign, found some unique photos that had not previously been published, and made everything public. That helped us connect to media outlets like Le Monde and Liberation, and other researchers working on the Doppelgänger problem began contacting us.
We discovered all kinds of funny details about the campaign like the way they developed these accounts. They were alphabetic. All the US-associated bots started with D names; French ones used names that began with J, and German ones started with R.
However, for the past several months, 0% of my time has been spent on what I think I do best: expose new bot and troll crowds and build automated detectors.
The team spends most of its time collecting data on bots’ nightly runs. They would most benefit from automation, but we cannot afford it yet.
Because we track and record the content they promote and/or the topics they comment on, we get a lot of coverage.
To try to make this work at scale, machine learning used to help dramatically, until Twitter discontinued free access to their Application Programming Interface (API). We are still struggling to recover.
What’s important to understand is that the point isn’t really just to look at what bots are writing about or what their specific talking points are. What they are trying to accomplish is more subtle than that. Bots are about introducing uncertainty and confusion — to undermine, not a particular story, but news more generally, to disrupt the conversation itself. That’s why they bring in as many talking points and perspectives as possible, even if they are contradicting each other. It adds to the confusion.
For example, the recurring pattern is: A few citizens of a third country are hired to do something on the ground that favors the Kremlin’s interests or agenda; a few days later, Doppelgänger bots are focusing on massively promoting it. It might be taking aim at an official or to chip away at support for Ukraine or some other targeted country.
Now, it seems like Doppelgänger is learning from its own experience when covering on-the-ground influence operations.
Last fall, Doppelgänger bots promoted unique photos of Stars of David in Paris that were never published before. That showed very strong evidence of connection between Doppelgänger operators and people behind the offline operation.Their bots promoted a publication by Doppelgänger’s original site (artichoc[.]io), which used a broadly circulated photo of red handprints at a memorial by AFP — which helped with “plausible deniability.” Bots promoted publication by Le Figaro, a legitimate, reputable media outlet — which made the tweets posted by the bots look more authentic.
In reality, the biggest achievement of influence operations based on trolls-for-hire is, in our opinion, that regular users suspect each other to be pro-Russian, pro-China, pro-Iran, what have you. Once they encounter someone from an opposing point of view, they prefer to stop the conversation altogether. In a sense, the Godwin’s law is not there any more. It was replaced with “you’re a troll-for-hire.”
The biggest achievement of FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference), as well as of domestic troll farms in Russia, is that it ruined the benefit of doubt. Regular users stopped trusting each other, especially with those holding views different from theirs. Polarization and atomization improved; it became increasingly difficult to seek tactical allies for the sake of common goals among those bearing differing views. It’s “divide and conquer” at its best.
We also collected what we believe is a top-3-largest dataset on Doppelgänger bot activity that can be made available for journalists for analysis and reporting. We collected over 3,500 articles that were promoted by social media bots on X, along with every relevant evidence out there.
At the same time, it turned out that most media outlets are not used to being paying customers for researchers; they typically trade exposure to researchers for viral stories from them, unlike photo agencies, stringers or paparazzi.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
An earlier version of this story appeared on the “CLICK HERE” podcast from Recorded Future News. Additional reporting by Sean Powers and Jade Abdul-Malik.
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