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AI-powered apps may be able to use your data (including selfies) to predict your current mental state. | Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images Emerging apps use AI to guess when you’ll be sad. Can they also help you feel better? If you have a sore throat, you can get tested for a host of things — Covid, RSV, strep, the flu — and receive a pretty accurate diagnosis (and maybe even treatment). Even when you’re not sick, vital signs like heart rate and blood pressure give doctors a decent sense of your physical health. But there’s no agreed-upon vital sign for mental health. There may be occasional mental health screenings at the doctor’s office, or notes left behind after a visit with a therapist. Unfortunately, people lie to their therapists all the time (one study estimated that over 90 percent of us have lied to a therapist at least once), leaving holes in their already limited mental health records. And that’s assuming someone can connect with a therapist — roughly 122 million Americans live in areas without enough mental health professionals to go around. But the vast majority of people in the US do have access to a cellphone. Over the last several years, academic researchers and startups have built AI-powered apps that use phones, smart watches, and social media to spot warning signs of depression. By collecting massive amounts of information, AI models can learn to spot subtle changes in a person’s body and behavior that may indicate mental health problems. Many digital mental health apps only exist in the research world (for now), but some are available to download — and other forms of passive data collection are already being deployed by social media platforms and health care providers to flag potential crises (it’s probably somewhere in the terms of service you didn’t read). The hope is for these platforms to help people affordably access mental health care when they need it most, and intervene quickly in times of crisis. Michael Aratow — co-founder and chief medical officer of Ellipsis Health, a company that uses AI to predict mental health from human voice samples — argues that the need for digital mental health solutions is so great, it can no longer be addressed by the health care system alone. “There’s no way that we’re going to deal with our mental health issues without technology,” he said. And those issues are significant: Rates of mental illness have skyrocketed over the past several years. Roughly 29 percent of US adults have been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lives, and the National Institute of Mental Health estimates that nearly a third of US adults will experience an anxiety disorder at some point. While phones are often framed as a cause of mental health problems, they can also be part of the solution — but only if we create tech that works reliably and mitigates the risk of unintended harm. Tech companies can misuse highly sensitive data gathered from people at their most vulnerable moments — with little regulation to stop them. Digital mental health app developers still have a lot of work to do to earn the trust of their users, but the stakes around the US mental health crisis are high enough that we shouldn’t automatically dismiss AI-powered solutions out of fear. How does AI detect depression? To be formally diagnosed with depression, someone needs to express at least five symptoms (like feeling sad, losing interest in things, or being unusually exhausted) for at least two consecutive weeks. But Nicholas Jacobson, an assistant professor in biomedical data science and psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, believes “the way that we think about depression is wrong, as a field.” By only looking for stably presenting symptoms, doctors can miss the daily ebbs and flows that people with depression experience. “These depression symptoms change really fast,” Jacobson said, “and our traditional treatments are usually very, very slow.” Even the most devoted therapy-goers typically see a therapist about once a week (and with sessions starting around $100, often not covered by insurance, once a week is already cost-prohibitive for many people). One 2022 study found that only 18.5 percent of psychiatrists sampled were accepting new patients, leading to average wait times of over two months for in-person appointments. But your smartphone (or your fitness tracker) can log your steps, heart rate, sleep patterns, and even your social media use, painting a far more comprehensive picture of your mental health than conversations with a therapist can alone. One potential mental health solution: Collect data from your smartphone and wearables as you go about your day, and use that data to train AI models to predict when your mood is about to dip. In a study co-authored by Jacobson this February, researchers built a depression detection app called MoodCapture, which harnesses a user’s front-facing camera to automatically snap selfies while they answer questions about their mood, with participants pinged to complete the survey three times a day. An AI model correlated their responses — rating in-the-moment feelings like sadness and hopelessness — with these pictures, using their facial features and other context clues like lighting and background objects to predict early signs of depression. (One example: a participant who looks as if they’re in bed almost every time they complete the survey is more likely to be depressed.) The model doesn’t try to flag certain facial features as depressive. Rather, the model looks for subtle changes within each user, like their facial expressions, or how they tend to hold their phone. MoodCapture accurately identified depression symptoms with about 75 percent accuracy (in other words, if 100 out of a million people have depression, the model should be able to identify 75 out of the 100) — the first time such candid images have been used to detect mental illness in this way. In this study, the researchers only recruited participants who were already diagnosed with depression, and each photo was tagged with the participant’s own rating of their depression symptoms. Eventually, the app aims to use photos captured when users unlock their phones using face recognition, adding up to hundreds of images per day. This data, combined with other passively gathered phone data like sleep hours, text messages, and social media posts, could evaluate the user’s unfiltered, unguarded feelings. You can tell your therapist whatever you want, but enough data could reveal the truth. The app is still far from perfect. MoodCapture was more accurate at predicting depression in white people because most study participants were white women — generally, AI models are only as good as the training data they’re provided. Research apps like MoodCapture are required to get informed consent from all of their participants, and university studies are overseen by the campus’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) But if sensitive data is collected without a user’s consent, the constant monitoring can feel creepy or violating. Stevie Chancellor, an assistant professor in computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota, says that with informed consent, tools like this can be “really good because they notice things that you may not notice yourself.” What technology is already out there, and what’s on the way? Of the roughly 10,000 (and counting) digital mental health apps recognized by the mHealth Index & Navigation Database (MIND), 18 of them passively collect user data. Unlike the research app MoodCapture, none use auto-captured selfies (or any type of data, for that matter) to predict whether the user is depressed. A handful of popular, highly rated apps like Bearable — made by and for people with chronic health conditions, from bipolar disorder to fibromyalgia — track customized collections of symptoms over time, in part by passively collecting data from wearables. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” Aratow said. These tracker apps are more like journals than predictors, though — they don’t do anything with the information they collect, other than show it to the user to give them a better sense of how lifestyle factors (like what they eat, or how much they sleep) affect their symptoms. Some patients take screenshots of their app data to show their doctors so they can provide more informed advice. Other tools, like the Ellipsis Health voice sensor, aren’t downloadable apps at all. Rather, they operate behind the scenes as “clinical decision support tools,” designed to predict someone’s depression and anxiety levels from the sound of their voice during, say, a routine call with their health care provider. And massive tech companies like Meta use AI to flag, and sometimes delete, posts about self-harm and suicide. Some researchers want to take passive data collection to more radical lengths. Georgios Christopoulos, a cognitive neuroscientist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-led a 2021 study that predicted depression risk from Fitbit data. In a press release, he expressed his vision for more ubiquitous data collection, where “such signals could be integrated with Smart Buildings or even Smart Cities initiatives: Imagine a hospital or a military unit that could use these signals to identify people at risk.” This raises an obvious question: In this imagined future world, what happens if the all-seeing algorithm deems you sad? AI has improved so much in the last five years alone that it’s not a stretch to say that, in the next decade, mood-predicting apps will exist — and if preliminary tests continue to look promising, they might even work. Whether that comes as a relief or fills you with dread, as mood-predicting digital health tools begin to move out of academic research settings and into the app stores, developers and regulators need to seriously consider what they’ll do with the information they gather. So, your phone thinks you’re depressed — now what? It depends, said Chancellor. Interventions need to strike a careful balance: keeping the user safe, without “completely wiping out important parts of their life.” Banning someone from Instagram for posting about self-harm, for instance, could cut someone off from valuable support networks, causing more harm than good. The best way for an app to provide support that a user actually wants, Chancellor said, is to ask them. Munmun De Choudhury, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, believes that any digital mental health platform can be ethical, “to the extent that people have an ability to consent to its use.” She emphasized, “If there is no consent from the person, it doesn’t matter what the intervention is — it’s probably going to be inappropriate.” Academic researchers like Jacobson and Chancellor have to jump through a lot of regulatory hoops to test their digital mental health tools. But when it comes to tech companies, those barriers don’t really exist. Laws like the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) don’t clearly cover nonclinical data that can be used to infer something about someone’s health — like social media posts, patterns of phone usage, or selfies. Even when a company says that they treat user data as protected health information (PHI), it’s not protected by federal law — data only qualifies as PHI if it comes from a “healthcare service event,” like medical records or a hospital bill. Text conversations via platforms like Woebot and BetterHelp may feel confidential, but crucial caveats about data privacy (while companies can opt into HIPAA compliance, user data isn’t legally classified as protected health information) often wind up where users are least likely to see them — like in lengthy terms of service agreements that practically no one reads. Woebot, for example, has a particularly reader-friendly terms of service, but at a whopping 5,625 words, it’s still far more than most people are willing to engage with. “There’s not a whole lot of regulation that would prevent folks from essentially embedding all of this within the terms of service agreement,” said Jacobson. De Choudhury laughed about it. “Honestly,” she told me, “I’ve studied these platforms for almost two decades now. I still don’t understand what those terms of service are saying.” “We need to make sure that the terms of service, where we all click ‘I agree’, is actually in a form that a lay individual can understand,” De Choudhury said. Last month, Sachin Pendse, a graduate student in De Choudhury’s research group, co-authored guidance on how developers can create “consent-forward” apps that proactively earn the trust of their users. The idea is borrowed from the “Yes means yes” model for affirmative sexual consent, because FRIES applies here, too: a user’s consent to data usage should always be freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific. But when algorithms (like humans) inevitably make mistakes, even the most consent-forward app could do something a user doesn’t want. The stakes can be high. In 2018, for example, a Meta algorithm used text data from Messenger and WhatsApp to detect messages expressing suicidal intent, triggering over a thousand “wellness checks,” or nonconsensual active rescues. Few specific details about how their algorithm works are publicly available. Meta clarifies that they use pattern-recognition techniques based on lots of training examples, rather than simply flagging words relating to death or sadness — but not much else. These interventions often involve police officers (who carry weapons and don’t always receive crisis intervention training) and can make things worse for someone already in crisis (especially if they thought they were just chatting with a trusted friend, not a suicide hotline). “We will never be able to guarantee that things are always safe, but at minimum, we need to do the converse: make sure that they are not unsafe,” De Choudhury said. Some large digital mental health groups have faced lawsuits over their irresponsible handling of user data. In 2022, Crisis Text Line, one of the biggest mental health support lines (and often provided as a resource in articles like this one), got caught using data from people’s online text conversations to train customer service chatbots for their for-profit spinoff, Loris. And last year, the Federal Trade Commission ordered BetterHelp to pay a $7.8 million fine after being accused of sharing people’s personal health data with Facebook, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Criteo, an advertising company. Chancellor said that while companies like BetterHelp may not be operating in bad faith — the medical system is slow, understaffed, and expensive, and in many ways, they’re trying to help people get past these barriers — they need to more clearly communicate their data privacy policies with customers. While startups can choose to sell people’s personal information to third parties, Chancellor said, “no therapist is ever going to put your data out there for advertisers.” Someday, Chancellor hopes that mental health care will be structured more like cancer care is today, where people receive support from a team of specialists (not all doctors), including friends and family. She sees tech platforms as “an additional layer” of care — and at least for now, one of the only forms of care available to people in underserved communities. Even if all the ethical and technical kinks get ironed out, and digital health platforms work exactly as intended, they’re still powered by machines. “Human connection will remain incredibly valuable and central to helping people overcome mental health struggles,” De Choudhury told me. “I don’t think it can ever be replaced.” And when asked what the perfect mental health app would look like, she simply said, “I hope it doesn’t pretend to be a human.”

A Moscow court says a U.S. man has been jailed for drunkenly crashing through a kid's library window, as an American soldier is also detained.

A turncoat security officer is accused of working with Russia's FSB to take out top Kyiv officials, including Ukraine's leader and his spy chief.

"He got drunk, had a fight with his friends in a bar. ... Then he broke the window at a children's library, climbed inside and fell asleep," a source told REN TV of American tourist William Russel Nycum.

The university has presented itself as a national model for free expression on campus. Its president said that the encampment “cannot continue.”

The foray came after hours of whiplash in the Israel-Hamas war, with the militant group on Monday saying it accepted an Egyptian-Qatari mediated cease-fire proposal. Israel, however, insisted the deal did not meet its core demands.

The brothers' interactions have gone viral ahead of Harry's visit to Britain to attend an Invictus Games event.

Anti-Israel agitators at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., have repeated a demand for the school not to call the MPD to clear their encampment.

The New York Knicks escaped Game 1 with a win over the Indiana Pacers, but a controversial call in the latter seconds sparked a social media firestorm.

The "Baywatch" alum, who opted for Old Hollywood glamour on the red carpet Monday night, celebrated the "beautiful evening" via Instagram.

The attorney suggested Trump did not violate a court-imposed gag order by reposting comments by others on social media.

Santaquin Police Sgt. Bill Hooser, 50, started his law enforcement career eight years ago after first serving as an unpaid volunteer, his brother said.

Lawyers in the former president's hush-money trial are making Trump "look like he has something to hide," an analyst has said.

European Union countries have approved a $6.45 billion plan to assist Western Balkan states in accelerating reforms and economic growth with the aim of EU membership.

Abbott claimed the Biden administration is "making a power grab" with a move that would put some National Guard personnel under federal control.

Jake and Callum Robinson from Australia and American Jack Carter Rhoad were shot in the head, their bodies dumped in a covered well miles away.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., responded to a member of "The View" mocking him for his leadership in bringing Black voters over to the Republican Party.

Social Security funds won't be depleted until 2035, a year later than expected, thanks to the strength of the U.S. economy.

The group — the largest set of Americans retrieved from the war zone — was joined by a 9-year-old noncitizen whose brother is an American.

As a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq, Alvin Gauthier felt a personal connection to the wartime letters. “I had to find the family,” he said.

The university has presented itself as a national model for free expression on campus. Its president said that the encampment “cannot continue.”

President Biden called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the phone on Monday, warning the prime minister against continuing with plans for an invasion of the Gaza city of Rafah.

The Russian leader began a record breaking fifth term on Tuesday, a day after announcing military exercises with tactical nuclear weapons.

Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said Tuesday that Putin's rule will "come to an end" ahead of his inauguration.

Russia noted the nuclear exercises would take place as Ukraine awaits U.S. missiles and American-made F-16 fighter jets.

IDF XIsrael’s military on Tuesday said it had seized control of the crucial Rafah crossing between southern Gaza and Egypt as part of what it called a “precise counterterrorism operation.”The move came just hours after Hamas said late Monday that it had accepted a ceasefire deal brokered by international mediators. A statement from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Hamas proposal was “far from meeting Israel’s core demands” and that the war cabinet had unanimously decided to continue the operation in Rafah to “apply military pressure on Hamas.”The Israel Defense Forces shared images of its tanks on X and said its forces had established “operation control of the Gazan side of the crossing” in eastern Rafah after the military received intelligence that it was being “used for terrorist purposes.” It also claimed that mortars fired from the area on Sunday killed four Israeli soldiers.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Roosevelt Island residents are having a cow over an elusive muscle car that's been blaring annoying animal sounds across the neighborhood at all hours of the day.

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One person is reported dead after a tornado swept through the cities of Barnsdall and Bartlesville in northeastern Oklahoma late Monday, as dangerous storms swept across the Plains.

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Stuyvesant High School students Ankita Saha and Cathleen Xi describe the connection between the school and local eateries.

Every teen sports gambler has dreams of hitting it big one day on a parlay with more legs than a millipede, but they don’t take a step back to examine the numerous risks.

As the saying goes, any girl could tell you about the latest trends in fashion, movies and makeup products. But could she tell you about the latest trends in the stock market?

The guardian of the special relationship—the historical but possibly mythical bond between the United States and the United Kingdom—is a short woman with discerning blue eyes and a penchant for glittering headbands.The role of an ambassador has always been strange. They’re expected to be fun—to flit around comfortably at galas and cocktail parties, charming guests and making inroads with important people while waiters weave around with platters of deviled eggs. Still, British Ambassador Karen Pierce’s real duty is to lobby for her country and offer advice on delicate matters during heated international moments. And the job of an ambassador—even one representing a close ally—has become far more complex because of the strident partisanship that has taken hold in D.C.Part of Pierce’s mission recently has been to represent the British government’s firmly pro-Ukraine position on providing military aid—even when the Biden administration’s matching desire became mired in Congress because of protests by a Trump-aligned faction of House Republicans.[Elaine Godfrey: Trump’s VP search is different this time]Pierce had not only lobbied hard on Capitol Hill ahead of last week’s long-awaited congressional vote on aid; she’d also traveled with Britain’s foreign secretary, David Cameron, to Mar-a-Lago to try to get buy-in from Donald Trump. (She has been tight-lipped about their meeting, and was certainly claiming no credit, but the former president’s toned-down opposition to the bill probably did help the package pass—even though more Republican lawmakers voted against it than for it.)In an era when populist politics and rising nationalism are challenging the institutions of the international liberal order, diplomacy can seem like a quaint relic of bygone etiquette.The more public side of an ambassador’s job seems much easier. Over the past three years, Pierce has become well known for throwing lively and well-attended Pimms-fueled bashes, especially in the D.C. social season surrounding the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Underneath the surface frippery, though, Pierce is a serious operator. The true art of her diplomacy is the very English thing of working hard to make it all look totally effortless.One evening last week, I watched Pierce at work. During a party two days before the WHCD, she buzzed around the lush green garden of her Washington residence, chatting with various politicos.The 64-year-old Pierce grew up in northwest England and has worked for the U.K.’s Foreign Office for 43 years. She’s held positions in Japan, in Ukraine, and in the Balkans during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia. For a year, she lived in Kabul as Britain’s ambassador to Afghanistan, and she represented the U.K. at the United Nations for three years. Although she was made a dame in 2018, Pierce’s working-class background makes her a relative outsider in the foreign service, which is otherwise a bastion of the upper-class elite. Being Britain’s first female ambassador to the U.S. does too. She leans into it.The day I saw her, she was wearing a vivid chartreuse dress and black tights, with her feet tucked daintily into a pair of black-and-white kitten heels. Despite being shorter than everyone else at the party, she still commanded the attention of all the people in her vicinity. Pierce has worn tangerine suits to state events, and baby-pink silk dresses with huge round sunglasses. Once, to attend a UN summit, she wrapped herself in what looked like a maroon feather boa. Such displays aren’t just a sartorial choice; they’re a strategy.“When you’re an ambassador, you want people to remember you,” she told me. So I made note of her leaf-patterned sheath dress, shiny blue blazer, and cheetah-print headband. About that feather boa; it wasn’t one. “It was a fur, but it was fake,” Pierce insisted. “Though the Russians tried to say it was an exotic fur.” She rolled her eyes. “The Russians will go for anything. They really have no scruples whatsoever.”[Read: What a former U.S. ambassador to Russia learned from Condoleezza Rice]The wall behind the desk in Pierce’s office, a cheerful, sunlit room in an otherwise sterile building, is covered in magnets collected from around the world (“The tackier the better,” she told The Washington Post). Orchids decorate the tables.Entertaining is part of the job. But don’t call them parties: “We would call them receptions, because we treat them as work events,” she chided me. In the days surrounding the WHCD on April 27, Pierce hosted an embassy reception that provided not only a selection of assorted British pasties, but a cigar room and Scotch bar as well. She also made appearances at half a dozen events put on by various Washington bigwigs and media outlets, and emceed a Sunday brunch in the embassy garden. Pierce’s drink of choice? “I like lots and lots of cocktails, but the more pink they are, the better, I’m afraid.”Pierce’s first job in D.C. was as private secretary to the then-ambassador. She arrived in 1992 with her husband, former U.K. Treasury Secretary Charles Roxburgh, and her first of two children, an infant at the time. “The fact that politics is in the air is just—and also the fact that you’re in the capital of the leading nation in the world—I get a real buzz out of that,” she said.In 1995, Pierce watched as Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House, and American politics grew more polarized. When she came back to serve as ambassador in March 2020, she saw that trend intensify, culminating in the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. “I watch all of these developments, and we spend a lot of time evaluating them and finding historical context for them,” she told me.But Pierce wasn’t particularly eager to discuss current politics—or the ex- and possibly future president who has sent that polarization into overdrive. Her caution made sense: Pierce’s predecessor, Kim Darroch, resigned from his position after leaks revealed that he’d criticized the Trump administration as “inept and insecure.” When I asked her about the former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, whose time in office famously lasted only about as long as a head of lettuce stayed fresh, and who has recently cozied up to the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, Pierce’s expression was steely. “She’s a private individual, and she’s welcome to pursue her politics,” she said. “It’s not where the British government is.”[Read: America’s Trumpiest ambassador]The day after we met in her embassy office, Pierce showed up early at the Hilton Hotel, in a rich-blue gown and a pair of cascading diamond earrings, greeting as many people as possible before the Correspondents’ Dinner officially began. This year’s dinner was probably Pierce’s last spring soirée; a new British ambassador is expected to replace her by the end of 2024.Leaving will be hard, Pierce said during a Politico podcast taping—“I’ll have to be dragged out of [here] by my fingernails”—not least because this is an election year. A return to the Oval Office for the resident of Mar-a-Lago could mean a challenging new dynamic between the U.S. and the U.K. Pierce joked about being reluctant to leave America, but her concern about a possible end of aid to Ukraine seemed obvious.That aside, her domestic assessment was surprisingly rosy—or at least highly diplomatic. “I personally do not worry about America,” she told me. “I have a lot of faith in American democracy and in Americans, and I think you have very strong institutions.” Pierce’s faith in what an ambassador to America can achieve seemed unshaken, even amid the capital’s current dysfunction. She didn’t hesitate to assert that confidence when I asked her advice for her soon-to-be-announced successor: “Make the weather.”

Here in Ukraine, we often react very emotionally when we hear people in the West calling for peace with Russia. According to some commentators, this would be achieved by means of a “compromise,” entailing Ukrainian “concessions” that would somehow satisfy the Kremlin and stop the war: major territorial giveaways, armed forces reduced to insignificance, no further integration with the West—you name it.Most of us see such views as extremely naive, given the totalitarian and militaristic nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Having built his rule on war hysteria, land grabs, imperial chauvinism, and global confrontation, Putin is hardly likely to stop even at a deal that most Ukrainians would find entirely unacceptable.But that leads us to another problem that much of the Western media fail to fully appreciate: Ten years of confrontation with the Kremlin, and especially the past two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, have fundamentally changed Ukraine. These changes are not superficial or easily swept away.[Read: The one element keeping Ukraine from total defeat]A little more than a decade ago, many young Ukrainians—including those, like myself, from Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east—were angry and restless, itching for something we saw just over the horizon. In high schools and universities, we read Montesquieu and soaked up such tantalizing concepts as the rule of law, democracy, and human rights. Western values felt native to our generation; we were open to the world in a way that our parents had never imagined. Most of them had ventured no farther than Central Asia for their Soviet military service, or maybe Moscow for the 1980 Olympics. This essay is adapted from I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv. My peers and I wanted our country to have clean streets, polite police, and government officials who would resign at the exposure of petty corruption scandals. We wanted to be able to start businesses without passing money under the table, and to trust that courts of law would render justice. What we did not want were irremovable, lifetime dictators who packed the government with cronies on the take and sent goons to beat us up in the streets.In Kyiv’s Maidan Square, starting in November 2013 and lasting into February 2014, demonstrators showed their fervor for such a future in what became known as the Revolution of Dignity. Some gave their lives to unseat Viktor Yanukovych, the kleptocratic ruler Moscow supported, and orient Ukraine unequivocally toward the West. At the site of desolation, armloads of flowers commemorated these dead. Yanukovych fled a country that despised him and had spiraled out of his control.A new Ukraine began—and with it, a decade-long war of independence, as the Kremlin marked our revolution by seizing Crimea and infiltrating the Donbas region in the country’s east. For nearly a decade, Ukraine was fighting on two fronts: a military war against Russia, and an internal struggle for its revolution’s ideals, which meant stamping out corruption, obsolescence, unfreedom—everything that might drag the country back into the past.Ukraine is still far from achieving all that my generation once dreamed of. But we do live in a country that is radically different from the Russian-influenced Ukraine of 2013—politically, mentally, and culturally. And we are starkly different from Putin’s Russia.Ukrainians have tasted freedom and experienced a competitive, vibrant political life. We elected a comedian to be our leader after he faced down an old-school political heavyweight in a debate that was held in a giant stadium in downtown Kyiv and aired live to the nation. We’ve reinvented Ukrainian culture, generating new music, poetry, and stand-up comedy. Starting in 2014, we had to build our country’s armed forces almost from scratch; we are insanely proud of them, as they have fought heroically against one of the largest and most brutal war machines in existence.A few weeks ago, I brought my dog to a veterinarian in Bucha, the town outside Kyiv where Russian forces committed a well-documented massacre in 2022. As the young doctor handled my dog, I noticed a large Ukrainian trident entwined with blue and yellow ribbons tattooed on her wrist under her white sleeve. For my generation of Ukrainians, such national symbols are an expression of pride in all we’ve made and defended.I was with one of the first groups of journalists to enter Bucha after the Russian retreat in 2022. To describe the atmosphere is very difficult: I remember rot, stillness, a miasma of grief. The Russians had graffitied the letter V everywhere. On a fence along the main street: Those entering the no-go zone shall be executed. V. We followed the Ukrainian police as they broke through doors into premises inhabited only by the dead. Some of the bodies were charred and mutilated. I saw two males and two females lying on the ground, incompletely burned, their mouths open and hands twisted. One looked to be a teenage girl.Outside the Church of Andrew the Apostle—a white temple that rises high over Bucha—Ukrainian coroners in white hazmat suits carefully removed layers of wet, clayish soil from a mass grave and placed 67 bodies on simple wooden doors under the cold drizzle. A tow truck hoisted the cadavers out one by one, hour by hour. Now and again, the rain would pick up, and the coroners would hastily cover the grave with plastic sheeting stained with dried gore.“My theory is that there was a very brutal Russian commander in charge of Bucha,” Andriy Nebytov, the chief of police for Kyiv Oblast, told reporters at the church that day. “And they unleashed hell in this place.”The Continent apartment complex used to be one of the finest in Bucha. I met a guy named Mykola Mosyarevych in a basketball court there. In his 30s and fit, he was a likely target for the Russians—a potential guerrilla fighter or member of the Territorial Defense—and so he’d spent the whole month in a basement. After the Russians left Bucha, on the day of my visit, he sat staring at a pair of ripped Russian fatigues marked with the orange-and-black striped ribbon of Saint George—a symbol of war and love for destruction. He wept. Over and over again, he said: “I just don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why they would want to do all this to us.”We all asked similar questions, and our fragmentary answers could bring little comfort to Mosyarevych or anyone else: lust for power, years of aggressive propaganda, a sense of impunity, a would-be emperor grasping at illusion. Deep down, fear.[Read: Ukraine’s shock will last for generations]Later that day, I walked alone with my camera through what was left of a Russian armored column on Vokzalna Street. Bucha’s defenders recalled that the Russians in this column had been moving carelessly and singing patriotic songs when Ukrainian forces struck their leading and trailing vehicles. The column stopped. The remaining Russian vehicles scrambled like bumper cars to maneuver through the wreckage, find a way out, and save themselves. But Vokzalna Street is narrow: They were trapped. A Ukrainian artillery strike left hardly any vehicle whole. The layer of ash on the ground was so thick that it crunched underfoot like snow.What used to be a leafy green lane, part of my favorite bicycle route to Bucha and Hostomel, had become a cemetery. But within three weeks, Ukrainian workers had cleared away the rubble and repaved the road. Later, Warren Buffett’s son donated funds for Ukrainian authorities to completely renovate the street and construct new, Scandinavian-style, single-family houses with lawns and picket fences. Online, people posted tens of thousands of likes and comments under images comparing Vokzalna Street during the Russian occupation and after.Springtime soon came, too, and with it snaking lines of cars, as thousands of people who had fled poured back into their hometown days after its liberation. Young mothers returned with their strollers. Time would absorb the grief and horrors of this war, as it had of so many that had come before.Even so, I don’t want to think about what will happen to my dog’s veterinarian if the Russians make it back to Bucha. Or what will happen to Ukraine. After everything that’s transpired over the past decade—and especially given what Russia has become—Ukraine must not be made a Russian colony again.Today’s Russia is a neo-Stalinist dictatorship led by an aging chauvinist. In the grip of his messianic delusion, Putin initiated the biggest European war since World War II. He seeks to eliminate Ukraine not only as an independent nation, but also as an idea. No concessions or compromises are possible with such a vision—not given the kind of country Ukrainians have made and fought to defend.This essay is adapted from I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv, published on May 7 by Bloomsbury.