Morning Update: Ukraine’s next front line

October 3, 2025

Morning Update: Ukraine’s next front line

Good morning. The Globe’s senior foreign correspondent, Mark MacKinnon, recently travelled to Pavlohrad, a Ukrainian city on the verge of becoming the next front line as Russian troops edge closer. More on that below, along with tariff talk and a playoff picture. But first:

Tetyana Kotenko, 29, seen in September in Pavlohrad, is expecting a baby boy. Olga Ivashchenko/The Globe and Mail

Pavlohrad is not yet on the front line, or in headlines. But it will likely be in Vladimir Putin’s crosshairs in the months ahead. Mark has been covering Russia and Ukraine for The Globe since 2002. He answered some questions about the trip he took to Pavlohrad with Ukrainian photographer Olga Ivashchenko to learn more about the city and how the war is changing it .

Why did you want to travel to this region?

The concept was that cities like Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, and now Pokrovsk, tend to be written about for weeks or months on end while they’re on the front line, and then they disappear, and readers never really know what that city was or what it was like. It seems that Pavlohrad is on the trajectory where the front line is getting closer, where it’s increasingly getting targeted by Russian air strikes, and we’ve seen this pattern before. What Olga and I decided to do was spend some time getting to know the place and try and tell readers about what this city is like before it jumps into the headlines. Before it becomes too dangerous to get to.

What are some of the biggest differences that you noticed on the ground between a city closer to the front line like Pavlohrad compared to Kyiv?

It’s always been a tale of two worlds in Ukraine. Even with the increasing number of air strikes and the increasing hits that the capital has taken, life in Kyiv can feel really normal sometimes. I spent part of last weekend just sitting outside on a patio listening to somebody play violin, having a coffee and enjoying brunch at a French restaurant. That’s not imaginable in a place like Pavlohrad. When a siren goes off, it often means that something is going to hit the city imminently rather than in Kyiv where it can mean the start of an hours-long wait for an attack that may or may not happen. Also, in Pavlohrad, the fact that the war is getting closer is apparent as internally displaced people from the front arrive in minibuses several times a day.

Schoolchildren, seen in Pavlohrad on Sept. 17, are forced to study in a bomb shelter because of the possibility of Russian shelling. Olga Ivashchenko/The Globe and Mail