Luka’s parents – Nadia and Karen – try to figure out where to take him once war breaks out. (6 minutes)

Russian forces have besieged the town of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine. Shelling is constant.

Valerie Kipnis tells the story of 12-year-old Ilya, a Ukrainian refugee eager to figure out whether his hometown can still feel like home. He and his family return to Mariupol, a city badly damaged in the war, and now under Russian control.

As Kyiv empties out, Ukrainian photographer Yevgenia Belorusets documents her interactions with those who stayed behind. (15 minutes)Her diaries were published by ISOLARII.

Late at night on the evening Russia invaded Ukraine, Ira talks to two people who escaped to Lviv, near the Polish border: a woman we call Natalie, and the Ukraine Correspondent for The Economist, Richard Ensor. Natalie’s harrowing story about escaping Kyiv is not the sort of war story that makes you think, "I can't imagine what it'd be like to go through that.” In fact it’s just the opposite.

Reporter Dana Ballout tells the story of Radio Fresh, a community station in Syria that the local listeners depend on, and local militant factions try to shut down.

Paul Zimmer is eighty-three years old now, and he’s still haunted by something he saw in his teens. Something very few Americans have ever seen: The explosion of an atomic bomb.

Earlier this month, North Korea fired an intercontinental ballistic missile… one powerful enough, news reports said, to reach Alaska. People were shocked.

In Iraq, everyone from the militant group known as ISIS to the government security forces and shiite militias have been putting on such a deliberate show. Each faction has its own videos, parades, flags, propaganda and counter-propaganda.

Sarah Carr is a reporter and blogger in Cairo, Egypt. Her blog inanities.org is regularly cited as one of Egypt's best blogs and English language news sources coming out of Egypt.

In 2009, a U.S. soldier contacted our show and offered to send audio dispatches from his deployment in Afghanistan, to do a story about what it's really like to go to war. But what he learned when he was over there was way more personal and honest than we, or he, expected.

Writer Michael Lewis tells the story of a man named Emir Kamenica, whose path to college started with fleeing the war in Bosnia and becoming a refugee in the United States. Then he had a stroke of luck: a student teacher read an essay he’d plagiarized from a book he’d stolen from a library back in Bosnia, and was so impressed that she got him out of a bad high school and into a much better one.

Susan Orlean tells us about the moment America asked untrained household canines to make the ultimate sacrifice: to serve in World War II. Susan talks to Gina Snyder, who remembers being a teenager when her dog Tommy joined the service.

Ira tells the story of how Oscar Ramirez, a Guatemalan immigrant living near Boston, got a phone call with some very strange news about his past. A public prosecutor from Guatemala told Oscar that when he was three years old, he may have been abducted from a massacre at a village called Dos Erres.