内容摘要：With a pair of bright pink tweezers in hand, Emma Teni is delicately wrestling a large and leggy spider in a small plastic pot.

With a pair of bright pink tweezers in hand, Emma Teni is delicately wrestling a large and leggy spider in a small plastic pot.

Fighting between Ukrainian and Russian troops intensified in recent weeks, with assaults on the front line up by about 30%, according to Ukrainian military chiefs, who believed they were part of a spring offensive by Russia.Until now Russian forces have been advancing slowly north and west of Donetsk, towards the city of Pokrovsk, and have recently been closing a Ukrainian pocket along the front line south west of Toretsk, according to experts at the ISW.

The Russian advance towards Pokrovsk is the most notable change in control of the front line near Donetsk for several months, but analysts say innovative tactics by Ukrainian forces, combining the use of drones and ground forces, have inflicted significant losses of troops and equipment and slowed the offensive.It has taken a year for Russia's troops to advance about 40km (25 miles). Ukraine was forced to withdraw from Avdiivka, just north of Donetsk, in February 2024 after months of fighting.In addition to its operation on the eastern front, Russia began what the ISW describes as its "subordinate main effort" when it crossed the international border to the north of Ukraine's second-biggest city, Kharkiv, in May 2024. Several villages were seized and thousands of civilians fled.

The Russian push took place at the end of a four-month period when the US was not supplying weapons to Ukraine, due to a stalemate in the US Congress which was resolved in April 2024.Ukrainian forces eventually held firm and, even though the city of Kharkiv has come under repeated attack from glide bombs fired by Russian warplanes, it remains beyond the range of Russian artillery.

Eastern Ukraine has been contested territory since 2014, when Russian-backed fighters seized large swathes of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Russia had already seized the southern peninsula of Crimea in February 2014 before annexing it soon afterwards.

US President Donald Trump has said it is unlikely Ukraine will return to its pre-2014 borders but, in response to a question from the BBC, he said "some of that land will come back".Pattern maker Mar Marcote has been with the business 42 years and still uses a magnifying glass to examine each item of clothing before it finally goes into production.

"When you finish the item and see that it looks good, and then sometimes sells out, it's marvellous," she says.Zara is a business that has changed the way we shop.

In the old days, retailers released just two main collections a year, Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter. For decades, most chains have outsourced manufacturing to lower-cost factories in the far east with the clothes arriving up to six months later.Zara went against conventional wisdom by sourcing a lot of its clothes closer to home and changing products much more frequently. That meant it could respond much faster to the latest trends and drop new items into stores every week.