Yes, the Kyiv Independent AIUI was formed when the Kyiv Post's owners threatened the paper's editorial independence, leading to an argument with journalists and ultimately the owners firing
every single journalist at the paper, who then went and formed the Kyiv Independent together, so from what I know I think they're good people. Anything by Terrell Starr is usually worth reading on Ukraine too, he's a US journalist/analyst with a lot of worthwhile perspectives on Ukraine, Russia, and colonialism.
Watching the mythology of the war build as it happens is something I think is not done enough: like, plenty of people comment on these things from an IR or military standpoint (whether or not they have the expertise to do so), and historians often rightly point out that their views are not necessarily the most important ones right now since explaining the long run can be interesting but not always useful - to focus solely on the long history sometimes obfuscates the short-term goals of people like Putin in favour of long-term explanations that miss the point. But anyway, mythologies of war are something I really have never seen discussed much in the public domain, and there's clearly tons going on there.
- The thirteen defending soldiers of Snake Island, a small Ukrainian-owned rock in the Black Sea, were killed. Their final recording has been relayed and released, and involves a chilling exchange in which a Russian ship commander tells them to surrender or he will open fire, and is responded to with "Russian ship, go f*ck yourself". (Link)
- A video has been released of a Ukrainian lady berating Russian soldiers for invading, and offering them sunflower seeds to put in their pockets so that when they die Ukraine's national flower will grow on the spot. (Link)
- Rumours have been circulating online of a "ghost of Kyiv" Ukrainian flying ace who single-handedly downed six Russian fighters yesterday (entirely unconfirmed/probably not true).
- The speeches of Ukrainian leaders have been geared on this angle too, whether intentionally or not - Zelensky's speech to the Russian populace where he emotionally reminisced about friends and times in the Donbas and talked of his family in response to allegations of Nazism (Zelensky is Jewish and his grandfather was a Soviet colonel) has been widely shared internationally (Link). I've also seen a lot of sharing of a chilling exchange at the UN in which the frustrated Ukrainian delegate told his Russian counterpart ther "There is no purgatory for war criminals - they go straight to hell, ambassador." (Link)
Frustratingly I'm finding a lot of this stuff really difficult to find on places other than Twitter (there are often wider articles, but actually you end up getting
more depth from journalists doing original Twitter threads on the topics than from the actual news websites). Anyway, a bunch of these pretty definitely happened (Obviously the speeches, Snake Island seems as reliably verified as these things get, and I've seen video of the lady talking to Russian troops), and some are more dubious like the Ghost of Kyiv, and some of the ones that did happen may of course be missing context. But I think "did they happen" isn't really the point, in any case. The mythologisation of the war and the intensity with which that seems likely to strengthen the sense of Ukrainian nationality and anti-Putin sentiment in the country has an awful lot of power to make Putin's life more difficult, and I think it's worth watching how those sorts of urban legends of resistance grow.
It does seem like the overall likelihood is a slow military defeat for Ukraine followed by an even slower insurgency, and that might be quite destabilising for Russia too: what Putin's doing feels like taking on the Iraq war but if the insurgents were signficantly better trained and funded, had a more unified national sentiment (and probably a government-in-exile to rally round), and with a fraction of the resources the US-led coalition had to spend. Though I do also worry that if there is even the appearance of success in the short term, that will embolden Putin to go after Georgia and Moldova in particular.