Ukraine’s Left movement Sotsialnyi Rukh (Social Movement) recently held a conference in Kyiv, at which members adopted a resolution entitled “The path to victory and the tasks of the Ukrainian left.” The resolution has now appeared in English translation here. I reproduce it below.
(Founded in 2015 by “Ukrainian leftists of different backgrounds who participated in the revolutionary events of the so-called Euromaidan of 2013-14,” Sotsialnyi Rukh calls itself a movement based on “principles of democratic anti-capitalism, feminism, and ecosocialism,” including “radical deoligarchization of Ukraine.”)
Here’s the resolution. (Thanks to LINKS for the translation.)
Nathan Greenfield has compiled an excellent set of current and recent observations from scholars on the continuing ecocide occurring as a result of Russia’s war on Ukraine. I’m in there, among others, but the more first-hand information comes from environmental scientists working in Ukraine, like Kseniia Bondar, Viktor Vyshnevskyi, Anna Kuzemko, and Mykhailo Yatsiuk.
As announced last fall, a group of prominent historians are launching what may be the largest scholarly mega-project in Ukraine’s history.
With initial funding from Ukrainian billionnaire (and oligarch) Viktor Pinchuk and support from the Charity Commission for England and Wales, the Ukrainian History Global Initiative‘s list of advisors and researchers reads like a “who’s who” of Ukrainian academe. It features not only several of the leading historians of modern and contemporary Ukraine — Serhii Plokhy, Yaroslav Hrytsak, and Timothy Snyder among others — but also leading period/area specialists (Christian Raffensberger writing on diplomacy in medieval Rus’, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern on Jewish history in Ukraine, Frank Sysyn on the Cossack era, Daniel Beauvois on Black Earth, Yuliya Yurchenko on inequality, and Phillips O’Brien on “wars for Ukraine”), world-renowned scholars not known for their work on Ukraine (such as environmental historian John McNeill and archaeologist David Wengrow), and well-known figures in arts and letters including Yuval Harari, Fareed Zakaria, Timothy Garton Ash, Anne Applebaum, “forensic architect” Eyal Weizman, Ukraine-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev, and renowned Ukrainian poet Serhii Zhadan.
Some 50 of the project’s 90 scholars are Ukrainians, and the planned three-year collaborative research project will result in scholarly as well as popular texts in English and Ukrainian on almost every aspect of Ukrainian history: from deep prehistory through Rus’ and the Cossack state to the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, with plenty of attention to wars of the past and the present, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, regional distinctions, and culture and the arts. If it succeeds in its goals, many of the topics discussed on this blog will have an additional, and hopefully authoritative, set of references to cite and refer to.
“So in a nutshell, Russian strategy is take whatever you can now, no matter how small an area and no matter how much it costs, on the assumption Trump wins, and you get to keep it. You then have four years to basically recover and come again when you are ready. The strategy is based around the longer term degradation of Ukraine as a power, the friendship of Trump, and the weakness of Europe.”
Meanwhile, “Ukrainian strategy at present has settled into a pattern of trying to maximize Russian losses, to lead to a steady degradation of Russian fighting capabilities for 2025.”
Longer term, so much depends on whether the Trump-Orban-Putin (and techbro?) axis wins the U.S. election. O’Brien’s quote of a long rambling passage from Trump’s acceptance speech provides the justification for how and why that intersection of interests (of at least the first three) can rightfully be called an axis – a case also made by Byline Supplement, co-authored by the team at the investigative media site Byline Times. Anne Applebaum correctly notes that “axis” is too strong a word; she prefers “network of convenience.” I agree with her caution and will share my own thoughts on her new book soon.
I would go further than O’Brien does in his piece, however, and would say that every significant national election today, especially in a country like the U.S., is an international election involving external players – in this case Russia, China, and other countries and transnational groups (corporate-industrial lobbies, among others) exercising influence via media and other channels (just as U.S. interests play a role in foreign elections when those interests are at stake). When Americans vote for authoritarians like Trump, they are also voting for authoritarians like Putin — and for a carve-up of international power among neo-empires still largely driven by old-energy plus new-tech interests. The opening up of the Arctic, for instance, is also opening up geopolitical competition over the Arctic and its resources, which are particularly attractive to old-energy (fossil fuel) interests, as they may keep them afloat for a significant time longer.
And voting is just the tip of the iceberg of political action – still an essential step, in countries like the U.S., but also just a cog in a much larger set of wheels. That said, the very likely emergence of Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presidential nominee has certainly invigorated U.S. politics, with the differences between the two candidates — in style now (as she differs little from Biden in policy) — being exactly the kind of thing the Democrats needed to whip up some enthusiasm. We’ll soon see how ugly things get as the racism of Trump’s far-right supporters (and their international backers — tech, fossil fuel, and media moguls — and autocrat/info-war facilitators) goes into high gear.
A recent article in the Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology (Hryhorczuk et al) provides an in-depth analysis of the environmental health impacts of Russia’s war on Ukraine, including coverage of air and water pollution, chemical contamination, habitat destruction, and much more. And the excellent first issue of the London Ukrainian Review, published in March, focused on various dimensions of this topic. Other coverage of it can be found here, here, here, and here, and see the bibliography of sources below.
One of the most devastating events affecting Ukrainian territory was the well-known destruction of Ukraine’s largest dam, Kakhovka, on June 6th, 2023, by Russian forces. This tragedy qualified as ecocide and the worst environmental disaster in Europe sinceChernobyl. Russian troops blew up the dam and the hydroelectric infrastructure, destroying it and releasing massive amounts of water. Impacts of the event included leaving 700,000 people without clean drinking water, demolishing wildlife and natural habitats, and unleashing more than a thousand potential sources of pollution from flooded sites. (For further reading on its impacts, see here, here, here, here, here and here.)
Despite all the chaos and environmental damage that has and continues to occur in this war-stricken country, plans are being formed and action has been taken to improve the current environmental crisis in Ukraine. The international Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) has been covering the climate crisis in Ukraine and discussing progress as well as necessary steps forward for Ukraine, including climate mainstreaming and building capacity for a green transition.
But these eco-friendly transitions can only happen with extensive funding and support from other countries (especially the U.S.). As highlighted in the Ten-Step plan to address environmental impact of war in Ukraine, Ukrainian “organizations are calling on the international community to act now.” There are also conservation groups in Ukraine making headway, including the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group and other supportive organizations (e.g. see here).
For all that can be said about Thursday’s debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump — including about the former’s dismal performance and about the boundless creativity of Trump’s fabrications on almost every topic under the sun — Trump’s curious note about Putin’s “dream” stood out to me:
“Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my — this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”
While nothing Trump says should be taken at face value, Heather Cox Richardson’s analysis of that note is worth reading. Political historian Richardson, who remains one of the most perceptive daily commentators on U.S. news, connects Trump’s version of “Putin’s dream” to Trump (and previously Yanukovich) advisor Paul Manafort’s so-called “Mariupol Plan,” cooked up with Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnick — a “‘peace’ plan” Putin purportedly proposed in 2016 to carve off much of Ukraine. The plan is, of course, not so different from Putin’s recently proposed “peace plan” that involves Ukraine giving up what it controls of the four provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, which with Crimea amount to between a fifth and a quarter of the country’s land area.
Trump’s mention of Putin’s “dream” suggested he would happily indulge Putin in enabling its realization.
The following report was written by University of Vermont environmental studies major and undergraduate senior Kate Bossert, who is interning with UKR-TAZ as a researcher on Ukraine-related environmental and technology issues.
The pros and cons of new technologies have been debated for as long as such technologies have existed. Information technologies, with Artificial Intelligence or “generative AI” being the latest, are no exception. In the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, AI-based technologies have emerged as a new frontier for violence, psychological torture, misinformation, and the destruction of human life. This is taking place within what some have called “the twenty-first century’s ‘first cyber world war’.”
Russian cyber attackers operate on the same principles, with the additional goal of dampening Western governments’ support for Ukraine. Dina Temple-Raston’s Click Here podcast has covered this repeatedly (e.g., here and here), as have Microsoft Threat Intelligence reports on Russian threat actors and Russian influence and cyber operations, among other sources. Russian cyber actors have stolen data from Ukrainian firms that track crop yields, used techniques such as “password spraying” to bypass login into Ukraine accounts, broken into Ukrainian private signal chats, successfully attacked Ukrainian service providers, and obtained access to the location of Ukrainian military units through digital means.
Ivan Dzyuba (Dziuba) passed away earlier this year. The dissident theorist’s role in developing what could have been Ukraine’s version of “socialism with a human face” (the movement that emerged under Czechoslovak Communist party leader Alexander Dubček before Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to quash it in 1968) was an important one. Arrested and jailed in 1972, Dzyuba was silenced by the Soviet authorities until re-emerging as a literary critic in the 1980s and a political activist during the Perestroika years. He served as Ukraine’s Minister of Culture in 1992-94.
As Russian attacks get ever closer to Kharkiv, striking publishing houses alongside megastores, it’s helpful to remind ourselves how important this Ukrainian “second city” is in the country’s history.
Taras Tomenko’s 2017 documentary Slovo House (Budynok Slovo) is a powerful and moving tribute to Ukraine’s Executed Renaissance — the generation of Ukrainian writers, poets, filmmakers, composers, and visual and theatrical artists that flourished for a decade or so in the 1920s before being silenced, many of them brutally executed, by Stalinist persecution in the 1930s. It focuses on the the Slovo (Word) artist’s residence in Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, which housed dozens of the most creative minds in the country with their families.
A film like this can only be a first stab at documenting its subject matter. Its first half perhaps overfocuses on many of the artists’ bohemian lifestyles at the expense of detailing the ideals that drove them and with which they, in varying measure, hoped to build a new Ukraine. I wish it provided a bit more insight into what historian Mayhill Fowler, in her excellent Beau Monde on Empire’s Edge: State and Stage in Soviet Ukraine (U. of Toronto Press, 2017), calls the “unique connection between the arts and the state in the Soviet Union,” “a place where dictators called writers at home and personally involved themselves in the aesthetics of their work” (p. 3).
But by the time we get to the Holodomor of 1932-33 and the first arrests that began the years of purges, it becomes clear where the story is heading. The climax, to my mind, is the brilliant writer and theoretician Mykola Khvylovy’s 1933 suicide, by which he performatively accepted the blame for “the murder of an entire generation” for the crime of being “the most sincere Communists.” Ukrainian culture never truly recovered until the 1960s, and even then all too haltingly. Today’s arts scenes in Kyiv, Kharkiv, and elsewhere echo the brilliance of what seemed possible for a brief period a century ago. They also go far beyond it. (That will be a topic in my conversation with author Larissa Babij tonight, viewable online at 6 pm Eastern Daylight Time.)
While Slovo House suffers a bit from an underattribution of quoted materials, its formal elegance and rigorous research make it an important document. The film can be viewed in its complete form here: https://youtu.be/VrAlxSL0aCU?si=jpUq_y-WJRN_HyEt
On the two-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, what more can be said except that the invasion needs to end. For that, Ukraine needs more support. Negotiation cannot happen with someone who wants to eliminate you.
There are many excellent films that have been made to document the Russian war on Ukraine. Among the better post-invasion documentaries are Vitaliy Manskiy and Yevhen Titarenko’s Eastern Front, Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted, Albina Kovalyova’s Occupied, Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters, and the ones described here.
Perhaps the most riveting is Mstyslav Chernov‘s Academy Award nominated 20 Days in Mariupol, currently showing online at the PBS Frontline web site. The line quoted above is taken from the film. In perhaps the film’s climatic scene, Chernov, who wrote, narrated, directed, and produced the film, says, “If someday my daughters ask me ‘What did you do to stop this madness, this sadistic virus of destruction?‘ I want to be able to give them an answer.”
He’s able to give an answer because, against all odds, he survived to tell the tale, staying behind with a small Associated Press crew when all other international film crews had left Mariupol, and successfully getting out of the surrounded city on day 20. The city capitulated on day 86, but 20 days is sufficient for gauging the full horror of the experience for those who stayed behind. (The fall of Azovstal is another story, yet to be told in a suitable feature-length documentary. The same can be said of the bombing of the Mariupol Theatre, though Forensic Architecture’s and the Center for Spatial Technologies’ work on documenting the event has been incredibly valuable.)
The truth is that Chernov could easily have been killed, as other photographers, journalists, and filmmakers have been in the course of documenting this and other wars. Despite his previous experience as a war correspondent, the odds at the time of the filming were better that he wouldn’t have made it out alive, and that his daughters would have asked him, “Why did you leave us? What heroic urge were you pursuing against any odds of surviving the effort?” It’s our collective gain (and not just his daughters’) that Chernov survived to tell this tale.
What all these documentaries have in common is that they activate feelings of empathy and compassion for those who suffer in this war. In some cases they activate anger at those responsible for the suffering. They activate a sense of justice, according to which humans might get angry, might get into conflicts, but would never unleash mass murder on this scale — because it goes against the possibility of building a common world together.
War cheapens human life. It renders us into meat. War for sheer territorial gain cheapens it all the more.
The Putin government is counting on our society — the one that values human life and strives to follow norms that enable coexistence — not outlasting his society: the one in which a single group of people, an ethno-civilizational collectivity (in his twisted imagination) following a top-heavy, imperial script, gets to define what is right and what is wrong, and what story will be told to future generations.
Just as Hitler envisioned a future in which he would be messiah and the Nordic race would rule over humanity’s lesser classes, Putin has envisioned a story of the Russian race (or civilization, in his telling) in a similar position — not ruling over all humanity perhaps, just over its own domain, its “Russkii mir,” yet leading the entire world toward something known only to Putin himself.
Both are abominations — hysterical visions of worlds cleansed of otherness, purified and ordered so that only a certain image of humanity can endure and all others be ground into dust.
Modernity, Enlightenment humanism, cosmopolitan liberalism, or whatever it is that has spread over the planet in the last few centuries, has a very mixed track record of accomplishments. Some of them — colonialism, imperialism, extractive capitalism — have left behind deep scars on the earth and its people. Others — humanism and liberal democracy, for all their flaws — follow the best inclinations of our nature insofar as they see humans as alike and as equally worthy of life and of dignity. (We can continue debating the details, for instance, the virtues of liberalism as opposed to socialism, communitarianism, libertarianism, and so on, without disagreeing on these basic grounding principles.)
Putin’s war negates human dignity. It crushes difference, even — and perhaps all the more — the difference that is closest to one’s own perception of self. The “Russian soul,” so lauded by Russian poets and Russophilic western dreamers, is a dead one in Putin’s grip.
Two years of this full-scale war (and ten years of the war itself) is two years (and ten years) too many.
