The first online book launch for Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth was just held on Zoom, sponsored by the RUTA Association and University of Tallinn’s Institute of Humanities. It was facilitated by Professor Epp Annus, and featured seven author-contributors in addition to the book’s editor, me (Adrian Ivakhiv).
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek has written about the book that it “deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.” I think and hope that my overview of the book’s theoretical framework, and the rich diversity of author profiles and topics we covered — the Anthropocene, colonialism and decolonialism, the role of art in war, multispecies relations with land, the affective sensibilities and soundscapes of war and resistance, and more — captured why that might be so. My introduction focused especially on the question of why and how the Russo-Ukrainian war should be considered an “environmental war,” and why that is relevant to all of us.
Today marks the 34th anniversary of the national referendum in which 92% of Ukrainian voters approved the declaration of independence made by Ukraine’s Supreme Council (Verkhovna Rada) on 24 August 1991. To mark this date, a manifesto has just been published that was drawn up by a fairly diverse committee of co-authors, with prominent signatories including writers, activists, media people, and academics. (Apparently there was plenty of disagreement on the details, and in the end a certain tension between details and generalities is evident. There’s a venerable tradition of that sort of thing in the history of the Ukrainian People’s Republic with its four “Universals” and other declarations.)
The manifesto, entitled “Survive. Endure. Prevail!” (“Вижити, вистояти, перемогти!”), has been published by Ukraïnska Pravda and can be read in English here. It compares two concepts of Ukrainian victory — “victory at its maximum” and “minimum victory” — and calls for the latter, more attainable one to have three dimensions:
The military dimension: strategic neutralisation of the enemy
The political dimension: preservation of our sovereignty
The human dimension: a successful Ukraine
Each is spelled out in ways that sound reasonable, if it were not for the fact that the world they are aiming for — a world of sovereign nation-states, each of which is a land “of opportunity, based on the rule of law and an effective system of public governance” — is an ideal that has never quite existed in reality (at least at the world scale) and that, if it has (at regional scales), is already slipping out of our hands.
That’s not to fault the authors. It’s a vision worth upholding and orienting oneself around, especially when their country is engaged in an existential struggle for survival and is aiming to corral more support from the community of developed western nations on which that survival depends. If it lacks a certain acknowledgment of how the world has changed and the difficulties it is facing, it doesn’t lack them entirely. It acknowledges a “broader global crisis” that includes “the rise of a global coalition of dictatorships, an ambivalent U.S. foreign policy, crises of democracy in multiple countries, a devaluation of international law and of the world order as a whole.” At the same time, by introducing these as part of a “crossroads between exciting opportunities for development and unprecedented threats to human existence” (my emphasis), it fails to capture the actual state of the world.
I’m happy to share the news that Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth, the first English-language book-length anthology of wartime Ukrainian environmental humanities writing (and art), is out now — and that it’s available as a fully open access downloadable file thanks to McGill-Queen’s University Press and the Olga M. Ciupka Memorial Fund.
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes about the book that “Terra Invicta deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.” Writer Andrey Kurkov adds that “The war in Ukraine affects the ecology of nature and the ecology of consciousness throughout the world. This book is the best way to understand Ukraine today and the impact of Russian aggression on your life, no matter what country you live in.”
The book’s comprehensive introduction contextualizes the Russo-Ukrainian war within the historical processes — of politics, economics, culture, and ecology — that made it possible, and assesses it as the kind of environmental war that (sadly) presages wars likely to come as climate change intensifies. It then introduces the remainder of the book, with its 30+ authors and artists and rich array of topics, from place-based memory and trauma, ecocultural relations with amphibians, plants, trees, and fungi, and mappings of Indigenous (Tatar) musical landscapes and wartime soundscapes, to the role of art in war, ecological “war-rewilding,” decolonization of Europe’s last remaining empire (Russia), the possibilities of international solidarities across colonial contexts, and the tensions between extractive capitalism and democracy in the “full-scale Anthropocene.” To read the Introduction, see below.
Once you’ve looked at the open access PDF of the book, you just might decide to get yourself or someone else a print copy. (Or at the very least, to recommend it to libraries.) The book is available at a 25% discount until December 31, and it’s perfect for holiday gifts. All royalties from sales of the book will be donated to Ukrainian charities until the war is over and the country’s viable reconstruction is assured. See below for ordering information.
The first online book event, featuring several of the book’s authors and moderated by Tallinn University’s professor Epp Annus, will take place on December 8, 17:00-18:30 EET (GMT+2), hosted by the RUTA Environmental Initiative and University of Tallinn’s Institute of Humanities. Further information can be found here. Register for the event here.
Further Terra Invicta book events, which will double as fundraisers for Ukrainian charities, are being planned for Vancouver (late January–early February, details TBA), New York City (March 27-28), Toronto (April 20 and 24), Montreal (April 22), and elsewhere. Please sign up here to be kept in the loop or e-mail me for details.
The book can be ordered with the 25% discount code “MQ25” online or directly with the distributor in your area until 31 December 2025. Canada UTP Distribution: 1-800-565-9523 utpbooks@utpress.utoronto.ca. USA & Rest of World: Chicago Distribution Center 1-800-621-2736 orders@press.uchicago.edu. UK & Europe: Combined Academic Publishers +44(0)01423526350 enquiries@combinedacademic.co.uk.
Galina Rymbu‘s “Open Letter to Zarah Sultana,” ex-Labour MP and co-founder with Jeremy Corbyn of the new British left-wing political party Your Party, reads like a long letter from the Ukrainian left (certainly a large segment of it) to that poorly informed swath of the western left that continues to mouth platitudes blaming NATO for this war and seeking to ultimately placate Russia. (Irish president-elect Catherine Connolly is, unfortunately, the latest clear addition to that swath.) The letter trods over themes readers of this blog will be familiar with, and adds some more. Either way, it’s good to share with your leftist friends.
Rymbu writes about growing up as a working-class leftist and feminist in Russia, facing discrimination far exceeding what she has seen in eight years living in Ukraine; about the inauthentic Russian and Ukrainian influencers (like Alexei Sakhnin, Sergei Khorolsky, Andrei Konovalov, and some others associated with Mir Snizu, Union of the Post-Soviet Left, and Borotba) whose messages are all-too-readily embraced by old European leftists; and about the many reasons both to learn more about the Ukrainian left and to support Ukrainians’ struggle for self-determination from neo-imperial Russia.
This Ukraine is unknown and incomprehensible to most Russian leftists — and to those Ukrainians who now act as their protégés and “dependents.” This is an Ukraine with strong anarchist traditions of self-organization and radical democracy — traditions that always survive, despite occupations, colonizations, crises, and internal conflicts.
I believe that any international dialogue about resistance in Ukraine and about the possibilities of military and political support from abroad should begin with a story about these traditions—and about those who are fighting for them right now.
Greenpeace International has just published an exhaustive report on Russia’s environmental predicament. Entitled “Fossil-Fuel Empire: The Environment of Post-2022 Russia and the Kremlin’s Threat to Domestic and Global Stability and Sustainability,” the 9-chapter, 134-page report is “based on hundreds of studies and publications produced by various organisations, media outlets, expert communities and independent specialists working on Russian issues both within the country and abroad. More than 20 experts specialising in environmental preservation and activism contributed to its preparation.”
That attention is both critical and constructive. It highlights the “extractivism” that the Putin administration has made into “the foundation of a system based on corruption, imperialist propaganda and repression” (p. 6) and the role of the vast Russian territory in global ecology: “the country,” according to the report’s Introduction, “is crucial to global environmental sustainability. Its vast boreal forest, permafrost and wetlands play a vital role in global climate stabilisation, while the diversity of its ecosystems – from Arctic deserts to the subtropical foothills of the Western Caucasus mountains – makes Russia a repository of unique biological riches” (p. 6). But it also seeks to provide an “alternative path” towards a sustainable, post-extractivist future.
Here are a few excerpts from the report’s conclusions:
Modern Russia’s politico-economic model is a system based on extractivism, authoritarianism and war, in which all the interconnected elements reinforce one another.
Natural resources are exploited intensively, but the proceeds from their use and sale are distributed unfairly: rather than being invested in social development and improving the population’s quality of life, these funds go primarily to enriching the elite, financing the military-industrial complex and maintaining the repressive apparatus.
War serves as a tool for concentrating power, a justification for repressive legislation and a pretext for the violent suppression of civil society.
Authoritarianism, in turn, supports the extractivist model, protecting the interests of elites, whose wealth and power depends on the exploitation of natural resources. Public participation in decision-making is limited, hindering necessary structural reforms. Issues of environmental and social justice are systematically excluded from state policy priorities.
This troika forms a vicious cycle of degradation: it destroys institutions, undermines legal and environmental norms, depletes nature, deprives people of the means to defend their interests and makes a transition to just, sustainable and peaceful development impossible. As a result, the victims of the system are both people, particularly the most vulnerable, and the environment upon which their safety and wellbeing depends.
The model constructed by the Putin regime threatens not only the future of Russia itself, but also global stability – the Kremlin wages war and stokes other military conflicts, destroys global institutions, accelerates the climate crisis and contributes to the loss of biodiversity. (p. 94)
With enormous resources, Russia, the report concludes, has “a unique potential for sustainable development.” But
in order for [those resources] to serve the wellbeing of people and the world, a fundamental transformation of the country’s development model is necessary. This includes an end to aggression against Ukraine and other countries, a rejection of neocolonialism, promoting international environmental and humanitarian cooperation, dismantling authoritarianism, the restoration of civil society, and a transition away from extractivism and toward sustainable development. (p. 103)
From Fossil-Fuel Empire: The Environment of Post-2022 Russia and the Kremlin’s Threat to Domestic and Global Stability and Sustainability, Greenpeace International, October, 2025, p. 95
A new issue of the London Ukrainian Review examines culture as a matter of national security in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war. The Review, which is an open-access publication of the Ukrainian Institute London partnering with the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Academic Studies Press, and INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange, has been publishing excellent work since 2021. Editor-in-chief Sasha Dovzhyk explains that this issue “highlight[s] the voices of cultural figures who defend Ukraine with arms” and “examines culture as a tool of Russia’s imperialist expansion, all the while insisting on a bond between cultural familiarity and political solidarity.”
Had the long history of Russian colonial violence against Ukraine been better understood by a public familiar with the canon of Ukrainian culture, Ukraine and Crimea might not have been perceived by so many in the West as obscure parts of Russia’s ‘backyard’ in 2014. Ukraine, of course, is not alone in this sense: how different might our reactions to events in Gaza or Sudan be if we all read novels by Palestinian and Sudanese writers in our schools and universities?
In “How Fascist is Putinism?“, German political scientist and veteran Ukraine watcher Andreas Umland thoroughly examines and assesses the arguments and counter-arguments for considering Putinism to be a form of fascism. If there’s a single scholarly article to recommend on this topic, it is probably this one.
Umland shows that while it’s still quite possible to argue that Putinism is not fascism, this requires either a rather strict definition of what fascism is (and an eagerness to highlight the ways it still fails that definition), or a nuanced empirical eye that sees Putinism not as one thing but a hodgepodge, and therefore not only fascist. To argue that it is not fascist at all, however, seems to be stretching credulity. The answer is, at best, a matter of degree.
Among his conclusions:
“Russia’s armed forces and occupational administration in Ukraine behave, especially since 2022, in a manifestly terroristic, genocidal, ecocidal, and sometimes even sadist manner. Against this dreadful background, it seems strange to insist that Russia’s policies and the ideas behind them are clearly, absolutely and unquestionably non-fascist.”
On the other hand,
“An exclusive explanation of Russia’s motivation for its policies in Ukraine and elsewhere with ultra-nationalist maximalism limits understanding of the motivations behind the so-called ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine. [. . .] The initial impulse for the full-scale invasion was, nevertheless, less growing ultra-nationalist fanaticism than misinformed power-political cynicism within Putin’s regime.”
More to the point, however:
“The longer and the more successful Russia’s war against Ukraine is, the more prominent and influential fascist Russian actors, ideas and networks will become in Russia as well as beyond.”
The book features the work of 30+ Ukrainian authors and artists that together articulate “what in the world is worth fighting for” — a world in which, in the face of history’s repetitions and the future’s uncertainties, we nevertheless persist, in Katya Buchatska’s words, in “plant[ing] a garden so that we have something to lose.”
Political philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes about it:
“Urgently needed, Terra Invicta focuses on the catastrophic environmental impact of the Russian aggression on Ukraine. It demonstrates how the genocidal Russian attack systematically destroys natural resources, renders large domains uninhabitable, and endangers nuclear power plants. New habitats are emerging where old forms of life were destroyed. Ivakhiv’s volume makes it clear that there is no choice between ecological concerns and struggle against military aggression: in Ukraine, they are the two moments of the same struggle. For this reason alone, Terra Invicta deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.”
And Andrey Kurkov, leading Ukrainian novelist and essayist, writes:
“The war in Ukraine affects the ecology of nature and the ecology of consciousness throughout the world. This book is the best way to understand today’s Ukraine and the impact of Russian aggression on your life, no matter what country you live in.”
Below is a brief description followed by a list of the contents and ordering information (which includes a 25% discount). In addition, the full-colour book features art by Katya Buchatska, Nikita Kadan, Kateryna Aliinyk, Arsen Savadov, Anna Zvyagintseva, Zhanna Kadyrova, Kateryna Lysovenko, and some of the authors listed. Deep gratitude to all of the authors and artists involved, and to the wonderful sprites at McGill-Queen’s University Press. Royalties will go to Ukraine’s defense for as long as the war continues.
Historian and left-wing activist Vladyslav Starodubtsev is becoming a prominent spokesperson for Ukraine’s “left-republican tradition,” a tradition he identifies with some of the leaders of Ukraine’s national awakening in the late 1800s, and with those that led the efforts to create a social-democratic Ukrainian state in the years 1917 through about 1922 or so, a period that ended with the consolidation of Soviet control over Ukraine.
Suzi Weissman recently interviewed Starodubtsev for Jacobin Radio, and the two spent more time — almost an hour — discussing the 1917-1922 years than most people have ever spent thinking about those years at all, let alone what they looked like in Ukraine. As the web site puts it, the interview examines “the Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1917-1923, born in the revolutionary upheavals of 1905, WWI, and the February 1917 Russian Revolution. Built on grassroots power from peasants, workers, soldiers, and cooperatives, the Ukrainian People’s Republic legislated sweeping land reform, gender equality, national-personal autonomy for ethnic minorities, and a cooperative economy. It did not last.”
Please note that this is an old entry, drafted in early 2024 but left unpublished until now. It is being added to UKR-TAZ in order to be readable as an archived piece. That said, very little has changed in the global situation since the interview was conducted — which says something in itself.
The Belgian analytical review Politique has published an excellent and wide-ranging interview with Ukrainian historian and left-wing activist Hanna Perekhoda. The interview covers many of the angles on the Russo-Ukrainian war that UKR-TAZ has covered over the last few years. It’s in French. Here are some excerpts, in translation. (The translation is mostly Google’s, with occasional corrections of my own.)
On the shared interests of the anti-authoritarian left in Ukraine and Russia:
