UKR-TAZ

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.

The open-access PDF can be found here:
https://qspace.library.queensu.ca/items/11368c23-15ef-4907-a4b6-147877f62507

Below is the front matter and introductory chapter:

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.

On the latter, for instance:

Historically, all Ukrainian leftist political cultures differ profoundly from the imperial, Bolshevik, and Stalinist ones. The Ukraine of Ivan Franko, Lesya Ukrainka, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and Nestor Makhno still exists. And it continues in the Ukraine of Davyd Chychkan, Marharyta Polovynko, and Artur Snitkus. In the Ukraine of Maksym Butkevych, Artem Chapeye, Vladyslav Starodubtsev, and other comrades who are now resisting Russian aggression and building broad, horizontal networks of leftist international solidarity with Ukrainian anti-authoritarians.

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.

The full letter can be read here.

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.”

While some on the left continue to take the old Marxist view that a concern for Ukrainian culture and language is a purely liberal or “bourgeois nationalist” interest (I examined this in the writing of Volodymyr Ishchenko some time ago), authors of this issue take the opposite view, which is well articulated by University College London’s Uilleam Blacker in “Defensive Wall: Why Ukraine’s Culture is Everyone’s Fight.” Blacker writes:

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?

Alongside wartime poetry and prose (in translation) and arguments about the politics of concert halls and misplaced Russophilia, the issue includes a richly insightful conversation between historian Olesya Khromeychuk and author and propaganda analyst Peter Pomerantsev. Another piece, Maria Sonevytsky’s “Everyday Amulets,” documents how displaced communities maintain cultural memory through transported objects — specifically, in this case, through house keys, which “become symbols of refusal to consent to elimination across contexts of displacement: Crimean Tatars deported by Stalin in 1944, Palestinians displaced in 1948, and Ukrainians fleeing Russian occupation since 2014.”

The entire issue can be read here.

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.”

Umland’s article is based on a chapter in Russia and Modern Fascism: New Perspectives on the Kremlin’s War Against Ukraine, edited by Ian Garner and Taras Kuzio (ibidem Press, September 2025, ISBN 9783838220154, 350pp, paperback, $40.00).

It can be read in its entirety here.

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.”

In an opinion piece published a few days ago in Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper (“The Ukraine emergency is far from over – because Donald Trump is the emergency,” August 21, 2025), popular center-right columnist Andrew Coyne writes about the “three possible explanations for Mr. Trump’s seeming capture by Mr. Putin.” (Coyne is the journalist whose writing following the re-election of Donald Trump made the rounds widely for its prescient prognostication of what was to come.)

The three “possible explanations” closely parallel the three hypotheses that I had written about last week, except that they fail to mention the one I spent much of that article discussing.

My first two hypotheses, which I called the “conspiratorial” (that Putin “has something on him,” in Coyne’s words) and the “psychoanalytical” (that Trump’s particular form of pathological narcissism lends him to looking up to certain kinds of men) are covered by Coyne, though the latter becomes a little vague: Coyne writes that, in this rendition, Trump

has simply been rolled by him, over and over – whether because he has some sort of inexplicable man-crush on him, or because of Mr. Putin’s adroit application of flattery to the suppurating wounds of Mr. Trump’s ego, or because of Mr. Trump’s peculiar susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left ‘when you think about it, the West are really the bad guys’ arguments favoured by your stoner roommate in first year.

Coyne’s third explanation, however, merely repeats a variation of the second: “that Mr. Trump just happens to agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one.” Coyne misses the all-important “realist” explanation I had written about, which is rooted in a particular constellation of political-economic relations, especially those of fossil fuels.

Now, Rolling Stone’s star writer on these topics, Antonia Juhasz, has penned a piece that provides many more details to support the contention that the Putin-Trump meeting in Alaska was largely about joint fossil fuel dealmaking (“Inside Putin’s Fossil-Fueled Victory Lap in Alaska,“ August 23, 2025).

As Juhasz puts it,

Maksym Eristavi’s Russian Colonialism 101 is an effectively written, sprightly illustrated romp through the last few centuries of Russian colonialism, the last of the undeconstructed European colonialisms still standing. His Russian Colonialism 101 substack continues Eristavi’s work in deconstructing that colonialism in all its forms.

In “david: and why not platforming russian culture is justice,” Eristavi writes evocatively about Ukrainian anarchist artist David Chichkan, his illustrated Ukrainian Code on Administrative Offences, so-called “cancel culture,” and Western imperialist complicity.

A few quotes:

There are three main hypotheses explaining Donald Trump’s eagerness to please Vladimir Putin.

The first is “conspiratorial”: that Putin has something over Trump, related perhaps to the Steele dossier, Trump’s real estate shenanigans, the KGB’s long-term efforts to cultivate Trump as a “Russian asset,” or maybe even the Epstein files (Trump and Putin do, after all, connect within the ranks of the uber-rich masculinist jet set, where sexist pedophilia seems readily appeasable).

The second is psychoanalytical: that Trump is a pathological narcissist with a fragile father-damaged ego, and that he only looks up to other, more “successfully” imperial father figures. Putin is one of the few who fit his criteria.

The third is “realist,” which acknowledges that there are benefits, from Trump’s perspective, to a cozier relationship with Russia. Allying with Russia could, for instance, steer the latter away from China. More importantly, and more specifically these days, is that Russia is a fossil fuel superpower — and Trump’s authority is also reliant on a perpetuation of the global power of fossil fuels. Rehabilitating Putin will enable Trump to “make deals” around Russia’s only assets, which are its oil and gas deposits. When other prices are rising all around Trump, he could at least keep gas prices down by dealing directly with Putin.

The Silicon Curtain podcast — which describes itself as “a channel about propaganda, digital disinformation, politics, corruption, hybrid warfare, weaponised conspiracy theories, social echo chambers and digital dystopias” — is an excellent place to hear astute analyses of all things Russia. Their last few episodes, including “Did the Global Media Fall for a Giant Geopolitical Con?“, “Trump’s Surrender to Putin is Far Worse than Most People Realize,” and “Oil was Greasing the Gears of War, Not Peace at the Alaska Summit” — have covered various angles of the Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska. The last is particularly insightful about the fossil-fuel dimensions of the meeting.

A few quotes:

Ukraine may be the only country in the world where black-and-red flags can signify either anarcho-syndicalism — which they mostly do in the photos below, from David Chichkan’s funeral ceremony in Kyïv yesterday — or the right-wing nationalism associated with the world war two era OUN and UPA partisan armies. (Those armies and their followers today are commonly known as “Banderites” in honor of ultranationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who’s become a symbol of all things anti-Russian, though the flag long pre-dates Bandera and has been used well beyond the paramilitary legacy associated with him.)

In some cases they can even be both, as with Ukraine’s national anarchists or anarcho-nationalists. (On anarchism and the Russo-Ukrainian war, see here, here, here, and here.) Sometimes, the “Banderite” flag features red over black horizontal bands, while the anarchist flag features the two in diagonal bands, but that’s not always the case.

Irrespectively, the loss of anarchist artist David Chichkan is felt by many, and his funeral ceremonies featured many red-and-black flags alongside others. Posting about yesterday’s ceremony, Nataliya Gumenyuk, co-founder of Hromadske independent media, the Public Interest Journalism Lab, and The Reckoning Project, wrote [my translation]: