In “Eastern Ukraine: Popular Uprising, Conspiracy, or Civil War?” leftish cultural-political magazine n+1 presents a very interesting and diverse collection of interviews with left-wing activists in Ukraine and Russia on the events of the last few months.
And Observer Ukraine presents an interview with Left Opposition activist and lawyer Vitaliy Dudin.
An earlier interview with Zakhar Popovych (also included in the n+1 article) has been translated here.
In the Moscow Times article “Russia’s Propaganda War Will Backfire,” Mark Lawrence Schrad, author of Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy and the Secret History of the Russian State, argues that the Putin regime’s media offensive against the Maidan revolution and the interim Ukrainian government will backfire on Russian-Ukrainian relations for years to come.
How is it that PBS’s respected public affairs show Frontline could produce a sensationalistic portrayal of Ukraine as a divided, bloody, chaotic mess — airing two days after an election that produced the clearest majority ever in a Ukrainian presidential election — while the internet-based Vice News could produce this comparatively sensible portrait of a country that showed courage and a very clear consensus in its belief that the political process is far preferable to warfare?
It is good to know that there are extremists on both sides, and PBS is right to show that. But we’ve been seeing that for months now.
In “The Chocolate King Walks Onto a Sticky Wicket,” left-wing Ukraine analyst Marko Bojcun provides an excellent overview of the prospects facing post-presidential election Ukraine: deteriorating socio-economic conditions, a fragile state, chaos in the eastern provinces, and so on.
The article is well worth reading.
Every serious newspaper in the world announced something yesterday about the winner of Sunday’s Ukrainian presidential election, Petro Poroshenko.
Canadian journalist (and Liberal Party politician) Chrystia Freeland’s piece in the center-left Toronto Star encompassed more of the meaning of the election for Ukrainians than most other reports. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s another useful summary of things from Cathy Young (Ekaterina Jung).
(While I don’t always agree with her liberatarian-leaning political positions, she is a respectable journalist. I share it only because the Russian state media, i.e., propaganda, narratives are still so pervasive.)
As Ukraine is preparing for its presidential election, historian William Risch is sharing this view from the ground in Slavyansk, epicenter of the pro-Russian Donetsk separatist movement. Very interesting.
Ukraine Conflict, an online archive of materials related to the recent events in Ukraine, is a very useful source for those searching through the full range of online materials on specific topics. The site’s description reads as follows:
“This collection seeks to document conflict in Ukraine as it progresses. Contributions to this collection were made by the Archive-It team and subject matter experts in the fields of Investigative Journalism, Russian, and Eurasian studies, and include news outlets, social media, blogs, and government websites. Sites are written in English, Russian, Ukrainian, and other languages.”
I’ve added a link to it in the right-hand sidebar of the UKR-TAZ main page.
I’ve been away from blogging on this site for over a week now (and was somewhat irregular for the previous little while as well). I’ll try to catch up over the coming days.
In the meantime, an offer I had extended to some colleagues in Ukrainian studies still holds: if you have your fingers in the worlds of Ukrainian and/or Russian media and would like to contribute to this blog — the goals of which are expressed here — please write me.
I drafted an op-ed piece a few weeks ago that I failed to oversee to publication, because it was quickly overtaken by events that I didn’t manage to incorporate into the piece.
I’m sharing it here for what it’s worth, as it includes some useful links to materials I have not posted to this blog. It’s more opinionated than my posts have usually been, but that’s the nature of an op-ed. The general idea remains quite relevant (as my “Right Sector vs. United Russia” post shows). A brief update follows.
Manufacturing reality: The Russian infowar over Ukraine