UKR-TAZ

The University of Toronto Munk School’s Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES) held a conference on June 20 on the topic “After Ecocide: Grappling With the Ecological and Socioeconomic Consequences of the Destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant in Southern Ukraine.” A recording of the conference can be viewed here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xgB4coV8Ws

Conference organizers have kindly allowed me to share the following set of resources on the topic of the impacts of the dam’s June 6 destruction by Russian explosives. The list includes organizations that are collecting donations to help the victims of the disaster.

After about 24 hours of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s 24-hour abortive mutiny (judging by the major media, we haven’t even figured out what to call it yet), I posted the following list of uncertainties, intended to answer the common question “WTF is going on in Russia?”, on social media:

• 1) If this was an attempted coup, it didn’t end convincingly.
• 2) If this was an egomaniacal outburst within a long simmering battle of wills, it was bizarrely theatrical and not very smart.
• 3) If this was a spectacular false-flag operation, it didn’t go according to plan (and it’s not very evident who was in the know and who wasn’t, except that most or all of the Russian media was not).
• 4) If this was simply another day in the workings of an authoritarian kleptocratic-mafia state, it was a spectacularly entertaining one.
• 5) If this was the beginning of the implosion of Putinist Russia, all bets are off on what that implosion will look like. (But, honestly, I can’t wait to see.)
• 6) If this was a dress rehearsal, the real performance will be wild.

Since then, a consensus seems to be emerging among Russia observers (in the West) that, if we don’t know what exactly to call it yet (“armed rebellion,” “march on Moscow,” “abortive coup,” et al.), we know it was not a good thing for the Putin regime.

It revealed, and proclaimed, military weakness, as well as genuine brittleness at the top, challenged longstanding narratives of the “special military operation,” and showed the inability of state media to do much of anything when they aren’t given precise instructions. Its ending was anti-climactic — as the Columbia Journalism Review put it, “Putin, a man who punishes journalists and peaceful domestic opponents as if they were traitors, had apparently agreed to give an actual traitor no punishment at all. If only for now.” But it left wide open the possibility that this was no ending, just a temporary stopping point. As CJR puts it, “most observers seem to agree that the last shoe has yet to drop in this story.”

Outside of some circuitous (and rather touch-and-go) Twitter threads, the most useful analyses I’ve seen include the Institute for the Study of War‘s June 24 and June 25 assessments, and Timothy Snyder’s Substack piece “Prigozhin’s march on Moscow: Ten lessons from a mutiny.” Snyder summarizes the background beautifully:

Both the Russian state itself and Prigozhin’s mercenary firm Wagner are extractive regimes with large public relations and military arms. 

The Putin regime exists, and the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are relatively wealthy, thanks to the colonial exploitation of hydrocarbon resources in Siberia.  The wealth is held by a very few people, and the Russian population is treated to a regular spectacle of otherwise pointless war — Ukraine, Syria, Ukraine again — to distract attention from this basic state of affairs, and to convince them that there is some kind of external enemy that justifies it (hint: there really isn’t). 

Wagner functioned as a kind of intensification of the Russian state, doing the dirtiest work beyond Russia, not only in Syria and Ukraine but also in Africa.  It was subsidized by the Russian state, but made its real money by extracting mineral resources on its own, especially in Africa.  Unlike most of its other ventures, Wagner’s war in Ukraine was a losing proposition.  Prigozhin leveraged the desperation of Russia’s propaganda for a victory by taking credit for victory at Bakhmut.  That minor city was completely destroyed and abandoned by the time Wagner took it, at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian lives. 

But because it was the only gain in Russia’s horrifyingly costly but strategically senseless 2023 offensive, Bakhmut had to be portrayed by Putin’s media as some kind of Stalingrad or Berlin.  Prigozhin took advantage of this. He was able to direct the false glory to himself even as he then withdrew Wagner from Ukraine.  Meanwhile he criticized the military commanders of the Russian Federation in increasingly vulgar terms, thereby preventing the Russian state (and Putin) from gaining much from the bloody spectacle of invaded Ukraine.  In sum: Wagner was able to make the Putin regime work for it.

Snyder disputes the “realist” explanations for Russia’s war on Ukraine in ways that add to what’s already been said on this blog (e.g., here), and offers another kind of realism — one that sees Russia as a protection racket:

You can think of the Russian state as a protection racket.  No one is really safe, but everyone has to accept “protection” in the knowledge that this is less risky than rebellion.  A protection racket is always vulnerable to another protection racket.  In marching from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, Prigozhin was breaking one protection racket and proposing another.  On this logic, we can imagine Prigozhin’s proposal to Putin as follows: I am deploying the greater force, and I am now demanding protection money from you.  If you want to continue your own protection racket, pay me off before I reach Moscow.

Read the whole thing here.

To update my last post about the Vienna “peace summit,” I recommend Fabian Sommavilla’s account of the day-long conference. Here’s some more context on the cancelation of the event.

I also recommend University of Salzburg economic geographer Christian Zeller‘s excellent analysis of the summit, shared at Emancipation, Journal of Ecosocialist Strategy; see “Somewhere between anti-imperialism, conspiracy theory, and the need to speak honestly.” Written on Friday, Zeller’s account describes organizers’ efforts to give the summit a “quasi-diplomatic status.” He notes:

The organisers did not conceive their “summit for peace” at all as a gathering of pacifist grassroots movements fighting dictatorships, occupying powers and war – everywhere and always  – but as an event that only apparently pursues alternative geopolitics against the hegemony of the “West”. This orientation towards multipolarity, which also respects dictatorships, is far from an emancipatory perspective, as the Indian communist and feminist Kavita Krishnan has clearly pointed out.

Zeller concluded:

The organisers of the “peace summit” have brought their fiasco upon themselves. The process of personal and political erosion in the run-up to the event shows that the strategists of the only seemingly alternative geopolitics, who are completely anchored in reactionary concepts of geopolitical camps (“campism”), are not succeeding in gaining hegemony on the broader left. This is a welcome outcome.

In response to the summit, Zeller proposed

that we organise — together with trade unions and groups in solidarity with the social resistance in Ukraine against the Russian occupation — an international conference to support the Ukrainian trade unions and civil society, both in their resistance against occupation and for a socially just and ecologically compatible reconstruction of Ukraine.

This ended up becoming Saturday’s alternative “solidarity summit,” which also took place in Vienna (but about which I have not yet seen any news).

Forensic Architecture — which has done tremendous investigative “counter-forensics” work in Palestine/Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, Myanmar, Colombia, Brazil’s Yanomamo territory, and Louisiana’s “Death Alley,” among other zones of war and human rights violation — has been working with the Center for Spatial Technologies on the March 2022 bombing of Mariupol’s Drama Theatre.

This 20-minute video presents the first part of their investigation. Their investigation of the Russian bombing of Kyiv’s Babyn Yar is also excellent, and viewable from their website. (See co-founder Eyal Weizman’s writings, including his co-authored volume on Investigative Aesthetics, and the “Methodology” section of their extensively documented web site for further information on their approach.)

“Before it was destroyed by a Russian airstrike, the Mariupol Theater was a key refuge in the besieged city, a unique site of solidarity and resistance. With Forensis & Forensic Architecture, the Center for Spatial Technologies interviewed survivors to tell the story of a self-organized commune: a city within a building.”

Since Timothy Snyder is such a key figure in today’s debates over the Russian invasion of Ukraine (and over the larger global context in which they figure), and since I had intended to write something about him and his critics but have not done that yet, I was happy to see Robert Baird’s long-form article about him, which appeared in today’s Guardian. In “Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times,” Baird covers all these things and more.

On the debate between “realists” and those I previously called “culturalists“, Baird writes:

This emphasis on ideas has led Snyder to be criticised by some in the realist school of international relations. Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a thinktank, counts herself an admirer of Snyder’s historical work, but she also says that his “understanding of world affairs is almost indelibly shaped by what he thinks are the big important ideas, whereas I would say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was motivated as much by trying to prop up its falling security in the region”. The dispute is not academic. If you believe, as Ashford does, that Russia is motivated by strategic fears, then every additional degree of western involvement risks exacerbating the original causes of the war and prolonging the conflict. By contrast, if you believe with Snyder that the war’s roots lie in Putin’s fascist worldview, then victory on the battlefield becomes imperative. “A lot of smart people have said it before me, but fascism was never discredited. It was only defeated,” he says. “The Russians have to be defeated, just like the Germans were defeated.”

The article provides an intellectual biography of Snyder including his work as a historian of Eastern Europe and of the Holocaust, as well as his writings as a “public intellectual” analyzing Trumpism, Putinism, and much more.

It can be read here.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS/SUBMISSIONS: Creative writing, theoretical/scholarly writing, experimental text/image works from Ukrainian writers/artists and humanities scholars

Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth

Creative visions from Ukrainian artists and humanists articulating what in the world is worth fighting for

In an Anthropocenic context of intensifying climate change, exploding migration crises, and anticipated future wars over land, resources, and borders, Ukraine’s recent experience is hardly peripheral. It is in fact central to geopolitical, economic, and sociocultural processes at large in the world, and becoming more pressing year by year. Just as the 1986 Chornobyl nuclear accident placed Ukraine on the map of the world’s socio-ecological “sacrifice zones,” so has Ukraine’s invasion by Russia—an authoritarian petro-state poised to decline as its fossil-fuel economy depreciates—made it central to the global crises expected to arise on a climate-destabilizing planet.

Putin, yesterday:

The West started to turn Ukraine into anti-Russia. This project started back in the 19th century, started by Austria-Hungary Empire and Poland.

Putin, Feb. 21, 2022:

modern Ukraine was entirely created by Russia or, to be more precise, by Bolshevik, Communist Russia.

Voltaire, in 1731 (in his Histoire de Charles XII):

“Ukraine has always aspired to freedom.”

Žižek, “The Dark Side of Neutrality” (responding to Roger Waters, last week, also readable here):

As an independent voice who follows Russian media very closely, I am well acquainted with what Putin and his propagandists “actually say.” The major TV channels are full of commentators recommending that countries like Poland, Germany, or the United Kingdom be nuked. The Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, one of Putin’s closes allies, now openly calls for “the fight against Satanism [to] continue throughout Europe and, first of all, on the territory of Poland.”

Indeed, the official Kremlin line describes the war as a “special operation” for the de-Nazification and de-demonization of Ukraine. Among Ukraine’s “provocations” is that it has permitted Pride parades and allowed LGBTQ+ rights to undermine traditional sexual norms and gender roles. Kremlin-aligned commentators speak of “liberal totalitarianism,” even going so far as to argue that George Orwell’s 1984 was a critique not of fascism or Stalinism but of liberalism.

[. . .]

Those who would claim neutrality forfeit their standing to complain about the horrors of colonization anywhere. […] It is obscene to blame Ukraine for Russian acts of destruction, or to mischaracterize the Ukrainians’ heroic resistance as a rejection of peace. Those, like Waters, who call for “an immediate ceasefire” would have Ukrainians respond to redoubled Russian aggression by abandoning their own self-defense. That is a formula not for peace, but for pacification.

Since late May of this year, Posle/После (Russian for “After”) has been publishing wide-ranging leftist perspectives on the continuing Russo-Ukrainian war, in both English and Russian.

The web site calls itself “a platform for political reflection on this criminal war, its preconditions and consequences,” and welcomes “everyone who seeks to understand the present and to imagine the future.” To that end, it has published several dozen articles that, as the editors put it, collectively “examine the structure” of the invasion, its relation to “immense social inequality and powerlessness,” and the “imperialist ideology” that “feeds on the militarist discourse, xenophobia, and bigotry” — and help to “imagine the way out.”

Editorial details are hard to find, presumably because many (or most?) of those involved are currently in Russia. The web journal’s coverage of Russian dissident voices is good to see (though it can feel a little abstract given the lack of real-world presence they seem to have). But it also includes coverage of the global left and its responses to the war (including the American, Swedish, and German lefts), the “ecological scars of war,” Russian regionalism, and nuanced analyses of Russian shame, discourses of the “brotherly peoples,” and much more.

An interview with Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi includes some perceptive comments about the on-the-ground situation in Ukraine. Here’s one:

[A]lthough it is believed that wars inevitably lead to an increase in conservative sentiments, I try to stay optimistic. This war is engaging an unprecedented number of people with very different political views and backgrounds. Organizations such as Solidarity Collectives and the Unicorn Battalion support many left-wing activists and LGBT people who are serving in the army. Right-wing groups played a big role in 2014, because the Ukrainian professional army was weakened and undeveloped, but today the situation is different. 

The journal can be followed on Telegram and Instagram, in addition to its main web site.