UKR-TAZ

by Kate Bossert (UKR-TAZ intern; see her UKR-TAZ piece on Russian cyber threats here)

In all armed conflicts, land and nature are among the most immediate casualties, yet these devastating effects on the environment never seem to be prioritized in mass media or in conversations about wars. The environment is often the silent victim of war. In the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the natural world has endured ongoing widespread and long-term environmental damage that could continue to negatively affect the country for centuries.

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 since Chernobyl. 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.) 

The attack elicited great controversy over whether or not to rebuild the Kakhovka dam. In the month following the flood, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine passed a decree on the reconstruction of the reservoir and dam of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant (HPP). Ukrhydroenergo, the biggest hydro power generating company in Ukraine, is in strong support of this bill as the company wants to build a new HPP with an output of 550-600 megawatts. From an economic perspective, rebuilding the reservoir could entice residents back to abandoned homes, weekend dachas, and fishing boats along the former shoreline. And considering the inconceivable social and environmental costs this catastrophe has had on Ukraine, it can appear to be logical and necessary to rebuild the dam. 

But the solution to this disaster is not so black and white, and many environmentalists have argued against restoring the reservoir. Environmental activist Eugene Simonov stated that the previous reservoir already produced “very low-quality water with a lot of pollution“, and so the 2,000 square kilometers of land could be used in a much more environmentally and economically productive way. Additionally, if the Kakhovka reservoir restoration project goes ahead, it will be necessary to destroy all of these 1,800 square kilometers of natural ecosystems that have now begun to form. To learn more about the Kakhovka dam debate, see 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.

Richardson’s full piece can be read here.

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.

Dzyuba’s Internationalism or Russification? (1965) was a powerful, Marxist-based critique of Soviet nationalities policy as a continuation of the colonialism of the tsarist Russian empire. A new edition of the book has just been jointly published by the ecosocialist International Institute for Research and Education and anti-capitalist publishing house Resistance Books. It includes a new introduction by John-Paul Himka. Bohdan Krawchenko’s introduction to the book’s original English (1968) edition can be read at Ukrainian Solidarity Campaign’s tribute page to Dziuba. The earlier edition is also available at the Internet Archive and at Diasporiana (but please support the publishers of the new edition if you can).

Tributes to Dzyuba can be found in leftist (e.g., The Militant) as well as human-rights media (e.g., Euromaidan Press).

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

Timothy Snyder’s Substack post dissecting Vladimir Putin’s rabidly (and genocidally) imperialist view of history, as revealed (again) in his interview with Tucker Carlson, is brilliant. It packs in a lot of what Snyder covers in his 23-part online course The History of Modern Ukraine, and includes a handy bibliography.

The whole post, “Putin’s Genocidal Myth,” found here, is well worth reading.

Vladimir Putin’s two main advances on Stalinism are (1) the digitization of propaganda and its spread into social-media systems, making for a much more sophisticated penetration of contemporary global information systems, and (2) the mobilization of Russia’s vast prison system — the “Gulag archipelago” made famous by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — into a war machine, a prison-military-industrial complex.

The New York Times’ analysis of the latter, published this morning, presents it in its broad contours:

“In some ways, Mr. Putin’s war has turned the country’s entire criminal justice system into a military recruitment tool, experts say. Russia’s extremely high conviction rates — 99.6 percent — its long prison terms, and inhumane conditions inside jails create strong incentives to risk death to obtain freedom.

“Wagner said that about 50,000 inmates served in their ranks in Ukraine, and that one in five of them died.” [. . .]

“But one of three recruits was serving time for murder. This rate is more than 30 times higher than the overall percentage of murder convicts in the Russian prison system, underscoring the attraction of military service to men with long sentences.” [. . .]

“[Mr. Mokin’s] experience appears typical of inmates who struggle to fit into the brutal caste system of many Russian jails. Enforced by underworld leaders known as bratva, the system ostracizes and humiliates inmates deemed to have violated complex social rules that govern Russian criminal life.

“Inmates in the bottom rungs are forced to act as servants, carry out demeaning tasks such as cleaning toilets, and can be subjected to sexual abuse. Drug dealers like Mr. Mokin are traditionally assigned low social status.

“’All you need to make sure that people keep enlisting is to create bad conditions’ in prison, said Anna Karetnikova, a former senior prison official in the Moscow region, who left Russia in protest of the war. ‘This is not patriotism. It’s survival.'”

For the entire article, see “A Prison at War: The Convicts Sustaining Putin’s Invasion.”

Leading Ukrainian left-wing journal Spil’ne/Спільне/Commons: Journal of Social Criticism has published an all-English-language issue entitled “The Russian Invasion and the Ukrainian Left: The Struggle for a Social Ukraine.”

The issue includes a collective interview with editors that outlines the history of the Spil’ne project, alongside a selection of texts published earlier or reflections on the war. In the editors’ words, these include “texts that are our intervention in the Western left’s discussion on Ukraine,” others “devoted to the experiences of war — primarily occupation and refugeeism, but also the experience of solidarity and mutual support,” and articles that “criticize neoliberal solutions to the country’s economic problems, calling for a just and socially oriented post-war reconstruction.”

The full issue can be read here:

https://commons.com.ua/en/russian-invasion-and-ukrainian-left-struggle/

or downloaded here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QwQwaKvIM5FgTJ6a86QfmcBat5MNB7Se/view