UKR-TAZ

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.

Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal, an Australian-based journal that calls itself both a “journal for a post-Cold War left” and a journal for “Socialism of the 21st century,” has been publishing excellent material on the continuing Russian war on Ukraine.

Most recently, they have featured a video interview with political economist Yulia Yurchenko, urbanist Alona Liasheva, and cultural and political activist Ilya Budraitskis, and a lengthy article entitled “Ukraine, Self-Determination, and the National Question.” The authors of the latter — Bill Fletcher, Jr., Bill Gallegos, and Jamala Rogers — debunk some leftist myths about Russian aggression and develop a rigorous argument in support of “the Ukrainian struggle against aggression and for self-determination, including for self-defense.” “Standing with Ukrainians,” they conclude, “is an act of international solidarity of the oppressed.”  

An interview with Hanna Perekhoda, a University of Lausanne Ph.D. candidate in history who was recently featured on Democracy Now!, has also just appeared at Links’ ecosocialist “sister publication,” Green Left. Federico Fuentes’s interview with Perekhoda, entitled “Ukraine: Peace in Donbas ‘requires the complete withdrawal of Russian armed forces’,” is one of the most thorough yet concise summaries of the entire conflict and well worth reading, especially for its insights into the Donbas region.

The Links web site devoted to “special coverage” of the war includes an exhaustive listing of links to articles from the Ukrainian left, on Russian resistance to “Putin’s war,” and covering global and historical dimensions of the current crisis. It is an excellent resource.