I’m a Ukrainian Socialist. Here’s Why I Resist the Russian Invasion
I’m writing from Ukraine, where I serve in the Territorial Defense Forces. A year ago, I couldn’t have expected to be in this situation. Like millions of Ukrainians my life has been upturned by the chaos of war. For the past four months, I have had the opportunity to meet people whom I would hardly […]
10 Terrible Leftist Arguments against Ukrainian Resistance
Discussions with some on the (mostly) western left can be extremely hard. Some of their positions are disheartening to hear. Others seem hypocritical or cynical. There are, in my opinion, certain positions that are far from left principles. These points are not always expressed directly, so I want to briefly dig into some hidden messages […]
Ukrainian identity map in wartime: Thesis-antithesis-synthesis?
The cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of Ukraine is a well-known fact, used and abused in explanations of the ongoing war. Having taken root in the early modern period in the interstitial area contested by three empires – Polish, Turkish and Russian – the Ukrainian nation was, indeed, formed through demographic processes that have left […]
Russian Capitalism Today: A Case of ‘Primacy of Politics’?
The economic regime that has emerged in Russia has received a wide variety of characterizations and label forms. There are different terms from ‘state capitalism’ or various versions of ‘state capitalism’ such as Catherine Belton’s ‘hybrid KGB form of state capitalism’ to describe the regime under Putin, to Karen Dawisha’s ‘authoritarian kleptocracy’, Richard Sakwa’s ‘managed […]
Humanitarian aid is not enough
The war is now grinding into its fifth month and costing hundreds of lives every day, with no immediate end in sight. To get his perspective on what has unfolded since his letter was first published, Ivo Georgiev of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Kyiv Office sat down with Taras Bilous to discuss the war, the debate […]
The political logic of Russia’s imperialism
Beside my interrupted fieldwork in Ukraine (2021), this contribution to the war debate is based on my fieldwork in Belarus (2015-2017) and my conclusions on how Lukashenka’s ‘Caesarist regime’ mutated when faced with popular and geopolitical challenges to its ‘passive-revolutionary strategy’ (Artiukh 2020, 2021), to use Gramsci’s vocabulary. Drawing on my insights from Ukraine and […]
Self-Determination and the War in Ukraine
Two months ago, when I wrote “A Letter to the Western Left from Kyiv,” I hoped that the shock of the Russian invasion and the voices of the Ukrainian left would push Western leftists to reconsider their approach. Unfortunately, too many of them have failed to do so. In their analyses of the war, Ukrainians […]
Une guerre genante: que faire lorsque la Russie attaque l’Ukraine mais que tu es de gauche?
Текст статті відсутній / No text here
The war in Ukraine and the Global South
Peace is not the absence of war but a virtue born of the strength of the soul. Spinoza The best of the West is outside the West, in young Iranian women who let their hair down and are murdered because of it. The best of Europe is outside Europe, in the young Ukrainians who unfurl their […]
Murky future. What would Putin do in case of his military defeat?
The tenth of March, at 5 a.m. marked exactly two weeks since the start of a full-fledged Russian invasion of Ukraine, shamelessly dubbed a “special operation” by the Kremlin. The war continues right at this moment with countless civilian deaths in Kharkiv, Mariupol, Izium, and other Ukrainian cities, and with Russian tanks burning at the […]
