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The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology

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The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology

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https://www.academicstudiespress.com/ukrainianstudies/thewhitechalkofdays

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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
The Kennan Institute/Harriman Institute Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series
Introduction

A Note On Transliteration

ANDREY KURKOV
From Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv

HRYTSKO CHUBAI
The Woman
and ever so slowly looms . . .
The Corridor with Eye-Sized Doors
When your lips are but a half a breath away . . .
From Maria
Light and Confession

OLEH LYSHEHA
Song

MARJANA SAVKA
Books We've Never Read
From A Short History of Dance
Easter Jazz
For Yann Tiersen
Boston, April 2007
Baghdad Night
In This City
Who, Marlene, Who?
Some woman . . .
Organs of Sense
My beloved sun . . .

VIKTOR NEBORAK
From Genesis of the Flying Head
Monologue from a Canine Pretext
A Drum-Tympanum (a sonnet uttered by the Flying Head)
She (rap performance by the Kids of the Queenie) Part 3
An Itty Bitty Ditty 'bout Mr. Bazio (sung by Viktor Morozov)
Fish
Supper
Green sounds echo . . .
The Writer
The Poet

ANDRIY BONDAR
Genes
Slavic Gods
The Men of My Country
Just Don't Push Me Away
Fantasy
Robbie Williams
St. Nick No. 628
The Roman Alphabet
Jogging

YURI ANDRUKHOVYCH
The Star Absinthe: Notes on a Bitter Anniversary

TARAS PROKHASKO
Selections from FM Galicia

SERHIY ZHADAN
Chinese Cooking
Hotel Business
Children's Train
The Inner Color of Eyes
Alcohol
Contraband
Paprika
. . . not to wake her up . . .
The Lord Sympathizes with Outsiders
The Smallest Girl in Chinatown
Owner of the Best Gay Bar
The Percentage of Suicides among Clowns

IVAN MALKOVYCH
Stand up and look . . .
bird's elegy
happiness . . .
futile people
The Village Teacher's Lesson
Nothing is right here, you see: . . .
An Evening with Great-Grandma
The black parachute of anxiety grows . . .
There is much-I know-sadness . . .
The Man
The Music That Walked Away
At Home
I gaze at my mountains . . .
Tonight . . .
Circle
an evening (goose) pastoral
A Message for T.

VASYL GABOR
The High Water
A Story About One Dollar
Five Short Stories for Natalie-The Fifth Story-The Last One-The Lover

YURI VYNNYCHUK
The Flowerbed in the Kilim
Pea Soup
From Spring Games in Summer Gardens
Prologue
The Pilgrim's Dance, Part One
Malva Landa, Part One
Pears à la Crêpe

OLEKSANDR BOICHENKO
Out of Great Love
The Lunch of a Man of Letters
In a State of Siege

SOPHIA ANDRUKHOVYCH
An Out-of-tune-Piano, an Accordion

LYUBA YAKIMCHUK
Apricots of the Donbas
The Face of Coal
The Slag Piles of Breasts
Apricots in Hard Hats
My Grandmother's Fairy Tale
The Book of Angels
the eye of the slag heap
decomposition
eyebrows
I have a crisis for you
false friends and beloved
such people are called naked
marsala

About The Editor

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The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology - Academic Studies Press

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Compiled and edited by Mark Andryczyk Series: Ukrainian Studies & Kennan Institute/Harriman Institute Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series ISBN: 9781618116611 (cloth) / 9781618118622 (paper) Pages: 336 pp.; 15 illus. Publication Date: December 2017 Honorable Mention, 2018 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Translation Prize

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The Making of Tenderness by Lyuba Yakimchuk (poem)

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The Making of Tenderness by Lyuba Yakimchuk (poem)

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https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2022-10/the-making-of-tenderness/

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Words Without Borders is the premier destination for a global literary conversation. Founded in 2003, WWB seeks to expand cultural understanding by giving readers unparalleled access to contemporary world literature in English translation while providing a vital platform for today's international writers.

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Words Without Borders is the premier destination for a global literary conversation. Founded in 2003, WWB seeks to expand cultural understanding by giving readers unparalleled access to contemporary world literature in English translation while providing a vital platform for today's international writers.

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The Making of Tenderness - Words Without Borders

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Ukrainian poet Lyuba Yakimchuk wonders about the production of household goods and tenderness during wartime.

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On Our Way Home from the Revolution Reflections on Ukraine by Sonya Bilocerkowycz

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On Our Way Home from the Revolution Reflections on Ukraine by Sonya Bilocerkowycz

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On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine

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Following the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, a child of the Ukrainian diaspora challenges her formative ideologies, considers innocence and complicity, and questions the roots of patriotism.

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a moving grove by Iryna Shuvalova (poem)

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a moving grove by Iryna Shuvalova (poem)

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https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2023-02/a-moving-grove-iryna-shuvalova-uilleam-blacker/

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Words Without Borders is the premier destination for a global literary conversation. Founded in 2003, WWB seeks to expand cultural understanding by giving readers unparalleled access to contemporary world literature in English translation while providing a vital platform for today's international writers.

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One year after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, poet Iryna Shuvalova proposes an aesthetics of escape.

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Five Stalks of Grain Written by Adrian Lysenko, Illustrated by Ivanka Theodosia Galadza

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Five Stalks of Grain Written by Adrian Lysenko, Illustrated by Ivanka Theodosia Galadza

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https://press.ucalgary.ca/books/9781773853758/

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Words Without Borders is the premier destination for a global literary conversation. Founded in 2003, WWB seeks to expand cultural understanding by giving readers unparalleled access to contemporary world literature in English translation while providing a vital platform for today's international writers.

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Words Without Borders is the premier destination for a global literary conversation. Founded in 2003, WWB seeks to expand cultural understanding by giving readers unparalleled access to contemporary world literature in English translation while providing a vital platform for today's international writers.

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Speech and solitude intertwine in this poem by Ukrainian poet Iryna Shuvalova.

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Voices from Ukraine: A Reading List from Words Without Borders

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Voices from Ukraine: A Reading List from Words Without Borders

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https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2022-02/voices-from-ukraine-a-reading-list/

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Voices from Ukraine: A Reading List - Words Without Borders

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Some of this writing engages directly with Ukraine’s history of armed conflict with Russia, but the majority addresses more quotidian themes.

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https://ui.org.ua/en/
Available in English.

Contains information on Ukrainian music, art, language, literature, and more.

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we facilitate international connections between people and institutions, and create opportunities for Ukraine to interact and cooperate with the rest in the world. more Programmes and projects Films Music Visual arts Literature Performing arts Academic projects and programmes Cross sector projects and programmes Developing cultural diplomacy...

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https://www.amazon.com/Kobzar-Taras-Shevchenko/dp/1909156558

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Folk Tradition and Patriotic Symbol – Interesting Facts About Ukrainian Vyshyvanka

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Folk Tradition and Patriotic Symbol – Interesting Facts About Ukrainian Vyshyvanka

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https://www.kyivpost.com/post/17235

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Get the Latest Ukraine News Today - KyivPost

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On May 18, Ukraine and the world celebrate Vyshyvanka Day. A vyshyvanka is an embroidered fabric, and on Vyshyvanka Day, Ukrainians wear traditional embroidered clothing.

It's a young holiday. It began to be celebrated only in 2006 and quickly became very popular. It is celebrated in 60 countries where the Ukrainian diaspora is present. Kyiv Post has collected some interesting facts about the embroidered code of Ukrainian identity.

Vyshyvanka Day is celebrated in 60 countries of the world

Vyshyvanka Day has a special significance this year, as Russia continues its full-scale war against Ukraine. The embroidered shirt worn on May 18 became another symbol of the indomitable Ukrainian spirit, a statement to the whole world that Ukrainians are a free people.

President Volodymyr Zelensky sets the trend for embroidery. His khaki shirts with symbolic patterns date back to Kyivan Rus. Tanks and armored personnel carriers are becoming popular embroidered images among Ukrainians. The olive drab shirts worn by the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Valery Zaluzhny and have become the color of the season - not to mention woodland and pixelated camouflage patterns. The famous explosive sniffing dog Patron also has an embroidered shirt. Indeed, Ukrainians joke that pixelated camo is just embroidery run amok.

Valery Zaluzhny with gifted vyshyvanka. Photo: Facebook

Today, vyshyvanka is experiencing a renaissance, because Ukrainians are more united than ever in supporting their own traditions. Elements of Ukrainian embroidery are increasingly seen in collections by global fashion houses, and Hollywood stars are also eager to wear them.

British businessman Sir Richard Branson

Ancient origins

Ukrainian embroidery has an extremely ancient origin. Embroidered clothes and similar patterns are found on vases from the Scythian period (4th century BC) and in the graves of Sarmatians (1st century AD) during excavations. Even gold-embroidered shirts have been found. Archeologists assert that they must have been very valuable to be placed in graves.

The most ancient finds. Photo: spadok.org.ua

The first vyshyvankas were not so much items of clothing as amulets against evil and misfortune. That is why shirts were decorated with different patterns on sleeves, collars and hems - wherever they touched the body. There was a special embroidery for each ritual. Children were given an embroidered shirt at birth to protect them from evil spirits.

Ukrainian children in their best outfits. Collection Honchar Museum

In the past, girls learned to embroider from the age of five. Brides had to embroider a shirt not only for themselves but also for their grooms. And at the wedding, the groom wore a shirt embroidered by his mother, and then a shirt embroidered by the bride.

Ukrainian wedding

For Ukrainians, the vyshyvanka was never an everyday garment. In times before the advent of modern washing machines and detergents, it took months to create one shirt, so was very impractical to wear an embroidered shirt every day. Everyday shirts were not decorated with anything at all.

Regional differences

Each region of Ukraine has its own embroidery features. In total, there are about a hundred embroidery techniques in Ukraine. Until 1860, techniques such as low stitch, top stitch, goat stitch and other types of stitches were popular in Ukraine.

Motifs found in Ukrainian embroidery with geometric patterns are thought to be the oldest: various rhombuses, zigzags, circles, wavy lines, meanders, spots, etc. At the same time, such embroidery techniques as "straight-smooth" and " retyaz " (a type of cross) were used - the latter being especially popular in western Ukraine.

One of the most original embroideries is Borshchivskaya, it comes from the Borshchiv district in Ternopil. This shirt is embroidered with black threads. There is a legend that when the Turks and Tatars destroyed almost all the men in Borshchiv, the women of this and neighboring settlements for several generations wore only such black and white shirts as a sign of mourning.

A sample of Borshchivskayaya embroidery

The "white on white" technique is unique to embroideries from the Poltava region. The preparation for needlework embroidery would be started three years before the beginning of the creation of the pattern. The main and longest process was the bleaching of threads.

Poltava vyshyvanka

In ancient times, in order to obtain dazzling linen with a frosty pattern, embroiderers from Poltava came up with a method of spreading threads on the banks of rivers during the hottest days. That way the four elements - water, sun, air, earth - "charged" the threads. And from a practical point of view, the river reflected the sun's rays well, and the threads would naturally fade into their snow-white hue.

Organic origins

Before the advent of artificial aniline dyes, embroiderers used exclusively natural dyes obtained from decoctions and tinctures of herbs, bark, flowers, and fruit juice. For example, all shades of yellow were obtained from wheat straw. For the tone to be golden, these threads were baked in rye dough. Heat treatment in combination with steam fixed the color.

Patron, the explosive-sniffing dog

Vyshyvankas were divided by color. Black embroidered jackets were worn exclusively by men. Blue embroidered shirts were in the wardrobe of women who did not want or could not give birth, or girls up to 12 years old.

Today, Ukrainians, whether at home, in places of temporary refuge, or in the large diaspora, proudly where their embroidered garments as an affirmation of their cultural heritage and sense of national pride.

Kyiv Post kozaks

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Folk Tradition and Patriotic Symbol - Interesting Facts About Ukrainian Vyshyvanka

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On May 18, Ukraine and the world celebrate Vyshyvanka Day. A vyshyvanka is an embroidered fabric, and on Vyshyvanka Day, Ukrainians wear traditional embroidered clothing. It's a young holiday. It began to be celebrated only in 2006 and quickly became very popular. It is celebrated in 60 countries where the Ukrainian diaspora is present.

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https://www.kyivpost.com/

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Get the Latest Ukraine News Today - KyivPost

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Get the Latest Ukraine News Today - KyivPost

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The Kyiv Post Delivers Exclusive and In-Depth News and Opinions on Politics, Economics - Get Your Daily News Brief Direct from Ukraine Today!

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https://kyivindependent.com/vyshyvanka-traditional-ukrainian-embroidered-shirt/

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Vyshyvanka, the Ukrainian word for a traditionally styled embroidered shirt or dress, is the central feature of Ukraine's national clothing. The shirts are traditionally made of linen and the designs are often ornate and colorful and represent features of Ukraine's landscape or cultural values.

In the past, vyshyvankas were worn regularly by both men and women in Ukrainian villages, with highly specific regional differences. Nowadays, they are mostly worn for national holidays and festivities.

In recent years, vyshyvankas have become more popular and more fashionable, fueled by a heightened interest in Ukrainian national identity in the wake of the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution and the subsequent Russian illegal annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, as well as Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

What's behind their design?

Traditionally, there are six main colors of Ukrainian embroidery: white, black, red, blue, yellow, and green, each with its own significance.

Red and black are the most commonly used colors in vyshyvanka patterns. Red is considered to represent luck, joy, and love. Black, contrary to its association with sorrow, symbolizes wisdom in Ukrainian embroidery. The color black is also said to symbolize Ukraine's fertile soil. In some regions, vyshyvankas were decorated with black ornaments for weddings to wish the couple wealth and a strong marriage.

The color white in Ukrainian embroidery is associated with purity, innocence, and holiness. Vyshyvankas with blue embroidery were traditonally worn by men, especially those going to war, as the color blue is considered a kind of amulet that protects against diseases and brings peace of mind. Yellow represents the color of the sun and wheat, symbolizing abundance, joy, and well-being. The color green symbolizes spring and youth.

The patterns on vyshyvankas often include three main motifs: plants, animals, and geometric shapes. Plant patterns represent the "tree of life," prosperity, and harvest.

At times, vyshyvanka patterns are abstract and feature only geometric shapes, such as rhombuses, said to be associated with fertility. In the past, a young unmarried woman would have had this kind of vyshyvanka.

The design of the vyshyvanka varies depending on the region, and at one point in history were even a marker of someone's specific village. The embroideries of Kyiv Oblast usually have geometric-plant ornaments with stylized bunches of grapes, hops or eight-petal rosettes. The main colors of the Kyiv region are white, coral-red, and black. In Ukraine's southern oblasts, the embroidery technique has unique polychrome ornaments like a cross. In the western parts of Ukraine, many villages have their own specific vyshyvanka patterns that vary from village to village.

How old are they?

Vyshyvankas are said to have existed since the fifth century in Ukraine, since the time of Scythians, an ancient nomadic group of people from the territory that is now modern-day Ukraine and southern Russia. Statues of Scythian women were found with the elements of the pattern that could be considered the first vyshyvanka.

Embroidery dating back to Kyivan Rus from the 10-12th centuries features shirts with anthropomorphic motifs, images of plants and animals, and many geometric figures. In Kyivan Rus, men's shirts were adorned with embroidery only near the collar, while women's shirts were more ornately embroidered, especially near the collar, on the sleeves, and on the hem of a skirt.

In the 11th century, Anna Vsevolodovna, the sister of Volodymyr Monomakh who reigned as Grand Prince of the Kyivan Rus from 1113 to 1125, opened a school for girls where they were taught the art of embroidery.

There are multiple records of embroidered clothes in written sources such as "The Tale of Igor's Campaign," an anonymous epic poem written in the Old East Slavic language dating back to the late 12th century, and the Hypatian Codex, a collection of chronicles rediscovered in what is today Ukraine in 1617 and considered the most important source of historical data for the southern Kyivan Rus.

For Cossacks in the Zaporozhian Sich, a semi-autonomous proto-state in southern Ukraine that existed between the 16th and 18th centuries, vyshyvankas served as talismans in battles to protect their lands from enemies. According to different sources, Cossacks believed that embroidered shirts with linen brought them closer to the motherland, and helped and inspired warriors to win in battle.

When are they worn?

Ukrainians nowadays wear vyshyvankas on special occasions such as national holidays or weddings. They are also worn to celebrate the Day of Vyshyvanka every third Thursday of May. This holiday is aimed at preserving Ukrainian culture and folk art.

The idea for the Day of Vyshyvanka comes from a Chernivtsi university student, Lesia Voroniuk, who suggested in 2006 that her classmates and all students choose one day to all wear vyshyvankas. A couple of years later, it had become a national tradition. The Ukrainian diaspora supported the idea of this holiday worldwide and now also wear vyshyvankas on that day.

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Vyshyvanka, the Ukrainian word for a traditionally styled embroidered shirt or dress, is the central feature of Ukraine's national clothing. The shirts are traditionally made of linen and the designs are often ornate and colorful and represent features of Ukraine's landscape or cultural values. In the past, vyshyvankas

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https://www.rferl.org/Ukraine

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RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service is dedicated to covering all of Ukraine, including the conflict zones and Crimea, and sets a standard for balanced reporting and high-impact investigative journalism.​
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The quality and independence of Ukraine's media as a whole are still limited, and RFE/RL's Radio Svoboda is the country's most popular and trusted international broadcaster. Radio Svoboda celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2014.

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The Living Ghosts of the Second World War and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

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The Living Ghosts of the Second World War and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

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https://origins.osu.edu/read/living-ghosts-second-world-war-and-russian-invasion-ukraine

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The Living Ghosts of the Second World War and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine | Origins

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In Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 speech announcing Russia’s “special military operation”—in fact a full-scale invasion of Ukraine intended to topple the Ukrainian government—the Russian president framed the current Russia-Ukraine conflict through the lens of the horrors of the

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The Cossacks, Ukraine’s Paradigmatic Warriors

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The Cossacks, Ukraine’s Paradigmatic Warriors

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEM50xTtISg

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The Cossacks, Ukraine’s Paradigmatic Warriors

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Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution by Julia Alekseyeva 

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Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution by Julia Alekseyeva 

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https://microcosmpublishing.com/catalog/books/6320

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Soviet Daughter provides a window into the life of a rebellious, independent woman coming of age in the USSR, and the impact of her story and her spirit on her American great-granddaughter, two extraordinary women swept up in the history of their tumultuous times.

Soviet Daughter is the story of Julia Alekseyeva's great-grandmother Lola. Born in 1910 to a poor, Jewish family outside of Kiev, Lola lived through the Bolshevik revolution, a horrifying civil war, Stalinist purges, and the Holocaust. She taught herself to read, and supported her extended family working as a secretary for the notorious NKVD (which became the KGB) and later as a lieutenant for the Red Army. Her family, including 4-year-old Julia, immigrated to the U.S. as refugees in the wake of Chernobyl and forged a new life. Interleaved with Lola's history we find Julia's own struggles of coming of age in an immigrant family and her political awakening in the midst of the radical politics of the turn of the millennium.

At times heartbreaking and at times funny, this graphic novel memoir unites two generations of strong, independent women against a sweeping backdrop of the history of the USSR. Like Sarah Glidden in How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, or Marjane Satrapi in Persepolis, Alekseyeva deftly combines compelling stories of women finding their way in the world with an examination of the ties we all have with our families, ethnicities, and the still-fresh traumas of the 20th century.

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Soviet Daughter provides a window into the life of a rebellious, independent woman coming of age in the USSR, and the impact of her story and her spirit on her American great-granddaughter, two extraordinary women swept up in the history of their tumultuous times. Soviet Daughter is the story of Julia Alekseyeva's great-grandmother Lola.

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https://store.deepvellum.org/products/life-went-on-anyway-stories

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By Oleg Sentsov Translated by Uilleam Blacker This timely collection of stories is by a Sakharov Peace Prize-winning Ukrainian film director, whose political imprisonment in Russia since 2014 is an international cause célèbre. Publication Date: October 15, 2019 Paperback: 9781941920879eBook: 9781941920886 Description "

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Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine by Anna Reid

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Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine by Anna Reid

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https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/anna-reid/borderland/9781541603486/

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"A beautifully written evocation of Ukraine's brutal past and its shaky efforts to construct a better future . . . Reid succeeds in vividly conjuring up dozens of little known heroes and villains of Ukrainian history . . . Reid summons up the rogues and poets of Ukraine's past with a deft touch, but her real theme is the tragedy which has been Ukraine's lot for much of its history . . . Borderland is a tapestry woven of the stories of all its inhabitants, recording their triumphs and their conﬂicts with the fairness of a compassionate outsider."-Financial Times

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"A beautifully written evocation of Ukraine's brutal past and its shaky efforts to construct a better future . . . Reid succeeds in vividly conjuring up dozens of little ­known heroes and villains of Ukrainian history . . .

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The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy

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The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/serhii-plokhy/the-gates-of-europe/9781541675643/

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"For a comprehensive, engaging, and up-to-date history of Ukraine one could do no better than Serhii Plokhy's aptly titled The Gates of Europe. Plokhy's authoritative study will be of great value to scholars, students, policy-makers, and the informed public alike in making sense of the contemporary Ukrainian imbroglio."-Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University

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"For a comprehensive, engaging, and up-to-date history of Ukraine one could do no better than Serhii Plokhy's aptly titled The Gates of Europe. Plokhy's authoritative study will be of great value to scholars, students, policy-makers, and the informed public alike in making sense of the contemporary Ukrainian imbroglio."-Norman M.

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Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know by Serhy Yekelchyk

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Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know by Serhy Yekelchyk

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https://whateveryoneneedstoknow.com/display/10.1093/wentk/9780197532102.001.0001/isbn-9780197532102;jsessionid=8A57DE3E3074B0EF259EA82854ADF251

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Serhy Yekelchyk

Abstract

Conventional wisdom dictates that Ukraine's political crises can be traced to the linguistic differences and divided political loyalties that have long fractured the country. However, this theory obscures the true significance of Ukraine's recent civic revolution and the conflict's crucial international dimension. The 2013-14 Ukrainian revolution presented authoritarian powers in Russia with both a democratic and a geopolitical challenge. In reality, political conflict in Ukraine is reflective of global discord, stemming from differing views on state power, civil society, and democracy. Ukraine's sudden prominence in American politics has compounded an already-widespread misunderstanding of what is actually happening in the nation. In the American media, Ukraine has come to signify an inherently corrupt place, rather than a real country struggling in the face of great challenges. Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know® is an updated edition of Serhy Yekelchyk's 2015 publication, The Conflict in Ukraine. It addresses Ukraine's relations with the West, particularly the United States, from the perspective of Ukrainians. The book explains how independent Ukraine fell victim to crony capitalism, how its people rebelled twice in the last two decades in the name of democracy and against corruption, and why Russia reacted so aggressively to the strivings of Ukrainians. Additionally, it looks at what we know about alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, the factors behind the stunning electoral victory of the political novice Volodymyr Zelensky, and the ways in which the events leading to the impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump have changed the Russia-Ukraine-US relationship. This volume is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the forces that have shaped contemporary politics in this increasingly important part of Europe, as well as the international background of the impeachment proceedings in the US

Keywords: communism, Orange Revolution, pro-Russian movement, US-Ukrainian relations, Western conspiracy

Bibliographic Information

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Conventional wisdom dictates that Ukraine's political crises can be traced to the linguistic differences and divided political loyalties that have long fractured the country. However, this theory obscures the true significance of Ukraine's recent civic revolution and the conflict's crucial international dimension.

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https://shevchenko.ca/taras-shevchenko/poetry.cfm

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Taras Shevchenko, the national bard of Ukraine, is a founder of modern Ukrainian literature and language. A champion of people's freedom, with his poetry, he played a leading role in the formation of the Ukrainian national identity and consciousness. Political and revolutionary, his poems which speak to the struggles of all oppressed peoples have been translated into over 100 languages.

Shevchenko's poetry ranges from romantic ballads and heroic poems, to philosophical and visionary meditations, in which he reflects on the meaning of life and the future. His literary legacy consists of 237 poetic works (ballads, poems, lyrical verses, elegies, satires, and meditations), nine novellas, a journal, an autobiography, and plays. They were composed in different periods of his life and in various geographical locations - Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Due to tsarist censorship, very few of Shevchenko's poems were published during his lifetime.

The poems are presented in their original translations.

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Taras Shevchenko, the national bard of Ukraine, is a founder of modern Ukrainian literature and language. A champion of people's freedom, with his poetry, he played a leading role in the formation of the Ukrainian national identity and consciousness. Political and revolutionary, his poems which speak to the struggles of all oppressed peoples have been translated into over 100 languages.

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https://www.ndbooks.com/book/lucky-breaks/

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Out of the impoverished Ukrainian coal regions known as the Donbass, where Russian secret military intervention mixes with banditry and insurgency, the women of Yevgenia Belorusets's captivating collection of stories Lucky Breaks emerge from the ruins of an ongoing war. Through a series of unexpected encounters, we are pulled into the ordinary lives of these anonymous women: a florist, a cosmetologist, readers of horoscopes, the unemployed, cardplayers, a witch who catches newborns with a mitt. One refugee tries unsuccessfully to leave her broken umbrella behind as if it were a sick relative; another sits down on International Women's Day and can no longer stand up. With a mix of humor, verisimilitude, the undramatic, and a profound irony reminiscent of Gogol, Belorusets threads these tales of ebullient survival with twenty-three photographs that form a narrative in lyrical and historical counterpoint.

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Lucky Breaks | New Directions Publishing

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Out of the impoverished Ukrainian coal regions known as the Donbass, where Russian secret military intervention mixes with banditry and insurgency, the women of Yevgenia Belorusets's captivating collection of stories Lucky Breaks emerge from the ruins of an ongoing war.

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https://www.wordsforwar.com/

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Russia’s War on Ukraine Changed Global Oil Trade. Here Is What It Looks Like Now

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Russia’s War on Ukraine Changed Global Oil Trade. Here Is What It Looks Like Now

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-war-on-ukraine-changed-global-oil-trade-here-is-what-it-looks-like-now-11674740567

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Russia's war on Ukraine has redrawn the global oil map, rerouting a fleet of skyscraper-size tankers on longer voyages as they shuttle crude shipments that are essential to the global economy.

The Wall Street Journal analyzed data from the ship-tracking firm Spire Global that showed the paths of about 3,000 such vessels to find those leaving Russian ports across periods before and after the Russian invasion on Feb. 24. Using location-tracking signals shared by ships and authorities, the information shows how fallout from the invasion cut longtime trade ties and left the Kremlin rushing to find the money it needs to fund its war machine.

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Russia's War on Ukraine Changed Global Oil Trade. Here Is What It Looks Like Now.

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Russia's war on Ukraine has redrawn the global oil map, rerouting a fleet of skyscraper-size tankers on longer voyages as they shuttle crude shipments that are essential to the global economy. The Wall Street Journal analyzed data from the ship-tracking firm Spire Global that showed the paths of about 3,000 such vessels to find those leaving Russian ports across periods before and after the Russian invasion on Feb.

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West Ukraine's War Stories: A New Chapter?

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West Ukraine's War Stories: A New Chapter?

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https://youtu.be/piUnc5j5qsg

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West Ukraine’s War Stories: A New Chapter?

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West Ukraine’s War Stories: A New Chapter?

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West Ukraine’s War Stories: A New Chapter?

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https://origins.osu.edu/read/west-ukraines-war-stories-new-chapter

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West Ukraine's War Stories: A New Chapter?

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The region of western Ukraine makes up just a small percentage of the territory and population of present-day Ukraine, but has historically played an outsized role in the 20th

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The Religious Roots of the War in Ukraine

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The Religious Roots of the War in Ukraine

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https://origins.osu.edu/read/religious-roots-war-ukraine?fbclid=IwAR02m6IBQN0sb84lCJuc8MUFlrAGY6Vk2ixbJRaWpU7sOaHD3drQIJbHv50

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The Religious Roots of the War in Ukraine

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Three days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) called on God to "preserve the Russian land... the land which now includes

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The Cossacks, Ukraine’s Paradigmatic Warriors

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The Cossacks, Ukraine’s Paradigmatic Warriors

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https://origins.osu.edu/read/cossacks-ukraines-paradigmatic-warriors

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The Cossacks, Ukraine's Paradigmatic Warriors

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Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian army has proven itself mighty and tenacious to an international community that may have previously thought them quiet and unassuming.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8kDg3PcAYM

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1ii17kuy1w

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoeDsZRU1nc

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YALrhT6EO1Q

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAW85BCsoRg

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Rewatching Zelensky’s Servant of the People as Russia Wages War on Ukraine 

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Rewatching Zelensky’s Servant of the People as Russia Wages War on Ukraine 

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https://lithub.com/rewatching-zelenskys-servant-of-the-people-as-russia-wages-war-on-ukraine/

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I am a writer, but at the first reports of Russian shelling over Kyiv in February, my fixations shifted from the realm of words to that of numbers: the number of hours a friend waited in line at the Polish border to evacuate (23); the number of kilometers between the bombed oil depot and my cousin's house (28); the number of missiles Russia has launched at Ukraine (nearly 2,000); the number of Russian tanks destroyed by Ukrainian forces (725); the number of IFAK and trauma kits needed for an aid shipment (more, always more); the number of people still trapped and starving in Mariupol, the city around them being razed to the ground (120,000).

Last weekend a mass grave of Ukrainian civilians was found in Bucha. I am inclined to stop the essay here. What else is there to say? My sentences feel dry and dusty. I do not recognize them.

Though I have lived and worked in Ukraine in the past, and have family and friends there now, I am not there. I am in the US, far away from Russia's airstrikes. My grandparents came to America from Ukraine as WWII refugees. They had survived the horrors of the Nazi and Soviet occupations, and clung to their Ukrainian identity and culture. Busia, my grandmother, said that during the years they were in a displaced persons camp after the war, she and other Ukrainians would stage theatrical renditions of Taras Shevchenko's narrative poems.

When they finally settled in Chicago, my grandparents hung embroidered portraits of Shevchenko and other Ukrainian poets like Ivan Franko and Lesya Ukrainka in the living room. As a child I stayed in their house for several months each year, so perhaps it is no coincidence that I grew up to identify as a Ukrainian-American writer.

When Lit Hub asked if I wanted to write about Servant of the People, the comedy series Volodymyr Zelensky created and starred in prior to becoming president of Ukraine (the first season of which Netflix brought back last month), my initial reaction was no. Though I have been thinking and writing about Ukrainian art for a long time, when Russia launched its full-scale war on February 24, my desire to engage with art dissipated. Comedy, as a genre and a concept, seemed irrelevant. What's the point of composing some dried-out English sentences from afar? My books are secure on the shelves around me, while in areas of Ukraine that have been occupied, there are reports of Russian troops seizing and burning Ukrainian literature.

Servant of the People first aired on Ukrainian channel 1+1 and on YouTube in 2015, the year after the Maidan revolution overthrew Ukraine's corrupt, pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Russia had retaliated by annexing Crimea and starting a war in the Donbas region. Maidan was the country's third revolution in 25 years, which reveals something about how Ukrainians conceive of their own political agency. While they embrace free and fair elections, there is also an emphasis on corporeal politics and direct action, on imagining impossible things and then propelling those things into existence.
In the Ukrainian context, speculative politics and speculative art have a kind of eerie immediacy, their imagined worlds soon borne out by material realities.
One example is when Ukrainian revolutionaries seized Yanukovych's lavish and sprawling presidential estate Mezhyhirya, north of Kyiv. What had been a highly secretive private compound stuffed with vintage cars and Italian furniture was transformed into a public park and the site of a summer camp for displaced children from Crimea and Donbas. When I strolled the verdant grounds overlooking the Dnipro River as a visitor to Mezhyhirya in 2014, it felt like a sort of eat-the-rich dreamscape made real. (Currently, the basement of Yanukovych's former mansion is serving as a bomb shelter for local families.)

In the Ukrainian context, speculative politics and speculative art have a kind of eerie immediacy, their imagined worlds soon borne out by material realities. This is famously evident in Zelensky's rise to the presidency on an anti-corruption platform following Servant of the People. In the series, Zelensky plays Vasyl Petrovych Holoborodko, a history teacher who lives with his parents in their Kyiv apartment and reads Plutarch before bed. (The character is said to be named after living Ukrainian poet Vasyl Holoborodko-reportedly to the poet's chagrin.) He is fed-up with political corruption in the country, and one day channels his frustrations into a profanity-laden rant after class. A student is secretly recording, and the video of Holoborodko's outburst goes viral, his rage and candor resonating widely in this fictional version of Ukrainian society. His students then organize a crowdfunding effort to register Holoborodko as a presidential candidate.

Zelensky's character is bewildered and embarrassed by all the attention. After he miraculously wins the election, Holoborodko continues to embrace an everyman identity, by, for instance, trying to evade his security detail so he can take a marshrutka bus to work. There's a Ted Lasso-style earnestness to Holoborodko in season one, as if the show is sincerely testing out the premise that a regular, decent person can sanctify the tarnished corridors of power by mainly just being himself.

Of course, that aura of sincerity was intentional, and not only for its narrative effect. "We were not just making a kind of humorous critique but also proposing something to society, putting forward our vision," one of the show's writers, Yuriy Kostyuk, told The New Yorker in 2019. "In fact, the show was successful precisely because we weren't indifferent-we really wanted Servant of the People to demonstrate that a different life was possible." After he won the election, Zelensky appointed Kostyuk to his presidential administration.

I binged the first season of Servant of the People over a weekend in 2019, while sick at home with the flu. Zelensky had been inaugurated a few months earlier, but I had avoided his show until then, in part because several Ukrainian friends had expressed reservations about their country electing an actor-turned-president-a concern I certainly empathized with. I found myself charmed by Zelensky's portrayal and also leery of it. He was a good storyteller, but does that translate into good leadership?
Servant of the People today is to view a work of art from a country facing a renewed existential threat, and thus rapidly changing in real time.
In one early episode, Holoborodko tells the prime minister Yuriy Chuiko (played by Stanislav Boklan) that he has some ideas for his upcoming inaugural address. Before he can elaborate, Chuiko interrupts and dismisses him, explaining to Holoborodko that they have speech writers for that, so the president shouldn't concern himself with such trivialities and minutiae. "You think it's minutiae?" Holoborodko asks, visibly disappointed. To him-and to Zelensky-crafting narrative is not an afterthought or a chore to delegate. It is central to how he understands the responsibilities of his office.

It's hard to ignore the potency of narrative in Ukrainian political life, given how Servant of the People 's fictional storyline served as a scaffolding for reality. Today, it's not enough for the Russian occupiers to try and destroy Ukrainian people, including Zelensky-they are also destroying Ukrainian books. Putinism demands the suppression of Ukrainian literature and stories in order to continue Moscow's long legacy of colonial violence toward Ukraine.

For several centuries, Russian imperial authorities subjected Ukrainians to systemic persecution and, in 1863, banned the publication of most texts in the Ukrainian language. Under Soviet-era policy in the 1930s, a generation of Ukrainian modernist writers were murdered or deported in what is called the "Executed Renaissance." That name emerged through the title of an anthology, edited two decades later by exiled Ukrainian writer Yuriy Lavrinenko, who attempted-with much difficulty-to curate a selection of work from those vanished authors. Lavrinenko notes that out of 259 Ukrainian writers who had managed to publish in the USSR in 1930, only 36 of them were still active by 1938. Lavrinenko himself survived over three years in a Siberian gulag. Now, in 2022, Russian state media is openly calling for the "de-Ukrainianization" of Ukraine.

What does it mean, then, to be a writer in this tradition? When a Ukrainian text articulates a vision of the future, it inevitably pushes back against the past, against the violence that sought-and seeks-its erasure. I decided to write this essay about Servant of the People because Ukrainian art does not exist in some separate sphere, exempt from Russia's war. What's interesting, and perhaps less legible to a non-Ukrainian viewer, is that when Servant of the People first aired, not everyone was satisfied with how it represented Ukrainian-ness.
When a Ukrainian text articulates a vision of the future, it inevitably pushes back against the past, against the violence that sought-and seeks-its erasure.
One criticism was that the series treats the 2014 Maidan revolution flippantly, in that it depicts a proliferation of "Maidans" (especially in season 3) as a detriment to national unity. For Ukrainians who mourn the protestors murdered by government snipers during what is known as the "Revolution of Dignity," a dismissive portrayal does not sit well. It echoes aspects of the Kremlin's chosen narrative about Maidan, namely that it sowed chaos.

It also troubled viewers that, aside from a few passing jokes, Putin and Russia are hardly mentioned in the show. The Russian occupation of Crimea and the war in Donbas do not exist in Holoborodko's Ukraine, despite that by the time the series premiered, Russia's aggression had caused the internal displacement of 1.5 million people and several thousand deaths. It is a glaring omission that obscures Russia's role in destabilizing Ukraine.

Another salient point of contention is that the characters in Servant of the People speak almost entirely in Russian, with Ukrainian used briefly for ceremonial purposes, newscasts, et cetera. Recalling the history of Moscow's suppression of the Ukrainian language can help explain both why this fact about the show bothered some Ukrainians, and why it is a fact at all. Russification has long been part of the colonial project, though it would be wrong to imply that Russophone Ukrainians somehow lack agency. Zelensky is a native Russian speaker who made a concerted effort to improve his Ukrainian language skills when he ran for president, and who also promoted a pluralistic message with regard to Ukraine's linguistic diversity and its widespread bilingualism.

That said, Russia's current brutality seems to be hastening a process of grassroots Ukrainianization that began in 2014. One widely shared meme video even appears to show Zelensky forgetting several Russian words during a recent interview with Russian journalists. Some friends who didn't support Zelensky in 2019 now express their admiration for him and for how he uses narrative to galvanize and comfort in his nightly video updates. Unlike the show, these videos are trenchant about Russia's sole responsibility for the devastation in Bucha, Mariupol, and across Ukraine. To view Servant of the People today is to view a work of art from a country facing a renewed existential threat, and thus rapidly changing in real time.

"No matter what, we all have to think about the future," Zelensky said in his video update on March 31. "About what Ukraine will be like after this war. How we will live. Because this is a war for our future."

When I imagine the specifics, I see a future permeated with innumerable Ukrainian stories. Stories that stretch themselves into Chicago living rooms and other places far beyond Ukraine's borders. If these dried-out sentences can alchemize into something real, maybe it is in their function as a portal. To be in solidarity with Ukrainians, go watch a Ukrainian comedy. Read Ukrainian essays and poems, fiction and memoir. Support Ukrainian publishers and translators of Ukrainian literature. Listen to Ukrainian folk music and hip-hop. Encounter Ukrainian architecture and art.

These are not trivialities or afterthoughts, but the exact mediums through which Ukrainians will, once again, envision and rebuild.

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Rewatching Zelensky's Servant of the People as Russia Wages War on Ukraine

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I am a writer, but at the first reports of Russian shelling over Kyiv in February, my fixations shifted from the realm of words to that of numbers: the number of hours a friend waited in line at the Polish border to evacuate (23); the number of kilometers between the

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https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2022/03/25/the-nation-ukraine-has-become/

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A sardonic joke has been spreading on Ukrainian social media since Russia began its full-scale invasion of the country on February 24. There are several variations, but it basically goes: Maybe now NATO can apply to join Ukraine. While Ukrainians have expressed a strong desire to join the NATO alliance in recent years, this meme flips that expected script, highlighting instead the colossal resistance efforts undertaken by Ukrainians since the invasion began. These efforts have stunned onlookers; the David and Goliath cliché seems actually to apply. Against the enormity of the Russian military, few outside Ukraine expected Ukrainians to put up such a fierce fight, or to maintain control of major cities for as long as they have.

Despite its impossible premise, the meme holds an implicit question for NATO countries and their allies: Do you really know, or remember, what your alliance is for? Because Ukrainians certainly do. As, respectively, a Ukrainian who has spent most of her life in the UK (Khromeychuk), and an American with Ukrainian ethnicity (Bilocerkowycz), we exist at the intersection of Ukrainian and "Western" cultures and concerns. We see it as crucial not only that the Ukrainian resistance wins active support abroad, but also that Ukrainians gain recognition as global leaders of the democratic world with a deep understanding of what's at stake in this pivotal moment. The seismic changes that have occurred-and are occurring now-in Ukrainian society beg us to consider, simultaneously, what is changing and will change in the West.

For Ukraine, 2014 was a year of tragedies that changed everything: the killing of protesters during the Maidan Revolution; Russia's illegal occupation of Crimea; the start of the Donbas war in the East. Yet these events also deepened Ukrainian civic identity and accelerated the maturation of Ukraine's democratic culture in ways that continue today, even as Russian rockets and bombs fall on its cities. After 2014, Ukrainians asked themselves what sort of country they wished to live in, and then set about building it with a sense of urgency. As Ukraine faces down a brutally belligerent Vladimir Putin, it is the Ukrainian people who are defining what the future of European security and democracy will look like for all.

"Soul and body we'll lay down, all for our freedom." This line from the Ukrainian national anthem, a pathos-filled poem in the best traditions of nineteenth-century Romantic nationalism, acquired a very real meaning for Ukrainians in 2014. It rang from speakers on Independence Square in Kyiv and was sung by all who could several times a day: in defiance of the riot police, in celebration of repelled attacks, and in mourning the victims. The anthem was sung both by those who had learned it at school and knew it well and by those who were learning it for the first time.

Each found comfort and meaning in this poem, which had been written by an ethnographer from Kyiv (when it was still part of the Russian Empire) and set to music by a Greek Catholic priest from Galicia (which was then within the Austrian Empire). Feminists made a small alteration to the line "And we'll show that we're brothers of Cossack stock," replacing "brothers" with "sisters." They might have gotten sideways glances from fellow protesters at first, but it was a creation of a new tradition, like so much in Ukraine that year.

The Maidan demonstrations began as a rally against President Viktor Yanukovych's decision to suspend preparations for signing an Association Agreement with the European Union, thus refusing to strengthen Ukraine's ties with the EU, but it turned into a revolution against abuse of power, corruption, and the attempt by Yanukovych's regime to turn Ukraine into a dictatorship. This was not the first people's uprising staged by Ukrainians.

There's a popular notion that Ukrainians like to take to the streets at least every decade. The big protests the country saw before the Maidan were during the Orange Revolution in 2004, triggered by a fraudulent presidential election. The seeds of that movement had been sown in 1990 during the Revolution on the Granite, a student-led protest that greeted the disintegration of the USSR with a central claim to Ukrainian independence and statehood. There were other protests, too, including powerful miners' strikes in the Donbas in the 1990s. But the Maidan was special. It was a moment when Ukrainians did not just make their voices heard, but made a lasting difference. Yanukovych fled the country and his pro-European successor was democratically elected-a nightmare for Vladimir Putin and his plans to keep the country under Russian influence.

This "reloading of the country," as one of the Maidan protest signs described the revolution, came at a high price. More than a hundred protesters were killed on Independence Square. Peaceful, unarmed demonstrators were targeted and shot by the police. Many others were humiliated, kidnapped, and sometimes murdered by state-hired thugs. And more violence followed. Putin intervened, deciding that a fledgling democracy right on his doorstep was too great a risk: Ukrainians were demonstrating to Russians that it was possible for ordinary people to oust a dictator and decide their country's course. As Ukrainians got on with building the country they actually wanted to live in, Putin got on with doing everything in his power to stop them, illegally annexing Crimea and invading Donbas. Then, as now, the world watched with deep concern. That concern, short of the sanctions, humanitarian aid, and military supplies that have met the current invasion, was limited mostly to declarations.

Prior to the events of 2014, use of the anthem and other national symbols such as the traditional embroidered shirt ( vyshyvanka) or the flower crown ( vinok) was largely ceremonial and did not necessarily hold broader relevance in Ukrainian life. Many Ukrainians felt the failures of their national leadership acutely: In the face of so much corruption and abuse of power, what do such symbols stand for, really? But the Maidan sparked a grassroots wave of Ukrainization and a wider embrace of national symbols. Demonstrators sang the anthem as a stay against exhaustion and fear. Now, in 2022, Ukrainians from various regions are singing these lyrics in bomb shelters and in front of Russian tanks. (Another recent video shows antiwar protesters in Moscow being hauled away by police while belting out "Soul and body we'll lay down, all for our freedom.")

This civic nationalism that has been maturing in Ukraine is characterized by its political identification with a liberal-democratic state. Distinct from ethnic nationalism, this civic nationalist framework does not suppress differences in ethnicity, language, religion, or culture within the population but fosters people's collective willingness to uphold shared democratic institutions and values, encouraging solidarity between groups and overcoming historical divisions. Though no surprise perhaps, it was an indication of how far this civic identity has taken root that in 2019 researchers affiliated with the London School of Economics found that 70 percent of Ukrainians polled across all regions said they preferred such a civic model of national identity.

When Putin first occupied Crimea in 2014, many non-Tatar Ukrainians expressed regret for having neglected Crimean Tatar concerns and cultural rights. A Muslim ethnic group indigenous to the peninsula, Crimean Tatars have been systematically persecuted by Russian authorities for opposing the occupation. In February 2014, as Russian troops were seizing the regional capital of Simferopol, three Crimean Tatar activists created a Facebook group called KrymSOS (CrimeaSOS), which they began using to inform people in other parts of Ukraine and abroad about what was happening there. After one week, the group had 15,000 followers and soon, an email inbox full of messages from mainland Ukrainians offering accommodation to those fleeing the peninsula. Today, that Facebook page has almost 50,000 followers and continues to serve as a center for reporting and mutual aid efforts. At a diplomatic level, in August 2021 Ukraine held the inaugural summit of the Crimea Platform, which aims to counteract the Russian occupation by coordinating a more effective international response with foreign governments.

In the last eight years, cooperation between Crimean Tatars and non-Tatar Ukrainians has grown as both groups have found shared meaning in their historical and contemporary suffering at the hands of Moscow. As the Crimean Tatar activist Tamila Ravil Qizi Tasheva told Ukrainer.net, "The year 2014 was a turning point. Big misfortune came to us: the war, territory annexation. But along with that...recognition in Ukrainian society...understanding that Crimean Tatars are an indigenous people of Ukraine, an ethnic community that needs support." In 2016, the Crimean Tatar artist Jamala was voted to represent Ukraine at the annual Eurovision song contest. Jamala went on to take first place in the competition with "1944," a song about the deportation of Crimean Tatars under Stalin for alleged Nazi collaboration. Its chorus is in the Crimean Tatar language.

Similar work has gone into addressing alienation between residents of western and eastern Ukraine. The western territories of Ukraine had been part of the Habsburg Empire and interwar Poland before they were incorporated into the USSR. Much of the rest of the country fell within the Russian Empire and thus became part of the USSR nearly two decades earlier. This cleavage left a lasting mark, especially as memories of a difficult past.

When Russian aggression began in 2014, a common sentiment among western Ukrainians was regret at having spent little or no time in eastern Ukraine. Several programs started in response: the Ukrainian Catholic University began exchanges that brought students to Lviv from the East to foster new social ties; Freedom Home youth center was established in Kramatorsk-the first city captured by Russian proxy forces in 2014, later retaken by the Ukrainian military-as a gathering place for Ukrainians from all regions and as a hub for volunteer projects; the Theatre of Displaced People ran a documentary project called "Children and Soldiers," which invited local teenagers in eastern cities and Ukrainian soldiers stationed there to talk about their experiences of the war live on stage together. And today, the country's east is literally moving west, as waves of internally displaced people from around the areas most affected by Russia's full-scale invasion take shelter in cities and towns of western Ukraine.

Another area of solidarity-building that has made strides since 2014 is among Ukrainian Jews and non-Jewish citizens. The Center for Urban History in Lviv has held commemorations, exhibits, and conferences on the city's Jewish history, bringing together scholars of Ukrainian studies and Jewish studies. The public debate over the artistic direction of a private initiative to build a memorial at Babyn Yar has been a further noteworthy development. Babyn Yar is a ravine in Kyiv where over 33,000 Jews were murdered in just two days of the Holocaust, with an estimated total of 100,000 people killed over the duration of the Nazi occupation. Soon after the Russian filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky was named the memorial complex's artistic director in 2019, Ukrainian cultural activists demanded his dismissal, arguing that his intended design "dangerously approaches the impression of a Holocaust Disney," in the words of Dieter Bogner, an Austrian adviser to the project. They also criticized the project's acceptance of Russian oligarch funding, which they said would result in pressure to include a Kremlin-approved perspective in the center's historical narrative. For example, it is typical in Russian discourse to downplay the Soviet Union's signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with the Nazis in 1939, the treaty that led to the partition and invasion of Poland. While the disagreements and delays over the project are frustrating, the fact that these important conversations are happening in the public sphere is a sign of progress.

On March 1, the Babyn Yar memorial grounds were hit by debris from Russian shelling, and five civilians were reportedly killed in the attack. For the time being, the Babyn Yar project coordinators have shifted their focus from designing a memorial complex to documenting Russian crimes against humanity in Ukraine, announcing the establishment of a database for the UN International Court of Justice in the Hague.

Contesting a Kremlin-approved narrative at Babyn Yar will likely be even more imperative in the years to come, given that Putin has claimed "de-Nazification" as a central justification for the atrocities his forces are currently inflicting. Although Moscow's propaganda insists on a myth that Nazis run the government in Kyiv, in reality the far right has little political relevance in Ukraine. Despite forming a coalition of far-right parties ahead of the 2019 election, the united nationalist bloc received little more than 2 percent of the vote-well below the 5 percent threshold required for a party or bloc to take seats in parliament. And this turnout was much lower than those for ultranationalist parties in countries like Germany, Italy, and France, where far-right candidates have won vote shares between 10 and 17 percent in recent elections.

Where present-day anti-Semitism is concerned, a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2015-2016 found that Ukraine had by far the smallest proportion of respondents who said they "would not accept Jews as fellow citizens" of any central and eastern European country. This is not to deny that neo-Nazi elements exist in Ukraine. In response to the Russian aggression in Donbas in 2014, an ultranationalist fringe group formed the Azov battalion, comprising a few hundred fighters. The group was tolerated in 2014 as a fighting force against Russia, though its extremist views received broad public condemnation and the battalion featured frequently in Western media reports as a result. Their presence certainly presented a challenge for the country's prospects of postwar stability after 2014, especially for those promoting a civic nationalist agenda.

After 2014, the irregular battalion was transformed into a regiment of the Ministry of Interior, while its political activists largely transferred to a new far-right party, the National Corps. Support for it polls at about 0.5-1.5 percent, and for the 2019 election it joined the nationalist bloc, which performed poorly. While the regiment has retained the original battalion's far-right pagan symbol, the wolf's hook, and has links to the new nationalist party, Azov has become a regular fighting unit of Ukraine's National Guard; it would be incorrect to classify it as a political group anymore.

Police reform has been another area of serious attention in post-Maidan Ukraine. Ukraine's police force has received harsh criticism, particularly since 2014, for its brutality and corruption. In the year after Maidan, the new government held commissions at which public representatives could ask individual police officers questions like "What would you do if you received illegal orders?" and "When is a firearm used, and why?" These commissions uncovered significant ethical violations and criminal activity, and resulted in several thousand dismissals. But that process stalled in April 2015, when the Interior Ministry under Arsen Avakov, the former governor of Kharkiv region, changed the system for appointing representatives of civil society groups to the commissions, ultimately diluting the power of those hearings; some courts even began reinstating the fired officers. But Avakov's intervention provoked a backlash-"Avakov, chort," meaning "demon," became a popular rallying cry-and there was widespread relief when he eventually resigned in July 2021.

The refugee crisis caused by the Russian invasion has exposed another layer of such problems. There have been reports in recent weeks about African students' and other non-Ukrainian nationals' trying to evacuate the country and experiencing racist treatment from Ukrainian border guards and police. It's clear that there is much work to be done in Ukraine to address anti-Black racism and discrimination against people of color and ethnic minorities, including its Afro-Ukrainian and Romani communities. At the same time, the exodus has shown the extent to which Ukraine has become a multiethnic and multicultural country, with substantial minorities of foreign students and immigrant workers from Nigeria, India, and elsewhere. Compelling political leaders to address such issues as brutality, bribery, and xenophobia among officers will be a critical step toward ensuring the public safety of all of Ukraine's residents and citizens.

The pace of post-Maidan police reforms and other anti-corruption initiatives slowed in 2015 and 2016, midway through the presidential term of Petro Poroshenko, a businessman who had been elected after the 2014 revolution. Tired of setbacks, Ukrainian voters in 2019 passed on the incumbent candidate and instead elected Volodymyr Zelensky, a political outsider who was then primarily known as a comedian and as the star of Servant of the People, a popular television series in which a high school history teacher becomes the unlikely president of Ukraine. Zelensky's platform was built on promises of ending government corruption and the war in Donbas. His successful bid for the presidency marked another free and democratic election-a rarity among several of Ukraine's regional neighbors like Belarus, Russia, and Azerbaijan, though an increasingly regular phenomenon in Ukraine.

In choosing Zelensky, Ukrainians demonstrated once again their healthy skepticism toward the political elite. Since February 24, Zelensky's courageous leadership and his decision to remain in Kyiv during the Russian bombardment, in spite of the direct threat to his life, have made him perhaps the first Ukrainian president to be truly respected by the people. And yet, when peace does return to Ukraine, the democratic culture is now so rooted that it is conceivable to imagine his not being reelected-if for no other reason than that Ukrainians have a limitless appetite for better leadership.

For now, Zelensky's presidency represents an important symbolic shift, at least in part due to his identity: he is Jewish, and some of his own relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. At a 2019 press conference after the election, he found himself facing a heckler spouting anti-Semitic and homophobic abuse. Zelensky immediately shouted back: "I don't want to say anything negative about gay people because we all live together in an open and free society where each one can choose the language they want to speak, their ethnicity, and [sexual] orientation. Leave those people be, for God's sake!" It was remarkable for the region to see Zelensky voicing such a spirited public defense of the LGBTQ+ community. Although activists have pointed out the need for further reforms and protections for LGBTQ+ people, Zelensky's response encapsulated, in a handful of words, the goal of civic nationalism: a vision of a country unified not by a homogeneous ethnonational identity but by shared principles such as pluralism and tolerance.

On January 22, Ukraine celebrated its Day of Unity. The holiday commemorates the Treaty of Unity signed in 1919, which joined the Western Ukrainian People's Republic (formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and the Ukrainian People's Republic (which was part of the Russian Empire) into one state. That statehood was terribly short-lived: the Bolsheviks soon defeated the fledgling independent Ukrainian state and absorbed it into the USSR. As a result, historians have often portrayed the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917-1921 as a failure. Yet it lives on as a powerful vision of a unified Ukrainian state, its western and eastern parts forming one whole. In 1990, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians joined hands in a human chain to mark the day and demonstrate Ukraine's unity on its path to independence. They did so again this year, in a country encircled by Russian troops ready to attack.

"Happy Day of Unity," a friend from the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia who lives in London texted in Ukrainian to her mother, who lives in Ukraine. "Thank you. Glory to Ukraine," replied her mother in Russian. Both mother and daughter had stood on Kyiv's Maidan in 2014, looking after the injured protesters and grieving for those killed. A Russian speaker, the daughter decided to switch to Ukrainian in 2014. Her mother did not, but didn't consider herself any less a Ukrainian. "Glory to Ukraine" can be said in Russian with the same conviction as in Ukrainian.

Many outside observers struggle to understand this linguistic diversity. People from monolinguistic states find it hard to grasp the notion of a bilingual country with a sizeable population that switches from Russian to Ukrainian halfway through their sentences, in addition to groups that also speak Crimean Tatar, Romanian, Hungarian, Greek, and several other languages. For years, out of ignorance or laziness when reporting on Ukraine, the Western media referred to a color-coded map that partitioned the country among Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers. This cartographic bisection endorsed Putin's myth of a divided nation. While Putin set himself the task of "rescuing" the Russian speakers whether they wanted it or not, Ukrainians themselves elected a Russophone president; Zelensky had to work at first to address his nation in idiomatic Ukrainian.

It took thirty years of independence, eight years of war in the east, and several days of heavy shelling this past month for the Western media to stop saying " the Ukraine" and start spelling and pronouncing Kyiv correctly (as opposed to the Russian transliteration Kiev). The color coding of the maps in news reports now reflects the areas that are under brutal bombardment from the Russian military: Kharkiv, Kherson, and Mariupol are all primarily Russophone cities. Their inhabitants are being shelled, not "rescued" by Putin.

Today, when Ukrainians come across strangers in uniform in areas that Russian troops are trying to occupy, they perform a language test on them: conscious of Russian saboteurs posing as Ukrainian soldiers, they ask them to say " palianytsia " (a typical Ukrainian bread loaf). Ukrainian soldiers-Russophone or not-will have no problem pronouncing the word correctly, but Russians get tongue-tied. The Kremlin chose to weaponize the language issue, deliberately misinforming the West, but Ukrainians are turning that weapon back on the aggressor-using their multilingualism to fight the occupation.

Russia's attempt to occupy more Ukrainian territory is frightening, precisely because Ukrainians already have a sense of what it would be like to live in a city under Russian control, having watched Crimea and Donbas. In Crimea, arbitrary detentions, torture, and disappearances have become the regime's standard operating procedure. It's not just Crimean Tatars who are at risk; even ethnic Russians are not safe. "Public incitement to the violation of the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation" is a criminal offense in Russia, which makes any advocacy of Crimea as part of Ukraine a crime. Oleh Sentsov, a Russophone filmmaker who opposed the occupation, was arrested on fabricated charges, tortured, and sentenced after a farcical trial in 2015 to twenty years' imprisonment.

The case of the Izolyatsia arts center is a microcosm of what has happened under the occupation of Donbas. Established in a former factory building in 2010, it soon became a vibrant art center, retaining the name of the product that had once been made there: izoliatsiia, or insulation. The Ukrainian word also means "isolation," though, and that acquired a harrowing connotation in 2014, when Russian proxies took over the gallery site and turned it into a concentration camp for prisoners of war and civilian hostages. Stanislav Aseyev, a Ukrainian journalist and native of Donetsk, was held in Izolyatsia from 2017 to 2019. In his account of his imprisonment, he told of numerous prisoners he'd known who chose suicide over endless torture.

The territory already occupied thus offers a grim glimpse into the future for all of Ukraine if the "Russian World" engulfs it. Ominous echoes of these repressions are sounding already in areas of Ukraine that have been newly occupied by Russia since February 24, with several reports of local Ukrainian mayors' being abducted by Russian occupiers and forced deportations of civilians. The knowledge that Ukraine has gained in the last eight years of conflict is a tragic form of knowledge, yet it gives Ukrainians a distinct advantage in that they understand the true nature of what is at stake in the defense of their realm. In this regard, they are well ahead of their European counterparts, who perhaps only now are beginning to grasp the dimensions of this struggle.

The professional Armed Forces of Ukraine are supported by the ever-growing volunteer corps of the Territorial Defense in the resistance. The civilians choosing to take up arms, while admirable, have also come to a sad realization: they don't expect anyone to come to their rescue. Already, ordinary, unarmed people in occupied towns, facing the Russians with nothing but Ukrainian flags and cries of "go home," risk being gunned down. Old men stand in front of tanks and armored vehicles to prevent their advance into towns. The sunflower, a symbol of mourning and peace in Ukraine, has also become a symbol of defiance: a few days into the invasion, an unarmed woman went up to a Russian soldier and told him to take sunflower seeds she held out and put them in his pockets so that, she said, sunflowers would grow from his corpse when he died and was buried in Ukrainian soil.

Putin uses a retrograde, mythic version of a Russian past not only to oppress Ukrainians, but also to prevent his own people from imagining a future in which their lives are worth more than serving as cannon fodder for his wars. In contrast, Ukrainians have a clear vision of the future for themselves and their country, and they will do everything to protect it. As we watch the news reports about the shelling of hospitals and kindergartens, about babies being born in bomb shelters, we marvel at the resolve and resistance of the Ukrainian people. We should be asking ourselves, whether in London, Paris, New York, or beyond, the question that Kyiv is answering right now: Do we have a democratic future of our own worth fighting for?

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The Nation Ukraine Has Become | Olesya Khromeychuk and Sonya Bilocerkowycz

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A sardonic joke has been spreading on Ukrainian social media since Russia began its full-scale invasion of the country on February 24. There are several variations, but it basically goes: Maybe now NATO can apply to join Ukraine.

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Heroes Never Die: The Legacies of Euromaidan

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Heroes Never Die: The Legacies of Euromaidan

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nocaC-4Du-M

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Heroes Never Die: The Legacies of Euromaidan

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https://www.udemy.com/course/crimea-history-and-people/

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The Ukrainian women who make art in the face of war

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The Ukrainian women who make art in the face of war

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https://www.npr.org/2022/08/02/1114969355/the-ukrainian-women-who-make-art-in-the-face-of-war

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Stories of war are being told now by some of Ukraine's leading female artists at New York's Fridman Gallery, as well as a gallery in Kyiv. The women are activists as well as artists, and are responding in paint, photographs and videos to the Russian invasion, and earlier conflicts over the annexation of Crimea. The powerful, haunting works prove that art is not just about pretty pictures.

Lesia Khomenko's portrait of her new husband Max shows one of the many Ukrainian men drafted to fight against the Russians. He'd been a musician and media artist before the war. He and Lesia were a couple. When Max entered the army, Lesia was able to leave the country.

Over the months of separation, he regularly sent her selfies. But during those months, she noticed changes in Max. "Now, he is totally in military uniform" she says. And she paints a new tension in him. There's a scowl on his face. He stands as straight as possible, saluting. His expression is serious - determined and focused. His clothes are too big. "I wonder if I can still recognize him," she says.

Lesia spoke to NPR a day before she flew from New York back to Ukraine, for just a week-long visit. She'd felt she had to leave her country, even though it meant being away from Max. "It's too dangerous in Ukraine. I have a small daughter and I am very responsible for her. I can't live with her in Ukraine." Three times a day she'd had to run to the basement to hide from shelling: "You're filled with fear."

But with help from technology, she and Max were able to make the fear almost bearable. They got married online.

Other artists in the exhibition "Women at War" make works about history, politics, war and the pain and toll of it. They show the aftermath of rapes - painful drawings of private parts, bloodied by aggression; a mother and small children at the foot of a filthy basement staircase; the forbidding image of a psychiatric hospital. Surrounded by shelling and death, the Ukrainian women make artworks.

"In every war, there was artistic life," says curator and art historian Monika Fabijanska, "either underground or above ground, wherever possible." Creating is an essential outlet. "Art allows you to process and name our feelings, and find other people who feel it and process it."

In drawings, film, even handwriting on scraps of bed linen, these artists are history's witnesses to the realities of war: its dailiness and the toll it takes.

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The Ukrainian women who make art in the face of war

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Stories of war are being told now by some of Ukraine's leading female artists at New York's Fridman Gallery, as well as a gallery in Kyiv. The women are activists as well as artists, and are responding in paint, photographs and videos to the Russian invasion, and earlier conflicts over the annexation of Crimea.

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War in Ukraine: the emerging global food crisis | The Economist

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War in Ukraine: the emerging global food crisis | The Economist

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDfE2Vcl-yo

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War in Ukraine: the emerging global food crisis

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https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/05/19/the-coming-food-catastrophe

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B y invading ukraine, Vladimir Putin will destroy the lives of people far from the battlefield-and on a scale even he may regret. The war is battering a global food system weakened by covid-19, climate change and an energy shock. Ukraine's exports of grain and oilseeds have mostly stopped and Russia's are threatened. Together, the two countries supply 12% of traded calories. Wheat prices, up 53% since the start of the year, jumped a further 6% on May 16th, after India said it would suspend exports because of an alarming heatwave.

The widely accepted idea of a cost-of-living crisis does not begin to capture the gravity of what may lie ahead. António Guterres, the un secretary general, warned on May 18th that the coming months threaten "the spectre of a global food shortage" that could last for years. The high cost of staple foods has already raised the number of people who cannot be sure of getting enough to eat by 440m, to 1.6bn. Nearly 250m are on the brink of famine. If, as is likely, the war drags on and supplies from Russia and Ukraine are limited, hundreds of millions more people could fall into poverty. Political unrest will spread, children will be stunted and people will starve.

Mr Putin must not use food as a weapon. Shortages are not the inevitable outcome of war. World leaders should see hunger as a global problem urgently requiring a global solution.

Russia and Ukraine supply 28% of globally traded wheat, 29% of the barley, 15% of the maize and 75% of the sunflower oil. Russia and Ukraine contribute about half the cereals imported by Lebanon and Tunisia; for Libya and Egypt the figure is two-thirds. Ukraine's food exports provide the calories to feed 400m people. The war is disrupting these supplies because Ukraine has mined its waters to deter an assault, and Russia is blockading the port of Odessa.

Even before the invasion the World Food Programme had warned that 2022 would be a terrible year. China, the largest wheat producer, has said that, after rains delayed planting last year, this crop may be its worst-ever. Now, in addition to the extreme temperatures in India, the world's second-largest producer, a lack of rain threatens to sap yields in other breadbaskets, from America's wheat belt to the Beauce region of France. The Horn of Africa is being ravaged by its worst drought in four decades. Welcome to the era of climate change.

All this will have a grievous effect on the poor. Households in emerging economies spend 25% of their budgets on food-and in sub-Saharan Africa as much as 40%. In Egypt bread provides 30% of all calories. In many importing countries, governments cannot afford subsidies to increase the help to the poor, especially if they also import energy-another market in turmoil.

The crisis threatens to get worse. Ukraine had already shipped much of last summer's crop before the war. Russia is still managing to sell its grain, despite added costs and risks for shippers. However, those Ukrainian silos that are undamaged by the fighting are full of corn and barley. Farmers have nowhere to store their next harvest, due to start in late June, which may therefore rot. And they lack the fuel and labour to plant the one after that. Russia, for its part, may lack some supplies of the seeds and pesticides it usually buys from the European Union.

In spite of soaring grain prices, farmers elsewhere in the world may not make up the shortfall. One reason is that prices are volatile. Worse, profit margins are shrinking, because of the surging prices of fertiliser and energy. These are farmers' main costs and both markets are disrupted by sanctions and the scramble for natural gas. If farmers cut back on fertiliser, global yields will be lower at just the wrong time.

The response by worried politicians could make a bad situation worse. Since the war started, 23 countries from Kazakhstan to Kuwait have declared severe restrictions on food exports that cover 10% of globally traded calories. More than one-fifth of all fertiliser exports are restricted. If trade stops, famine will ensue.

The scene is set for a blame game, in which the West condemns Mr Putin for his invasion and Russia decries Western sanctions. In truth the disruptions are primarily the result of Mr Putin's invasion and some sanctions have exacerbated them. The argument could easily become an excuse for inaction. Meanwhile many people will be going hungry and some will die.

Instead states need to act together, starting by keeping markets open. This week Indonesia, source of 60% of the world's palm oil, lifted a temporary ban on exports. Europe should help Ukraine ship its grain via rail and road to ports in Romania or the Baltics, though even the most optimistic forecasts say that just 20% of the harvest could get out that way. Importing countries need support, too, so they do not end up being capsized by enormous bills. Emergency supplies of grain should go only to the very poorest. For others, import financing on favourable terms, perhaps provided through the imf, would allow donors' dollars to go further. Debt relief may also help to free up vital resources.

There is scope for substitution. About 10% of all grains are used to make biofuel; and 18% of vegetable oils go to biodiesel. Finland and Croatia have weakened mandates that require petrol to include fuel from crops. Others should follow their lead. An enormous amount of grain is used to feed animals. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, grain accounts for 13% of cattle dry feed. In 2021 China imported 28m tonnes of corn to feed its pigs, more than Ukraine exports in a year.

Immediate relief would come from breaking the Black Sea blockade. Roughly 25m tonnes of corn and wheat, equivalent to the annual consumption of all of the world's least developed economies, is trapped in Ukraine. Three countries must be brought onside: Russia needs to allow Ukrainian shipping; Ukraine has to de-mine the approach to Odessa; and Turkey needs to let naval escorts through the Bosporus.

That will not be easy. Russia, struggling on the battlefield, is trying to strangle Ukraine's economy. Ukraine is reluctant to clear its mines. Persuading them to relent will be a task for countries, including India and China, that have sat out the war. Convoys may require armed escorts endorsed by a broad coalition. Feeding a fragile world is everyone's business. ■
For subscribers only: to see how we design each week's cover, sign up to our weekly Cover Story newsletter. Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine crisis

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B y invading ukraine, Vladimir Putin will destroy the lives of people far from the battlefield-and on a scale even he may regret. The war is battering a global food system weakened by covid-19, climate change and an energy shock. Ukraine's exports of grain and oilseeds have mostly stopped and Russia's are threatened.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=430&v=KpbVmt_b320&feature=emb_logo

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Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has returned to its pre-revolutionary position as a major agricultural exporter of key commodities. With Russia currently controlling a large portion of Ukraine's cultivated agricultural land in the south, as well as blockading ports on the Black Sea, a significant amount of grain for export is stranded in Ukraine.

Written by Ian M. Sheldon. Narration by Dr. Nicholas B. Breyfogle.

Video production by Svetlana Ter-Gregorian, Laura Seeger and Dr. Nicholas B. Breyfogle. Audio production by the College of Arts & Sciences Academic Technology Services.

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Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine has returned to its pre-revolutionary position as a major agricultural exporter of key commodities. With Russia currently controlling a large portion of Ukraine's cultivated agricultural land in the south, as well as blockading ports on the Black Sea, a significant amount of grain for export is stranded in Ukraine.

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Open Kurbas: A Digital Collection of Les Kurbas' Work

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Open Kurbas: A Digital Collection of Les Kurbas' Work

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https://openkurbas.org/en/

Created by Tetiana Rudenko and the team at the State Museum of Theatrical, Musical, and Cinematic Arts of Ukraine.

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is a project of the Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema of Ukraine that will open the museum collection to the world and make Les Kurbas's work accessible to all.

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https://origins.osu.edu/index.php/read/soviet-ukraine-nutshell

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When the Russian Empire collapsed in during , the lands of today's Ukraine became a battleground of violence and instability until 1922. Multiple communities of former tsarist imperial subjects imagined the future in radically different ways.

The territorial evolution of the Ukrainian SSR, 1922-1954.

Photo from the play "Hello from Radio 477." The Berezil troupe performed this in Kharkiv in 1929. Taken by author at exhibit "Kurbas: New Worlds" curated by Virlana Tkacz, Tetiana Rudenko, and Waldemart Klyuzko at Art Arsenal, 2018.

In addition to the mines of Donbas, Zaporizhzhia was home to DniproHES, the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station. Dnipro (then Dnipropetrovsk) became a center of rocket building in the 1950s and 1960s, and Mariupol (then Zhdanov) was a center for steel. Funding for industry in the Soviet period was extracted from the countryside, and Ukraine was its breadbasket .

Starving peasants on a street in Kharkiv during the Holodomor, 1933.

The borders of Soviet Ukraine changed in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact and the Soviet Union brutally occupied Eastern , today's Western Ukraine. Hitler broke that pact in June 1941 and the invasion brought devastation and the , which fundamentally changed Soviet Ukraine.

Executions of Jews by Nazi Einsatzgruppen near Ivanhorod, Ukraine, 1942.

Soldiers in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, 1947.

The KGB photo of Vasyl Stus, 1980.

Yet Soviet Ukraine was also a center of nomenklatura elites-after all, Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev came up through Ukraine. It was Khrushchev who made part of Soviet Ukraine in 1954.

And it was Ukraine opting for independence that was key to breaking the Soviet Union .

Grappling with this Soviet past and disentangling the Ukrainian from the greater Soviet (and Russian) experience is an urgent challenge today, when Russia, the successor state, attempts to wipe Ukraine off the map .

Soviet Ukraine had its own story, and we should listen.
Learn More: Surveys: For general reading: For non-textual sources:
Olesya Khromeychuk, producer, Nicola Roper, producer/director, "Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Ukraine," Ukrainian Institute London, 2020. Great short films for Ukraine in general, but especially on topics related to the Soviet period. https://ukrainianinstitute.org.uk/10-things-everyone-should-know-about-ukraine/

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When the Russian Empire collapsed in during , the lands of today's Ukraine became a battleground of violence and instability until 1922. Multiple communities of former tsarist imperial subjects imagined the future in radically different ways. In addition to the mines of Donbas, Zaporizhzhia was home to DniproHES, the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station.

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Why Crimean Tatars are fearful as Russia invades Ukraine

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Why Crimean Tatars are fearful as Russia invades Ukraine

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https://theconversation.com/why-crimean-tatars-are-fearful-as-russia-invades-ukraine-178396

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As Vladimir Putin's forces wage a brutal war against Ukraine, the Crimean Tatars living in Russian-occupied Crimea and on the Ukrainian mainland feel particularly threatened by their historic enemy's latest invasion.

Some have vowed to defend Ukraine, a land many fled to in 2014 after Putin's forces invaded the Crimean Peninsula and began to repress the local Crimean Tatars.

Despite the risk of 15-year jail sentences for protesting Putin's invasion of Ukraine, the Crimean Tatar World Congress publicly came out against the invasion and said in a tweet, "Our Congress recognizes its humanitarian and moral obligation to stand in solidarity with the Ukrainians ... so help them in all ways they are capable."

From 1997 to 1998, I lived with Crimean Tatars - both in their places of Stalin-imposed exile in Uzbekistan, where many still remain, and in their ancestral Crimean homeland - while researching two books on this resilient ethnic group. I found a people who had been through centuries of genocidal persecution, but emphasized their nonviolent approach to challenging Russian brutality.

Crimea's ancient inhabitants

The Crimean Tatars formed as a distinct ethnic group from the 11th to the 15th centuries. This ethnic formation began when nomadic Turkic horsemen, known as Kipchaks, arrived from the vast Eurasian steppe, which extends from modern-day Kazakhstan through Ukraine to Moldova. They mixed with the long-settled populations living on the Crimea's southern shores, such as the Germanic Goths.

The final process of consolidation as an ethnic group was completed when the nomadic Mongols conquered Crimea in the 1200s and their descendants converted to Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, after intermixing with the peninsula's original population.

The Mongol Golden Horde, a state founded by Genghis Khan's grandson Batu Khan, subsequently ruled over Crimea and Russia for 240 years. When the Golden Horde disintegrated in the 1400s, the Tatars of the Crimea created their own Khanate - a state governed by descendants of the Genghis Khan dynasty.

The Crimean Khanate went on to rule the region extending from the Caucasus Mountains to Moldova for centuries, even after the Mongol empire in China, Russia and the Middle East collapsed.

While Crimean Tatars came to be feared by the Russians as horse-mounted raiders and enslavers of the Russian people, their bold expeditions were carried out, in part, to prevent Orthodox-Slavic settlers from encroaching on their ancestral pasture lands. For centuries following Tsar Ivan the Terrible's conquest of the Tatars of Siberia in the 1500s, Russian settlers had began an inexorable southward advance onto the steppe lands of the Tatars, known in Russian as the Ukraina, or the frontier.

Soviet historians later tried to define the Crimean Tatars as " a mob of wild, barbarian bandits." However, in my visits to their former capital of Bakchesaray, the Garden Palace, located in a scenic gorge in the Crimean Mountains, I found Turkish-style imperial mosques and minarets, beautiful medieval marble fountains engraved with Arabic, and a palace evocative of a lost glory.

In 1774, the Russian Empire, using vastly superior numbers and new gunpowder technology, finally crushed the Crimean Tatars' cavalry-based army and annexed their realm nine years later.

Genocide under Stalin

The Russian conquest of their homeland almost destroyed the Crimean Tatars as a distinct ethnic group. The once-free Tatar peasants were turned into serfs by their new Russian masters, their communal lands were confiscated, and their centuries-old mosques, bazaars and graveyards were destroyed

As hundreds of thousands of Crimean Tatars abandoned their southern mountain villages and nomadic yurt encampments to flee to Ottoman Turkey, the dwindling remnants of this ancient people in Tsarist Crimea became a largely landless and repressed minority in a newly Slavic majority land.

Worse was to come under the Tsars' heirs, the Soviets. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin decided to ethnically cleanse the peninsula's remaining Tatar population during World War II after accusing them of being a race of Nazi collaborators.

Crimean Tatar women, children, and men, including those fighting in the ranks of the Soviet Army against Germany, were brutally deported in KGB cattle trains to the depths of Soviet Central Asia in May 1944. Approximately 1 in 3 Crimean Tatars died in an ethnic cleansing that Ukraine and several other countries later recognized as a genocide.

Widely dispersed from their ancestral lands in the Central Asian deserts among a hostile local population, the surviving Crimean Tatars might have disappeared as a nation under Communist programs designed to wipe out their distinct identity. But they tenaciously managed to keep their collective identity alive and fought a decadeslong, transgenerational battle to return to the romanticized "yeshil ada," or the "green island," of Crimea.

As Soviet rule weakened and collapsed from 1989 to 1991, approximately 250,000 Crimean Tatars, roughly half the nation, migrated back to their homeland on the shores of the distant Black Sea. By that time, the Russian administration-dominated Crimean Autonomous Republic had been made part of Ukraine.

In the late 1990s, I lived in a squatter settlement with the Shevkievs, a Crimean Tatar family who had returned to the then-Ukrainian territory of Crimea from exile in Uzbekistan. I still fondly recall eating their famous chiborek fried meat pastries, hearing ancient folk ballads of the brave, horse-mounted Tatar warriors fighting the Russians, and being welcomed with open arms by this impoverished but resilient family and people.

By this time, the Russians made up 58% of the Crimean autonomy's population and the indigenous Tatars only 12%. Anti-Tatar sentiment among the dominant Russians was widespread. I saw crowds in the Crimea marching with placards of Stalin as an overt message of hostility toward the Tatars.

The return of the Russians

In 2014, Putin annexed the Crimea to punish Ukraine for its efforts to form closer ties with Western Europe and the U.S. For the Crimean Tatars who had rebuilt their devastated nation in democratic Ukraine, the conquest of their homeland by their historical nemesis, now ruled by an increasingly autocratic Putin, was a nightmare come true.

Among the new Russian Federation authorities' first measures after annexing the Crimea Autonomous Republic was to ban the Crimean Tatars' parliament, known as the Mejlis, which had given women the right to vote in 1918. They also arrested, tortured and killed Crimean Tatar activists.

Thousands of Crimean Tatars fled Russian oppression in Crimea following its 2014 annexation. Many settled in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, or nearby Kherson, a town Putin's forces claimed they had captured on March 2, 2022.

One displaced Crimean Tatar, who fled the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014 to Ukraine, declared in late February 2022, "We have nowhere left to run, so we'll have to fight."

[Get The Conversation's most important politics headlines, in our Politics Weekly newsletter.]

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Why Crimean Tatars are fearful as Russia invades Ukraine

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As Vladimir Putin's forces wage a brutal war against Ukraine, the Crimean Tatars living in Russian-occupied Crimea and on the Ukrainian mainland feel particularly threatened by their historic enemy's latest invasion. Some have vowed to defend Ukraine, a land many fled to in 2014 after Putin's forces invaded the Crimean Peninsula and began to repress the local Crimean Tatars.

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Behind the Headlines: Who Are the Crimean Tatars?

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Behind the Headlines: Who Are the Crimean Tatars?

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/140314-crimea-tatars-referendum-russia-muslim-ethnic-history-culture

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For Crimea's Tatars, history is not just something in books-it is a guiding and often painful undercurrent of everyday life. The eldest of them still remember the 1944 deportation of their entire population under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. They were given 30 minutes' notice, and most would never see their homes again.

Nearly half of the 200,000 exiled men, women, and children loaded onto cattle cars died en route or shortly after their arrival in the Urals, Siberia, and Central Asia. Exile from their homes was punishment for their alleged "massive collaboration" with the Nazis who had occupied the peninsula. They, and their children and grandchildren who have been able to return over the past 20 years, are loath to fall once again under Moscow's control. (See: " Inside Crimea: A Jewel in Two Crowns.")

Some of the children of the deported-raised in Uzbekistan and now adults-have returned to become leaders. Refat Chubarov, head of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, the representative body of the Tatars, has called on his people-there are now approximately 300,000 Tatars in Crimea-to peacefully boycott the referendum. Nevertheless, some Crimean Tatars have vowed to oppose secession, with force if necessary. According to Western press reports, some Tatars fighting with the rebels in Syria have offered to return to join the cause.

Exile and Return

His mother was 11, his father 13 when they were deported from the village of Ay-Serez to Uzbekistan in 1944. "Our parents said we had to do all we could to return to our homeland," says Chubarov, speaking from the Crimean capital, Simferopol. "We had to study hard, to work hard, and to save money to someday return and buy a home." In 1968 his family was one of only 300 allowed to return "so the Soviets could tell the world they were letting us back," he says bitterly, "for propaganda purposes."

It wasn't until the late 1980s and the disintegration of the Soviet Union that large numbers of Tatars began returning from exile. "But many didn't make it," says Chubarov. "Our grandfathers, and so many others, they were all buried in Uzbekistan."

Now, other children and grandchildren of the deported, the strong ones, are up all night guarding their neighborhoods-afraid of attacks by ethnic Russians or the Russian soldiers who have swarmed their once-quiet peninsula. There are credible, firsthand reports of X marks on the doors of Tatar homes, a worrisome echo of the deportation tactics used more than half a century ago.

A spokesperson for the Crimean Tatars, Leyla Muslimova, says that while every year has shown "some excesses" against the Tatars, from "skinheads" destroying Tatar gravestones to the destruction of Tatar homes under construction, the tension now is unbearable. "Right now we are afraid. We're awaiting some provocation from pro-Russian organizations but are calling on our people to remain quiet and calm," she says, "and for the United Nations to invite some forces to protect us."

Tatar Power

Long ago it was the Tatars who ruled the region. Their history with Russia-a relationship of trade and cooperation, intermarriage and cultural exchange, but at times, significant mistrust-stretches back over the centuries. (See list of famous Russians of Tatar descent at the end of the story.)

The Crimean Tatars "first came on the map" around 1241, says Eric Lohr, when Batu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, conquered the region, making it a strategic part of the Mongol empire and close trading partner with the emerging power center of Moscow. (Related: " Genghis Khan's Secret Weapon Was Rain.")

"The Moscow district still known as Kitai Gorod [which translates as Chinatown] is where the Crimean traders set up shop. Relations were strong," says Lohr, chair of Russian history and culture at American University in Washington, D.C. By the 15th century, the group dominated the region as the Crimean Khanate-the longest lived of the Turkic-speaking khanates that were the remnants of the vast Mongol empire-eventually falling under the loose protection of the Ottoman Empire in the latter part of the century.

The Ottomans wanted slaves, and the Crimean Tatars provided them from the steppes of Ukraine and southern Russia-with the help of raiding Nogai Tatars and, until the 15th century, with the collaboration of Genoese merchants who shipped them off from the Crimean port town of Feodosia. One translation of a Ukrainian folk song reads:

The ﬁres are burning behind the river-

The Tatars are dividing their captives.

Our village is burnt

And our property plundered.

The khanate ruled until 1783 when, after a successful war against the Ottoman Empire, Empress Catherine the Great annexed the peninsula as part of her vast expansion of the Russian Empire. During this time, says Lohr, there were several mass migrations of Crimean Tatars to Turkey (where populations remain); another migration followed the Crimean War, which ended in 1856.

The peninsula was the last holdout of the White Army during the civil war that followed the murder of the last tsar and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. But the decades that followed were marked more by repression than by resistance. The Crimean Tatars were not spared the forced collectivization of the Soviet regime and the Holodomor, or man-made famine, of the early 1930s.

Stalin's Repressions

Stalin began deportations of "suspect nationalities" well before World War II, says Paul Gregory, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution in California and author of multiple books on the Soviet archives and gulag system. "Special settlements" were small groupings of families in remote areas, he says, "which were especially cruel because the whole family would be deported, and unlike in a gulag, there were no terms of sentence. It was unclear whether you'd ever get out."

But it was an April 13, 1944, NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) order "On Measures to Clean the Territory of the Crimean Autonomous Republic of Anti-Soviet Elements" that set in motion what Gregory calls "the major blow" to the Crimean Tatars: the deportation order of May 11, 1944, that shaped the Crimean Tatars' fate in the decades to follow, and much of their distress over Russia's actions today.

"This [was] not a legal referendum," says Mustafa Dzhemilev, a longtime leader of the Crimean Tatars, speaking from Bakhchysaray, the former capital of the Crimean Khanate and the heart of Tatar culture and architecture. He was six months old when his family was deported.

In Uzbekistan, Dzhemilev became a leading Soviet dissident, protesting not just Russia's invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, "but [also] for what was central to us, the return of Crimean Tatars to our homeland." He suffered 15 years in Soviet prison camps, including in a vast camp system in Magadan where he worked building and carrying cement blocks, "often ending up in the izolator [isolation] because I didn't fulfill my 'norms,'" recalls Dzhemilev.

He was freed in 1986, at the height of the Perestroika movement, and joined the tens of thousands of Crimean Tatars who were finally able to return home in the late 1980s and 1990s, following a trickle of returning Tatars in previous decades.

A Homeland Like Paradise

Dilara Setyeyiva was part of that unwelcome trickle. "There were no more than 10,000 of us here by 1979," says Setyeyiva, an engineer, mother of three, and now head of a teachers council for Crimean Tatars that tries to promote learning in the Crimean Tatar language. She and her young family fought bureaucratic red tape in their efforts to resettle, and at one point were kicked out of the area altogether. "We didn't go back to Uzbekistan when that happened," she said. "We didn't want to scare people into thinking there was no chance for them to return to our homeland."

And that homeland offered much to yearn for: It's "like paradise" in parts, says writer and adventurer Tim Cope, who traveled the peninsula by horseback in the spring of 2006 through its "waist-high grass, tulips and camomile" before the steppe meets the coastline of beaches, where dolphins play in the waves. In his book On the Trail of Genghis Khan, Cope details both this beauty and the long-standing tensions between ethnic Russians and the Sunni Muslim Crimean Tatars, including violent clashes over a Russian market built in the 1990s over mausoleums where Tatar khans and spiritual leaders were laid to rest.

Speaking from her home in Bakhchysaray-the site of the market clashes years ago-Setyeyiva laughs at the idea that Russia will build a bridge across the Strait of Kerch connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland. Like many Tatars, she embraces Ukraine's turn to the West and fears that a Crimea under Russian control will become like the disputed territory of Abkhazia, a once-beautiful place, she says, "that will become like a desert. These small republics, we will become isolated from the world."

Five Famous Russians of Tatar Descent

Tatars are an ethnic Muslim minority in Russia; many notable achievers throughout Russian history have had Tatar roots.

1. Rudolf Nureyev: This celebrated Soviet ballet and modern dancer defected from the Soviet Union to the West in 1961. According to the website of the Rudolf Nureyev Foundation, "The family were Tatars, coming of peasant stock in the Soviet republic of Bashkir, but his father, Hamet, seizing the opportunities brought to ordinary people by the Russian Revolution, become a political education officer in the Red Army, advancing to the rank of major."

2. Sergei Rachmaninoff: The famous pianist, composer, and conductor was born under the tsars and left Russia on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. He was born into a noble family of Tatar descent, which had been in the service of the Russian tsars since the 16th century in northwestern Russia.

3. Roald Sagdeev: The man who would become one of the pioneers of modern plasma physics, the director of the Space Research Institute of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, and science adviser to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was born in Moscow to Tatar parents in 1932.

4. Felix Yussupov: The flamboyant prince and count was of Tatar origin and a key figure in late tsarist Russia, best known for his part in the 1916 assassination of Grigori Rasputin, the self-proclaimed healer who was said to hold undue influence over Tsar Nicholas II and his wife.

5. Marat Safin: The famous tennis champ, who was ranked number one in the world in his day, and politician was born to Tatar parents in Moscow in 1980.

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Behind the Headlines: Who Are the Crimean Tatars?

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For Crimea's Tatars, history is not just something in books-it is a guiding and often painful undercurrent of everyday life. The eldest of them still remember the 1944 deportation of their entire population under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. They were given 30 minutes' notice, and most would never see their homes again.

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Kyiv: The War Diary of Yevgenia Belorusets

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Kyiv: The War Diary of Yevgenia Belorusets

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https://isolarii.com/kyiv

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YEVGENIA BELORUSETS

Yevgenia Belorusets has been one of the great documentarians of Russia's war against Ukraine since 2014, winning the International Literature Prize for her work. Her diary provides the news from a different vantage.

Updates are published by ISOLARII at 4:00 PM EDT each day-
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In Place of a Final Note

When the war started, I had no set plans to remain in Kyiv, but I quickly became the hostage of my own diary. At the very beginning, it struck me as important to witness what was happening. I decided to write a short text every day about events in the city. I set upon this work-which turned out to be hard-because I expected the war to only last for a few days. This war was so unthinkable, such a blatant violation of global security and human rights, that it seemed the world would quickly find a way to stop the aggressor.

As the attacks unfolded, I was shocked that, although the crimes were continuing, they were met almost exclusively with economic sanctions, which, however effective and lethal, still came without any active show of force on the part of the friendly powers. I realized that the diary was helping me to endure the storm of events that were in fact unbearable, and that it enabled me to describe something I really couldn't find the words for.

I had previously been to Debaltseve in the Donbas, at a time when the city was being regularly shelled by Grad rockets. That was when I first experienced horror in the face of war and in the face of how artillery could be used against a civilian population. I saw with my own eyes the consequences of shelling. I met people who hated Ukraine or Russia out of impotence-out of not knowing where to place the hatred that suffocated them-because of the pain they had lived through.

When the new phase of the war began and attacks reached Kyiv, my body memory kicked in. But it didn't make it easier for me to bear the events. In fact, knowing what happens to a person in a situation of such extreme and senseless violence, I experienced grief day after day. And my grief was much stronger than my fear. Fear came to me later-much more recently, when it seemed that Kyiv was returning to life, when Kyiv felt safe, especially the city center.

Sometimes I would speak to people who stayed in the Donbas, near Mariupol, or even people who had been in Mariupol, near the border with the occupied regions or near Kyiv, in Bucha or in Irpin. After each conversation, nightmares came to me, fear came to me, which sent me wandering around my apartment at night, sleeping on the floor in the entryway between two walls during the air raids. I couldn't fall asleep in the bed. Instead, I experience real horror, remembering meetings, phone conversations, and my previous trips to the Donbas.

A lot of people are unable to cry. But at times something comes over me, and I start crying. I myself find this state strange. At one point, I even decided to try to record the sound of my crying. It may seem ridiculous, but I thought that everything happening with my body needed to be used in some way, so that it could be talked about later. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had become my own working material. But every time I tried to make a recording of my state, the feeling would instantly vanish.

I can't say that the tears bring me relief. They are just one reaction to coming into contact with something new-with the events that are opening up to me.

I think everyone has the right to think and talk about the war. It is our common pain, the common pain of all humanity. The whole world is, in a sense, responsible for what is happening. This is an act of violence, bloodshed, brutality, and genocide. Anyone, anywhere in the world, must connect with this. If somebody has traveled out of Ukraine for whatever reason, but feels it necessary to talk about it, let her speak.

I subscribe to many Telegram channels, where I see photos of the aggressor-country's soldiers lying dead on the ground. Never before could I have imagined feeling such indifference when looking at images of men who had been killed. But now, it would be hard for me to live with the idea that the criminals-who shoot up apartment buildings, who attack old people and children-would go unpunished. Yet, on the other hand, I realize there is no punishment appropriate to the crime. We must have a trial! It is as necessary as air and it will definitely take place. But there is no resurrection of the dead, no restoration of broken worlds. There must be trials to try and prevent similar crimes in the future, there must be punishment for the guilty. But punishment isn't redemptive-it will not change what we have lost.

A key condition for us to preserve who we are is to preserve our diversity. We must carry out the work of accepting different worldviews, different points of view within our country. Then we will survive. Crimes must be punished, but anything that is an opinion rather than a crime, even if it is an intolerable opinion, we must try to accept.

As somebody who works with photography, I have always been struck by the fact that Kyiv, like the rest of Ukraine, has a hard time holding onto memories of its own history. Its history is constantly starting anew, and traces of the past are easily erased. Usually they are erased because of great tragedies or some external circumstances that drive the city to change. And now, something is once again forcing Kyiv to create its history afresh. This moment made me feel a rising desire to save some of that city that didn't know war was possible. Maybe that is why I constantly walked around Kyiv, photographing windows, walls of buildings, random corners, and fragments, without composition or meaning. It felt as if I were trying to save something connected with the past, something endangered, something that might be destroyed.

This is my desire-I don't want to call it a dream, just a very powerful desire: to somehow interrupt the flow of this particular, unbearable story. This desire is what allowed me to remain in Kyiv for so long, and it is what allows me to go on presuming that dreams are still possible in principle.
Adapted from an interview by Olga Serdyuk for NV, a Ukrainian online magazine

Sunday, April 3
DAY 39: A CITY DROWNS IN BLOOD
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A playground next to my house, which reminded me of playgrounds in Bucha. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]

A young man suffering from bipolar disorder, who lived all his life with his grandmother in Bucha-a town northwest of Kyiv-walked to the capital after his grandmother was shot by Russian soldiers in front of the entrance to her house. He completely lost his sense of time and doesn't remember how long he was on the road. For a few days he lived in Kyiv at the train station, where he met a policeman who took him to a volunteer center in the city where an acquaintance of mine works.

For days on end, a woman would not evacuate Irpin. She stopped responding to calls from her daughter, who was abroad. Her friends tried in vain to persuade the woman to leave. Power in her apartment had already gone out and there was no water, but the woman stayed. Her neighbors refused to leave their high-rise as well. They tried to care for the pets left behind and help other remaining residents. But the situation in the city became unbearable. In one of the last evacuation efforts, the neighbors were finally planning to leave and take the woman with them. But when they reached her apartment, the door was locked. She talked to the neighbors through the closed door, but she could not be persuaded. Fortunately, she survived the occupation of the city.

The father of a good friend of mine lives with his wife in Kharkiv. When the war began, they started a volunteer initiative to distribute medicine. My friend kept asking them to leave the city. But they remained and helped many people. When the shelling and bombardment became more intense, my friend's father disappeared all of a sudden. He was not found until days later. He'd had a paranoid episode in which he saw himself in the midst of only enemies, death, and destruction. He couldn't trust his wife, his children, or his friends. In this intoxicated state of suspicion, he reached the Russian military posts, where he was wounded. Two or three bullets were removed from his body. He will survive.

Now I sometimes hear the casual phrase, "this person or that person was wounded." When it comes to possible health issues, gunshots and war wounds have nearly become a legitimized form of harm in the collective imagination. Somewhere on the fringes of my childhood memories, I see children playing at being wounded soldiers. I myself liked to pretend that I was wounded. There always came a moment when I begged my friends in an unmistakably suffering voice, "leave me on the battlefield! I'm too much of a burden for you. Go on without me!"

Bucha is drowning in blood. When you hear that someone has survived there, it is a miracle. The dictator claims that we are not simply related peoples, we are in fact "one people." But when you see what the Russian army is doing here-dead women who have been raped lying on the side of the road in Bucha and Irpin, dead children as well-you understand immediately: this is a genocide of those who have been dehumanized.

Today, the streets of Kyiv were especially silent. The joy of return--quite small, but still palpable just yesterday--was gone. The city mourned by being motionless and deserted of people. Sometimes I heard words said very softly: "communal graves, mass graves."

Monday, March 28
DAY 33: ENDLESS CANNONADES
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During an air raid alarm, a lone woman leans against a tree in an empty park. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]

My previous entry was an eternity ago. At least that's how I perceive it. I may have missed only one day, but it feels like my German has slipped away and that I can no longer get used to expressing my thoughts in it. When I stop to reflect, Russian, Ukrainian, and English mingle to form the voice in my head.

Time sometimes runs too fast-days and hours seem to differ rapidly from one another. A feeling of security arises under the ongoing bombardment, and becomes unbearable: it seems to be cobbled together from counterfeit sensations.

An artist, the acquaintance of a good friend, lives on the outskirts of Kyiv. She says that the shelling sounds much louder in the forest than it does near me, in the center of town-as if there is fighting among the trees, someone on the hunt, shooting at someone else. Reflecting on the gunfire audio messages coming from all around her, she wondered: what if she lay down on a forest path and decided to accept her own death? She thinks this could be somewhat liberating.

Tomorrow, talks between Ukrainian and Russian negotiators will take place in Istanbul. Perhaps that's why Kyiv has been shelled all day long. Early in the morning I heard endless cannonades, a composition of gunshots. My mother came by my apartment and we went for a walk. We told each other funny stories and imagined that all the explosions came from our air defenses protecting the city. But then we heard a long, deep, and rolling roar. A white line appeared like the trace of an airplane, but short and uneven. It was the trail of a missile. We heard the explosion.

The news was silent even an hour after impact. For several days, reports of attacks and strikes have become increasingly delayed-so as not to give the enemy any hint about whether they have injured us. As a consequence, you hardly know where you are anymore. Where and when does the feeling of security-even if fleeting-begin, and where does it end? There remain only the messages on Telegram channels: "Many Kyiv residents are reporting explosions. But we don't want to write anything more specific about it now."

You can learn more from talk around town. At the kiosk where you can get one of the best espressos in Kyiv (or anywhere), the young barista confided in me that high-rises had been damaged within a fifteen-minute walk of his house. He reported this with a touch of irony in his intonation, as if he were talking about bad weather.

A good friend and human rights activist is now in Chernivtsi in southwestern Ukraine. Her boyfriend, who fled Mariupol on foot, just arrived there. The residents of Mariupol are constantly trying to leave the city-without cars and packing only the bare necessities. They flee in the direction of Berdyansk, where they get picked up. Often news arrives that these pedestrians have been shot on the way. I can't imagine how people can learn about such crimes and not at once do something to stop them. A collective psychosis is sweeping Russian media right now, combined with an obvious enjoyment of impunity and the ability to strike fear into the most powerful countries.

I was awakened by a phone call. It was a young woman who was practically a child in 2014 and who has been on the run since that very year. She cried as she explained that she really loves her new home, the city of Sloviansk in eastern Ukraine, and never wants to leave it. She got my number from acquaintances in order to ask about possible escape routes. I heard her tender, high-pitched voice-utterly incompatible with the sounds of gunfire and air defenses that are muffled by my tightly closed windows, and that have become the background to my everyday life.

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A group of friends, colleagues, and veterinarians walking their dogs before the long curfew. They are staying in Kyiv to rescue animals. [photo: Yevgenia Belorusets]

A day in lockdown, without being allowed to leave the house, alone with the news and conjectures about the future. The end of the war is continually announced like a weather forecast. Some experts express themselves in newspapers, others through long and reassuring video monologues. In this way, by leaping into a distant news stream, one can slowly accept what is happening to my country. At the same time, such a thought is unbearable. I push it away. Besides, I know that "my country" sounds abstract enough as an idea that one could be able to "accept" what is happening-but you can never understand how something so brutal can be done to people.

When I walk through Kyiv, I see men and women standing like little statues, looking at their phones; they don't seem to want to know what's happening in their immediate surroundings anymore. They read the news, because only there, it seems, are hidden the secret answers to these dark questions arising every day in new and uncertain ways. Many phone numbers have been disconnected. A humanitarian catastrophe is in full swing in all occupied territories. Hunger reigns, and people are kidnapped and arrested.

Perhaps the tight narratives of the news cycle only testify to something that is missing. What's really missing right now are words. I'm in my apartment, I found some time to write-but I can barely develop a thought.

I watch video clips of the shelling on my phone. They are shared via Telegram channels, posted by residents of Kyiv. I see how silver streaks glow and then settle from the sky onto the rooftops. Someone claims that's what phosphorus ammunition looks like, while others think it's rocket fire from a Grad system, a multiple rocket launcher. A few of the districts of Kyiv, including mine, were shelled today.

Then I think for the first time that this footage could be a forgery, that it is a recording of another reality. It is not about Kyiv at all. Is it possible that right now-as I write this in my apartment while most of my neighbors spend the night in shelters-Grad missiles are flying through the air and white phosphorus is raining down on someone's home, not so far from here, in my own city?

I miss all the walls, all the houses of this city that I haven't seen yet, that I haven't photographed, that have already disappeared and been destroyed, that have become unrecognizable, incinerated.

Around noon today a powerful strike could be felt throughout my house. The rules of news coverage are changing, so it is not clear right away what attacks are happening where. Only the body of the house and one's own body sense the danger. For now they have become the most immediate sources of information.

A few hours ago, I spoke on the phone with Elena, an employee at a zoo outside Kharkiv, an area subject to constant onslaught. She is the director of a theater where children perform as actors together with dogs, mice, and rats. Time and again employees try to feed and evacuate the animals. But as soon as the Russian army sees cars, bullets begin to fly.

On March 7, Elena tried to reach the zoo one last time in order to bring food to the animals. On the phone she explained to me that many animals remain in their pens. "The deer were shot at. Some of them died. Others managed to escape through the ruined fence into the forest. When we arrived by bus, the shelling started. We ran out of the bus with the feed and made it to the pens. Some great apes had been shot. We ran through the damaged rooms trying to distribute as much of the feed as possible. Then we ran to the bus, but the driver was already dead. We tried to get another car to go back and transport his body to the city. Another colleague was fatally injured. Only one other colleague and I were able to escape."

"I can't cry," she went on to say. "I can't even believe it took place. Before my eyes I keep seeing the plastic display window where the monkeys were waiting for us. Many of them were standing there with babies pressed against their bodies. They were hoping for food, but we didn't manage to feed them that day." Elena has stopped going to the zoo for the moment, but other staff members are trying to reach the pens so that the animals, the ones still alive anyway, don't die of hunger.

I don't want to write a "last" sentence. Every day we encounter our choices.

Thursday, March 17
DAY 22
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[photo: Nikita Kadan]

Today there is no entry.

Edited by ISOLARII with translations by Greg Nissan

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
YEVGENIA BELORUSETS Yevgenia Belorusets has been one of the great documentarians of Russia's war against Ukraine since 2014, winning the International Literature Prize for her work. Her diary provides the news from a different vantage.

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Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965, English Subtitles) - Sergei Parajanov

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Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965, English Subtitles) - Sergei Parajanov

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRmqJweWmQA

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Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965, English Subtitles) - Sergei Parajanov

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Understanding the War in Ukraine: Insights from the Recent Past, 1991—Present (CSEEES and Origins OSU)

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Understanding the War in Ukraine: Insights from the Recent Past, 1991—Present (CSEEES and Origins OSU)

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Ohio State University History Professor David Hoffmann examines some key moments in recent Russian and Ukrainian history, with particular attention to the breakup of the Soviet Union, Putin’s rise to power in Russia, and the 2014 Revolution in Ukraine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gW9xDJc1VM&t=1s

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Understanding the War in Ukraine: Insights from the Recent Past, 1991—Present

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10 Things Everyone Should Know About Ukraine

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10 Things Everyone Should Know About Ukraine

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https://ukrainianinstitute.org.uk/10-things-everyone-should-know-about-ukraine/

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The Ukrainian Institute London | Giving Ukraine a voice in the UK and beyond

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10 Things Everyone Should Know About Ukraine are short films that bring to life ten familiar and yet unknown stories including that of the serf who became an artist and a poet; a writer who rewrote European classics from a woman's point of view, a theatre director who thought that revolutionary art could change the world, a count who chose to become a priest, an author who wrote more than 300 poems in his prison cell, and film directors who gave a voice the silenced.

They tell the stories of Ukraine as a battleground of murderous regimes fighting over the territory and its people, Ukraine as a melting pot of languages and cultures each influencing one another, Ukraine as a place where revolutions happen in order to bring about peace, Ukraine of many stories told in many voices.

Producer/Director: Nicola Roper | Producer: Olesya Khromeychuk | Researcher: Maria Montague | Archivist: Serhiy Zakharchenko.

Taras Shevchenko: The Serf Who Founded a Nation

How Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) went from being a serf to becoming Ukraine's most important poet, giving a voice to the Ukrainian people. With Dr Rory Finnin, University Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Ukrainian Studies, University of Cambridge.

With special thanks to: Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, Uilleam Blacker, Virlana Tkacz and Yara Arts Group, Lesia Scholey, Anna Morgan.

Lesia Ukrainka: Fin-de-siècle Ukrainian Feminism

How Ukrainian modernist writer Lesia Ukrainka (1871-1913) pioneered a new feminist literature, at the forefront of European trends of the time. With Dr Sasha Dovzhyk, Associate Research Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London.

With special thanks to: Lesia Scholey, Anna Morgan.

The Many Voices of Ukraine

How over the centuries, the territory of Ukraine has been home to a huge diversity of languages and literatures, with unique and dynamic interplay between different cultures. With Dr Uilleam Blacker, Associate Professor in the Comparative Culture of Russia and Eastern Europe, University College London.

With special thanks to: Sasha Dovzhyk, Martin Lohrer, Lily Kahn, Lesia Scholey, Anna Morgan.

Les Kurbas: Ukrainian Avant-Garde Theatre

How the experimental director, Les Kurbas, radically transformed Ukrainian theatre and was at the cutting edge of theatre innovations across Europe. With Dr Mayhill C. Fowler, Associate Professor, Director of Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Stetson University.

With special thanks to: Lois Oxley, Virlana Tkacz, Lesia Scholey, Anna Morgan.

Holodomor: The Ukrainian Famine of the 1930s

How the Holodomor fits into the wider understanding of Stalin's USSR, and how the famine was covered in world media. With Dr Daria Mattingly, Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow and Affiliated Lecturer in Slavonic Studies, University of Cambridge.

With special thanks to: Samara Pearce, Lesia Scholey, Anna Morgan.

The Bloodlands: Ukraine in World War II

How the multiple occupations of Ukraine during the Second World War had a devastating impact on the populations of Ukraine, including the Holocaust. With Professor Timothy Snyder, the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.

With special thanks to: Daniel Fedorowycz, Vincent Hiribarren, the MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine, Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, Serhii Plokhii, Kostyantyn Bondarenko, Lesia Scholey, Anna Morgan.

Andrei Sheptytskyi: A Count Who Became a Priest

The extraordinary story of Andrei Sheptytskyi, a count who gave up a life of wealth to become a Ukrainian Catholic priest, who saved Jewish lives in WWII and eventually founded Ukraine's most modern university. With Bishop Borys Gudziak, Archeparch of Philadelphia for Ukrainians and Metropolitan for the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the USA, President of the Ukrainian Catholic University.

With special thanks to: Volodymyr Radko, Oleh Yaskiv, Lida Shyhymaha, Metropolitan Sheptytsky Information-Cultural Centre, Ukrainian Catholic University, Lesia Scholey, Anna Morgan.

Fighting for the Self: Poetry from the Gulag

How the dissident poet Vasyl Stus fought for human and national rights and created unique poetry of the self, overcoming the extreme conditions of the Soviet Gulag. With Dr Bohdan Tokarsky, URIS Fellow at the University of Basel and the 2020/21 Prisma Ukraїna Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin.

With special thanks to: Dmytro Stus, Stus Centre, Lesia Scholey, Anna Morgan.

Ukrainian Cinema: Giving a Voice to the Silenced

Throughout its history, Ukrainian cinema has captured the plight of marginalised peoples and identities, allowing those forgotten or hidden from society to come to life on screen. With Dr Olga Bryukhovetska, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the National University of Kyiv Mohyla Academy.

With special thanks to: Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Film Studio, Lesia Scholey, Anna Morgan.

Why do Ukrainians take to the streets?

Why Ukrainians, in spite of their divisions, are always ready to come out onto the streets and stand up for their rights. With Dr Ola Onuch, Associate Professor in Politics (Senior Lecturer), University of Manchester.

With special thanks to: Sergii Proskurnia, Lesia Scholey, Anna Morgan.

'10 Things Everyone Should Know About Ukraine' is made in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute and H.S. Pshenychnyi Central State Film, Photo and Sound Archive of Ukraine.

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10 Things Everyone Should Know About Ukraine ‣ Ukrainian Institute London

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10 Things Everyone Should Know About Ukraine are short films that bring to life ten familiar and yet unknown stories including that of the serf who became an artist and a poet; a writer who rewrote European classics from a woman's point of view, a theatre director who thought that revolutionary art could change the world, a count who chose to become a priest, an author who wrote more than 300 poems in his prison cell, and film directors who gave a voice the silenced.

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https://origins.osu.edu/index.php/read/ukraine-war-and-revolution

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Vladimir Putin’s case for war in Ukraine is simple but flawed. In his view there is no such thing as real Ukrainians. Instead, there were simply “the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land [who] have called themselves Russian.”

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https://origins.osu.edu/index.php/read/taras-shevchenko-poet-ukraine

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When Ukrainian troops liberated the town of Borodyanka from Russian occupation in early April, 2022 they discovered the damage done to its Taras Shevchenko monument. Bullets had hit the great poet's forehead. The pillar holding him up had been damaged by shells.

Liberated from bondage, Shevchenko turned to poetry. In 1840, he published his first collection, Kobzar, named after the bards who sang tales on their stringed instrument, the kobza. Shevchenko's poems imagined Ukraine as a distinct nation with a people, culture, and history separate from Russia.

Inspired by his reading of romantic histories, Shevchenko's Kobzar appropriated the history of the Cossacks for Ukraine. The freedom they embodied became a potent inspiration for Ukrainian readers. His 1838 poem "Night of Taras," for example, about a 1630 peasant revolt, included these lines:

Ukraine, O my dear Ukraine,
Trampled by the Polacks!
My dearest!
When I think of you, my homeland,
My heart can only cry ...
Whither all the Cossacks
Whither their red coats?
Whither our good fortune
And whither blessed freedom?

Kobzar brought Shevchenko acclaim. It also led to trouble. Traveling back to the Ukrainian lands, he lamented the lack of freedom among members of his family and members of his nation. He painted Ukrainian national landscapes and historical sites in an album he titled Picturesque Ukraine. He also befriended members of a secret society devoted to the right of Slavic peoples, including Ukrainians, to be independent.

Embroidered Towel with Shevchenko's "Testament", Kyiv Market, 2011. Photo by author.

Shevchenko Monument, L'viv, Ukraine. Photo by author.

Statues of Shevchenko were built in the Soviet era, including the well-known one in the center of Kyiv and the one in nearby Borodyanka. Soviet authorities heralded Shevchenko as "the great son of Ukraine " (as an article from 1984 declared him), but he also remained a potent symbol for an independent Ukraine, his poems a reminder of its essential characteristics. When Ukraine gained independence in 1991, Shevchenko served as its spiritual founding father.

The Complete Kobzar: The Poetry of Taras Shevchenko. Translated by Peter Fedynsky. London: Glagoslav Publications, 2013.

Rory Finnin, "Nationalism and the Lyric, Or How Taras Shevchenko Speaks to Compatriots Dead, Living, and Unborn," The Slavonic and East European Review 89/1 (2011): 29-55.

George G. Grabowicz, "Taras Shevchenko: The Making of the National Poet," Revue des études slaves LXXXV-3 (2014): 421-439.

Boris Khersonsky, "Every Hut in Our Beloved Country is on the Edge." Translated by Amelia Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuk. Literary Hub 11 March 2022.

Stephen M. Norris, "Shevchenko's 'Kobzar' Portrays Ukrainian Nationhood." Moscow Times 16 March 2014.

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When Ukrainian troops liberated the town of Borodyanka from Russian occupation in early April, 2022 they discovered the damage done to its Taras Shevchenko monument. Bullets had hit the great poet's forehead. The pillar holding him up had been damaged by shells.

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https://origins.osu.edu/index.php/read/ukrainian-theater-soviet-stage

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On a summer day in August 1920, in the middle of , a group of Ukrainians performed Macbeth. They had been in Kyiv, but the city was destroyed, dangerous, and barely supported life, let alone theater. They traveled through a war zone to a small town called Bila Tserkva, and arrived at the tail end of fighting between Poles and Bolsheviks (the Bolsheviks ). They were not safe, not at all.

Red Army soldiers in Kyiv, 1919. Encyclopedia of Ukraine.

Yet in these wartime conditions, they did a play about the murder of a king and the ensuing chaos and devastation, painfully relevant to all audiences who had endured not only , but also the fierce battles for control of this region after the and Habsburg empires collapsed. Audiences and artists knew uncertainty, violence, and pain.

After the war, these artists created a theater called Berezil, run by the indomitable Les Kurbas, which envisioned new horizons not only for the theater, but also for its artists and audiences. After the war, artists dreamed of changing the world.

Actors in the Berezil troupe, 1922.

And they did, at least theatrically. Their work highlights the innovative art of the 1920s and Ukraine's cultural connections to . And while we might think of "Soviet art" as exclusively about promoting a political message, in fact, in the 1920s, artists across the Soviet Union truly believed their work could make the world a better place .

In the 1920s, the Berezil was the largest state-funded theater in Soviet Ukraine. Based in Kharkiv, the capital of Soviet Ukraine, it produced extraordinary work. Yet it remains largely unknown today because most books on Soviet culture focus only on Moscow (or Leningrad), assuming that everything else is secondary. It is not.

Photo of the Berezil theater today which is known as the Kharkiv State Dramatic Theater.

Although Kurbas' work resembles that of the (more widely) famous Soviet director Vsevolod Meyerhold, his inspiration came from a different place. For example, Kurbas grew up in the Habsburg empire, not the Russian, and different theatrical traditions and practices shaped his creativity. In some sense, we can say theater in Ukraine is distinguished from that of other parts of the Soviet Union because of different influences: the legacy of Polish culture, multiple empires (Habsburg, , ), and ultimately, the experiences of and occupations in the 20th century.

The Berezil and its house playwright, Mykola Kulish, created a series of touchstone productions. They include The People's Malakhii (1927), a critique of Soviet bureaucracy about a postman with dreams of socialism who goes insane; Myna Mazailo (1929), a scathing satire on Ukrainization where no one escapes judgment; and Maklena Grasa (1933), a play about famine, created during the Holodomor, or terror famine in Ukraine. This last, unsurprisingly, led to the theater's closure, re-naming, and the arrest of its leading artists.

Les Kurbas in 1933 after his arrest.

Hello from Radio 477! shows the way Europe shaped Soviet Ukraine. The production was inspired by theater in Weimar Berlin, where Berezil artists traveled in 1927 and 1928. They enjoyed shows at theaters large and small, and at famous cabarets like the Scala, known for its line of dancing girls similar to New York's Ziegfeld Follies.

Photo of Hello from Radio 477!, taken by author at exhibit "Kurbas: New Worlds" curated by Virlana Tkacz, Tetiana Rudenko, and Waldemart Klyuzko at Art Arsenal, 2018.

Two actors, representing Kharkiv students, served as masters of ceremonies in Act I, with jokes about the relationship with Moscow, contemporary politics, and the lack of products in the general store. Act II featured Charlie Chaplin-esque mime work by Kurbas' wife, actress Valentyna Chystiakova, and western dances such as the Charleston. Act III brought the audience to Café "Hell," where actors, dressed like local literary celebrities, cavorted with dancing girls.

Photo from Hello from Radio 477! (1929), Encyclopedia of Ukraine.

Finally, the figure of comic writer Ostap Vyshnia was depicted hunting a line of dancing girls dressed as ducks. Ultimately, he is imprisoned in a brandy bottle by Baba Yaga, the frightening ogress of Slavic folklore.

It was a strange show, to be sure. But the jokes, the dancing girls, the contemporary references, clearly reflected the work they saw in Berlin that they transformed into a totally Soviet Ukrainian theatrical product.

Photo of Hello from Radio 477!, taken by author at exhibit "Kurbas: New Worlds" curated by Virlana Tkacz, Tetiana Rudenko, and Waldemart Klyuzko at Art Arsenal, 2018.

challenges the way we understand Soviet culture, which tends to focus on artists working in Moscow making "Soviet" art, or on non-Russian artists making "national" art. Neither paradigm captures this musical revue. It is Soviet, but it is not of Moscow. It's Ukrainian, but it's not nationalistic. Instead, Hello is a local product that reflects the multiple cultural influences in this place, Soviet Ukraine.

So, what happened to this remarkable theater generation?

The fate of this show and its artists are representative of Soviet Ukrainian experimental art. Hello played a season. It had a sequel ( The Four Chamberlains), but in the 1930s musical comedies ceased appearing on the stages of the USSR's dramatic theaters.

Photo of Budynok Slovo, taken by Anna Muller, 2016.

Some of the show's artists made it to old age on Soviet pensions. Some were arrested and sent to the gulag. Some survived Nazi occupation and left for the West. Artistic director Les Kurbas was arrested in 1933 and shot by the Soviets in the far north in 1937, along with over 100 Ukrainian cultural elites, including playwright Mykola Kulish.
Learn More
Website: "Open Kurbas" created by Tetiana Rudenko and the team at the State Museum of Theatrical, Musical, and Cinematic Arts of Ukraine: https://openkurbas.org/en/

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On a summer day in August 1920, in the middle of , a group of Ukrainians performed Macbeth. They had been in Kyiv, but the city was destroyed, dangerous, and barely supported life, let alone theater. They traveled through a war zone to a small town called Bila Tserkva, and arrived at the tail end of fighting between Poles and Bolsheviks (the Bolsheviks ).

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https://www.polyphonyproject.com/en

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At Chernobyl, Hints of Nature’s Adaptation

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At Chernobyl, Hints of Nature’s Adaptation

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https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/science/nature-adapts-to-chernobyl.html

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Biologist Timothy Mousseau has been studying the lasting effects of radiation on the flora and fauna of Chernobyl, Ukraine.

NOVOSHEPELYCHI, Ukraine - The clicking sound from Timothy Mousseau's radiation detector slowly increased as he walked through the forest here, a few miles west of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

As he stopped to examine a spider web on a tree branch, the display on the device showed 25 microsieverts an hour. That is typical, Dr. Mousseau said, for this area not far from Novoshepelychi, one of hundreds of villages that were abandoned after radioactive fallout from the 1986 reactor explosion at the plant rendered a large part of this region uninhabitable.

The levels of radioactivity here are far below those still found in parts of the deteriorating shelter that covers the destroyed reactor - a shelter that by 2017 will itself be covered by a huge arch that is intended to eliminate the threat of further radioactive contamination.

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NATURE'S COURSE Twenty-eight years after the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, clockwise from upper left: the port at the abandoned city of Pripyat; a spider web like those that an American biologist, Timothy Mousseau, is studying; Pripyat's decaying hotel; a radioactive mushroom in a forest near the plant site. Credit... Henry Fountain/The New York Times

But the levels in this lowland glade, where acacias and Scotch pines are interspersed with the occasional tumbledown barn, are higher than normal. In 10 days here a person would be exposed to as much background radiation as a typical resident of the United States receives from all sources in a year. That makes it off-limits except for short forays, but a good place to study the long-term effects of radiation on organisms.

"This level of chronic exposure is above what most species will tolerate without showing some signs, either in terms of how long they live or in the number of tumors they have, or genetic mutations and cataracts," Dr. Mousseau said. "It's a perfect laboratory setting for us."

Dr. Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina, has been coming to the contaminated area around Chernobyl, known as the exclusion zone, since 1999. The list of creatures he has studied is long: chiffchaffs, blackcaps, barn swallows and other birds; insects, including bumblebees, butterflies and cicadas; spiders and bats; and mice, voles and other small rodents. After the nuclear meltdowns at Fukushima, Japan, three years ago he has conducted similar research there, too.

In dozens of papers over the years Dr. Mousseau, his longtime collaborator, Anders Pape Moller of the National Center for Scientific Research in France, and colleagues have reported evidence of radiation's toll: higher frequencies of tumors and physical abnormalities like deformed beaks among birds compared with those from uncontaminated areas, for example, and a decline in the populations of insects and spiders with increasing radiation intensity.

But their most recent findings, published last month, showed something new. Some bird species, they reported in the journal Functional Ecology, appear to have adapted to the radioactive environment by producing higher levels of protective antioxidants, with correspondingly less genetic damage. For these birds, Dr. Mousseau said, chronic exposure to radiation appears to be a kind of "unnatural selection" driving evolutionary change.

Ionizing radiation, like that produced by cesium, strontium and other radioactive isotopes, affects living tissue in several ways, among them by breaking strands of DNA. A high enough dose - many thousands of times higher than the levels in the forest - can cause sickness or death. That is what happened to several dozen technicians and firefighters at the Chernobyl plant when the Unit 4 reactor exploded on April 26, 1986. They were exposed to lethal doses, in many cases in just a few minutes, and their organs and tissues were so badly damaged that they died within weeks.

Relatively low doses of radiation, however, even over a long time, may have little or no effect. But lower doses can cause genetic mutations, leading to cancers and other physical problems that may show up over longer periods and affect breeding and longevity. Studying the effects on animals and insects can lead to a better understanding of the impact on people as well.

Some researchers have challenged the studies by Dr. Mousseau and his collaborators, arguing that it is difficult to show that radiation levels in the exclusion zone, which covers about 1,000 square miles, have had much noticeable effect. There have also been anecdotal reports of abundant populations of some animals in the zone, suggesting that the lack of human activity there has led to the area becoming a haven for wildlife.

With an unfinished cooling tower at the Chernobyl plant in the background, Timothy Mousseau, right, and an assistant set out microphones to study bats in the contaminated area. Credit... William Daniels for The New York Times

Dr. Mousseau dismisses the idea that the zone is some kind of post-apocalyptic Eden. But the latest study has given him pause, he said, because it shows the kind of adaptations that may allow some creatures - chaffinches and great tits in this case, though not barn swallows or robins - to thrive in the zone. However, it remains to be seen whether these species are truly thriving, Dr. Mousseau said.

The findings also suggest that in some cases radiation levels might have an inverse effect - birds in areas with higher radiation exposure may show greater adaptation, and thus less genetic damage, than those in areas with lower radiation levels.

Like almost all of the studies by Dr. Mousseau and his colleagues, the latest one takes advantage of the unique circumstances of the Chernobyl exclusion zone as a real-world laboratory. "Nature is a much more stressful environment than the lab," Dr. Mousseau said. Abnormalities and other effects of radiation are seen at much lower radiation levels than in lab-based studies, he said.

Radiation levels in the zone also vary considerably from place to place because weather patterns during the accident and its aftermath affected the intensity of the fallout.

Podcast: Chernobyl's Radioactive Forest, Advanced Placement Boot Camp, Flat-Headed Babies

Stroll through irradiated woods near the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster; in Pittsburgh, a school tries to raise the number of its students who get college credit on A.P. science tests by 80 percent; some babies develop misshapen heads, but an expensive corrective helmet might not be effective in restoring roundness.

Not far from here is one of the hottest areas in the zone, the so-called Red Forest, where radiation levels were so high in the days after the accident that Scotch pines turned red and died.

"But 10 to 15 miles from here, there are areas that are absolutely clean," Dr. Mousseau said. "This gives us the ability to compare hot and cold areas that are similar ecologically in most ways except for radiation." Those comparisons have generally shown a lower abundance of birds and rodents in the more radioactive areas.

On this day, while collaborators from Finland were inspecting traps and collecting mice for genetic studies, Dr. Mousseau was gathering data for another project. He photographed spider webs.

Dr. Mousseau wonders if radiation exposure might have affected spiders' orderly web-spinning abilities, just as caffeine and other substances are known to do. So he'll have students back in South Carolina systematically analyze the photographs - he's taken more than 200 - for signs of disorder.

Dr. Mousseau said that for years he pursued the Chernobyl research largely out of personal interest. But that changed after the nuclear accident at the Fukushima plant in Japan in 2011. While the two accidents were different - at Chernobyl the reactor exploded, while at Fukushima cores melted down and there was an explosion outside the reactor itself - the result was basically the same: radioactive contamination over a wide area.

"No one really expected there'd be another nuclear disaster on this scale," he said. "But it's clear now after Fukushima that all of this has some broad relevance."

Dr. Mousseau has expanded his work to include similar studies in Japan - he's made about 10 trips there. Already, he said, he is seeing some Chernobyl-like effects in the contaminated area around the Fukushima plant, but he needs to gather data for at least a few more years before he can be confident about the impact.

"If we find the same sort of dose response in both places," he said, "that provides incredible strength to the hypothesis that it is indeed radiation that is leading to these negative impacts."

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At Chernobyl, Hints of Nature's Adaptation (Published 2014)

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NOVOSHEPELYCHI, Ukraine - The clicking sound from Timothy Mousseau's radiation detector slowly increased as he walked through the forest here, a few miles west of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. As he stopped to examine a spider web on a tree branch, the display on the device showed 25 microsieverts an hour.

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https://www.pbs.org/video/building-chernobyls-megatomb-lyqrnh/

Membership is required to view.

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NOVA | Building Chernobyl’s MegaTomb | Season 44 | Episode 8

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Engineers race to build a massive dome to contain the crumbling remains of the reactor.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ErboTlXvH0&t=1s

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Videos by Simon Ostrovsky of PBS NewsHour

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Videos by Simon Ostrovsky of PBS NewsHour

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https://www.simonostrovsky.com/

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Investigative Journalist, Documentary Filmmaker in New York

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Speeches by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

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Speeches by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy

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https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/speeches

Please note that some videos do not have subtitles, but may have transcripts offered.

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Official website of the President of Ukraine

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Speeches — Official web site of the President of Ukraine

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Speeches of Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Official web site of the President of Ukraine

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'Red Famine' Revisits Stalin's Brutal Campaign To Starve The Peasantry In Ukraine

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'Red Famine' Revisits Stalin's Brutal Campaign To Starve The Peasantry In Ukraine

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https://www.npr.org/2017/10/09/556180554/red-famine-revisits-stalins-brutal-campaign-to-starve-the-peasantry-in-ukraine

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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Russian disinformation campaigns of the present and the past are the subjects of today's interview. My guest, Anne Applebaum, is a Washington Post columnist who co-directs a new think tank that's devoted to analyzing, reporting on and combating disinformation. It's called Arena, and it's based at the London School of Economics, where she is a professor. Applebaum is also the author of a new book about how, with the help of disinformation, Stalin orchestrated a famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s that resulted in the deaths of nearly 4 million Ukrainians. Part of the goal was to stop the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Echoes of that continue today in eastern Ukraine, which is in its fourth year of fighting with Russian-led separatist forces. Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.

Applebaum was also the author of the books "Iron Curtain: The Crushing Of Eastern Europe, 1944 To 1956" and "Gulag," a history of Stalin's labor camps. She is American and now lives in London and Poland. Her new book is called "Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine."

Anne Applebaum, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Let's just briefly - for contextual reasons, as a frame, let's talk briefly about the ways Russia has been interfering in Ukraine for the past couple of years. Maybe you can almost just, like, list for us some of the things Russia has done.

ANNE APPLEBAUM: In 2014, the Ukrainians staged a street revolution of a kind that was particularly frightening to the Russian president, waving EU flags and calling for rule of law and democracy. In response to that, their president fled the country. He'd been trying to bring the country closer to Russia and trying to change their constitution so they wouldn't be democratic.

Russia responded by invading and occupying Crimea, which is a peninsula attached to Ukraine, and eventually incorporating that into Russia and then invaded and is still fighting in the eastern part of Ukraine called Donbass where there are Russian separatists who are backed by Russia and are using Russian army weapons and assistance to occupy eastern Ukraine.

GROSS: So does Russia want to annex Ukraine? Is that its goal?

APPLEBAUM: No. Russia doesnt want to annex Ukraine. Russia wants to undermine Ukraine and undermine any Ukrainian government that would pose any kind of ideological or other challenge to Russia. Russia wants to see Ukraine as a kind of colony, as a country that will pay it fealty, that will follow its political system, that will be a comfortable place for Russians to do business.

GROSS: So the story that you tell in your book about Stalin's war on Ukraine and how he helped orchestrate a famine in Ukraine - do you see that as connecting in some way with what's happening now between Russia and Ukraine?

APPLEBAUM: It connects in a number of ways. I think the most interesting way is Stalin's motivation. Stalin saw Ukraine as a problem not just for him politically but for his entire - for the Bolshevik Revolution. And he sought to undermine Ukraine and to eliminate Ukraine as a challenge, as a sovereign nation because he feared that it could undermine Bolshevism.

And that is not the same, but it's similar to the way in which Putin views Ukraine. He sees any Ukraine that was pro-democracy, any Ukraine that was close to Europe politically and economically - this is a challenge to his political system because his political system is a corrupt oligarchy. And he fears exactly the kind of emotions that led people to the streets in Kiev. So I think it's fair to say that these are two rulers who've both seen in Ukraine a source of anarchy, of discontent, of possible trouble for their own political systems.

GROSS: Ukraine in the 1930s, which is the period your book covers, was seen as, like, the breadbasket for the Soviet Union. So when there was a famine, Ukraine became especially important to the Soviet Union.

APPLEBAUM: Yes. Ukraine was important to the Soviet Union from the beginning as the source of much of its grain. Ukraine famously has two growing seasons. It has a whole region called the black earth district, which is unusually fertile soil. And Ukraine had been important to the czarist empire and then later to the USSR as a source of grain. And this of course was one of the reasons why the Soviet Union was very anxious not to lose Ukraine.

And so during the civil war in 1917 and '18, enormous efforts were made to keep Ukraine, to make sure that the Ukrainian independence movement, which at that time wanted to create a sovereign Ukrainian state, didn't succeed. And so there was that motivation in addition to Stalin's fear that Ukrainian nationalism could pose a challenge to Bolshevism ideologically as well.

GROSS: So you know, there's a famine. It gets worst because of the actions Stalin takes. Just give us a sense of how bad the famine was in Ukraine. I mean, you talk about some of the things that people ate when they couldn't find food, like boiling their belts and eating that.

APPLEBAUM: People ate leather. They ate leaves. They ate grass. They ate cats and dogs. They ate squirrels. I've read about people boiling frogs and toads, trying to make bread or bake things, make some kind of flour out of leaves and roots. You know, luckier people, people who lived near rivers were able to fish of course, and people who lived near forests were able to gather mushrooms. But unluckier people who didn't have those kinds of - who didn't have that kind of food source starved very, very quickly.

One of the things that happens when you starve is that you die - you can die very unexpectedly. Your whole system becomes weakened, and so people would be - would die as they were searching for food. They would go into fields. They would try to find leftover grain in fields that had already been harvested, and then they would collapse in the fields. They would try walking to local train stations. They would try walking to cities, and they would collapse along the side of the road. And there are photographs of people dying by the sides of roads among the very few photographs that we have. And there're many, many accounts of - particularly of the train stations - people gathered there, begging as trains passed, waiting and hoping to get on a train.

One of the ways in which Stalin exacerbated the famine was that he created a de facto cordon around Ukraine. So Ukrainian peasants didn't have any permission to travel, but of course they sought to leave anyway. People tried to sneak into cities. They tried to get work in factories. They tried to get off their farms in order to get food. But the level of desperation was something that I think we would now find very hard to imagine.

GROSS: You tell stories about cannibalism.

APPLEBAUM: There was cannibalism. And you know, it's one of these things where Ukrainians have been very reluctant to speak about it of course in subsequent years because it seems almost shameful to imagine that such a thing could have happened. But cannibalism, even at that time, even when people were starving, was never considered normal. Nobody ever treated it, you know, as something that was not anything other than horrible.

Cannibals were caught. They were arrested. Some of them were lynched. There were - there are police reports giving accounts of both of cannibals and of people reporting cannibals and trying to turn them into the police. A decade later when there were travelers in Ukraine who asked about the famine and were told about the famine were stunned to hear the stories of cannibalism because of course it's something that's unheard of in normal life.

But it become - you know, it was - almost became part of the secret history of the famine. It was one of the things that people knew about and spoke about and we're very, you know - yet it never made it - it was never of course in the newspapers. It was never reported in any public way.

GROSS: So there was a famine that was being caused by natural reasons. But you say that Stalin orchestrated a famine within the famine in Ukraine.

APPLEBAUM: Actually, to be more precise, there were no natural reasons for this famine. There was no weather issue. There were no insects, none of the things that normally cause famines. This was a famine that was entirely caused by political decisions. And so first there was a general decision about collectivization. And that meant that the Soviet peasantry - and this is all over the Soviet Union, not just in Ukraine - were forced to leave their homes and to join collective and state farms.

And this caused an enormous amount of disruption. Peasants resisted it. They fought back. Sometimes they fought back violently. There were, you know - teams of activists were sent into the villages to persuade them to do it. All of farming was reorganized. And the effect was a huge drop in food production. Partly, as people left their homes, they had no incentive on the new farms to work, but also just the general disruption led to a - far less food being available.

But as I say, that famine reached, you know, became - it became clear that people were starving in 1932. But what happened in Ukraine was that at that moment, the Soviet Union took - the Soviet Politburo took a decision to exacerbate the famine inside Ukraine. So within this general Soviet famine which affected many people in Russia and Kazakhstan and other places, there were also decisions taken that particularly affected Ukraine - the cordon drawn around Ukraine. There were villages and towns and farms that were blacklisted in Ukraine. There were - decisions that only affected Ukraine were made to make the famine worse there.

GROSS: What was Stalin's goal and collectivizing the farms and basically throwing peasants and landowners in Ukraine off the land?

APPLEBAUM: The goal of collectivization was, in effect, to turn the peasants into a kind of proletariat who would be - they wouldn't be independent. They wouldn't have their own land. They couldn't make their own decisions. They would be under state control. I think his - one of the ideas he had was that this would be more efficient. I think there was also a political reason to in that this would extend Soviet power into the countryside. So you know, inside the cities, it was easier to control people. You could nationalize industry. You could make people work. You could decide where people worked in the countryside. People had their own property. So this was, in effect, removing people's private property as a way of controlling them.

His goal in Ukraine specifically was a little bit different. In other words, the collectivization was the first wave of political changes in Ukraine. And then the famine had an additional goal, which was to weaken the sort of peasant resistance in Ukraine and to weaken the Ukrainian national movement, which he saw as being connected to the peasantry. And he spoke about this more than once. So he - his idea was that he would eliminate Ukraine as a kind of political problem. So you know, the peasantry was a general issue that affected all of the Soviet Union. And then the particular problem of Ukraine as the peasants being the main component of this nationalist movement would be - he would eliminate them by weakening them through mass starvation and also through mass arrests.

GROSS: So one of the things Stalin did was move in a lot of Russians from Russian cities - move them into the Ukraine and replace some of the peasants from Ukraine with these urban Russian workers.

APPLEBAUM: So there are two things that happened. One is that, in order to carry out the famine, there were teams sent from Russia and also from Ukrainian cities to - first of all, to collectivize the peasants and then later on to requisition their grain as well as much of their other food. The activist teams went house to house, and they took people's food away - literally all of their food, everything that they had and confiscated it. Secondarily, after the famine in 1933, 1934, 1935, there were Russians sent from other parts of the Soviet Union to colonize the empty Ukrainian villages. There were whole swaths of the countryside where nobody lived anymore.

And so Russians were brought into Russify rural Ukraine. There's a dispute about how effective that was. Some people stayed. Some people - there are very interesting letters written from some of the Russians who were brought into those empty communities. They didn't really know where they were being sent to. And they were horrified to discover corpses. They discovered, you know, that fields hadn't been tended. They didn't really know where they'd been brought to. And some left. But it's certainly true that over the subsequent 10 and 20 and 30 years, Ukraine - not just rural Ukraine but all of Ukraine - was Russified quite comprehensively.

Russians came in and took over many of the jobs in the Ukrainian Communist Party and Ukrainian institutions but also in the countryside replacing the missing Ukrainians. So in effect, the famine was a part of a larger process of attempt and Russification of Ukraine, of replacement of the Ukrainian language with Russian, of replacement of people who identified themselves as Ukrainians with Russians from Russia essentially in order to Sovietize Ukraine so that it became a more willing colony of the Soviet Union.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Anne Applebaum. She's the author of the new book "Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine." She's also a Washington Post columnist and teaches at the London School of Economics. We're going to take a short break, then we'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DANILO PEREZ AND CLAUS OGERMAN SONG, "RAYS AND SHADOWS")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Anne Applebaum. She's the author of the new book "Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine." She teaches at the London School of Economics and is also a columnist for The Washington Post.

So in addition to all of this, there were also mass deportations of Ukrainians. I think, like, tens of thousands of Ukrainians were deported during the period of this famine. What were the reasons for the deportations?

APPLEBAUM: Part of collectivization and part of why collectivization was possible was that Stalin demonized a part of the rural population, calling them kulaks. And this is a word that meant rich peasants. Many of the people who were called kulaks weren't rich by any normal standard. I mean, they might have two pigs instead of one. Or they might have, you know, two-and-a-half hector field instead of a one-and-a-half hector field. But - and many of them, of course, weren't rich at all. You could become a kulak if you opposed collectivization. You could be one - you could be considered one if you refuse to hand over all of your grain or all of your food to the activist brigades.

But the demonization of the kulaks was useful to Stalin because it created divisions and hatred inside Ukrainian villages. And he would turn - the system was designed to turn part of the population against the other part. So the kulaks were - you know, why are you suffering? Why don't you have enough food? Why is your family so poor? It's the fault of the kulaks. Blame the kulaks. They're responsible for all of your problems. And he used that kind of rhetoric actually all across the Soviet Union, in the cities as well. So the workers in the cities who also suffered from food shortages were told it's the kulaks' fault. You know, they're standing in the way of our revolution. The reason why the revolution isn't succeeding is because the kulaks are stopping it.

And part of collectivization was a kind of - there was this mass propaganda campaign against the kulaks. And there was also a process of deportation of the kulaks. Tens of thousands - actually, hundreds of thousands of people from Ukraine were sent both into the more distant parts of the Soviet Union - into the far north and the Far East to live as exiles. And a portion of them were sent into the Gulag where they became slave laborers, in effect. I - it's funny. I ran into them in an earlier book that I wrote about the Gulag. There's a kind of spike in the Gulag population that happens in 1930, '31, '32. And that is, of course, the kulaks being deported from Ukraine and other parts of the USSR. That was the height of this kind of hate campaign that was conducted against them - was this mass deportation.

GROSS: So when you stand back now, how - how successful would you say Stalin was in defeating Ukrainian nationalism and in altering the population of Ukraine so that it would identify more with Russia and less with a nationalist movement in Ukraine?

APPLEBAUM: Stalin was successful in - in the 1930s and the 1940s in repressing what had been a national movement that might have in a different context been successful. Remember at the time that, you know, Ukraine sought to have its own state in 1917 and '18. This was a time when lots of European states were - or European nations, rather, were becoming states for the first time. You think - or - or for the first time having lost statehood earlier - if you think of Poland, you think of Czechoslovakia, you think of Lithuania and Estonia, Latvia. So it wasn't an uncommon desire. Democratic liberal nationalism was an - was an important movement in this era.

But - and Stalin succeeded at least in repressing that movement and in destroying it for, you know, for the time being, for his lifetime and immediately afterwards. But he didn't succeed in destroying the memory of it. And, you know, although the famine, you know, it destroyed the peasants' desire to resist and there was no further peasant resistance, and then the mass arrest of intellectuals, you know, effectively eliminated the leadership of the national movement. The memory of it remained. People - the memory of the famine remained. People kind of kept it alive in their families. The grandparents told grandchildren what had happened. People - people went back, they kept the old texts, the old stories. And in the 1980s and 1990s, as the Soviet Union began to fall apart, Ukrainians went back to that movement and they - they saw heroes and they sought examples of what kind of a nation they could be in the - in the post-Soviet world in that movement.

So in a sense, you know, Stalin destroyed it for, you know, for the Soviet Union's lifetime, but it emerged. And, you know, in a sense, the emergence of an independent Ukraine, one with its own identity that was different from the Soviet Union and Ukraine's then declaration of independence and its refusal to join the - into a kind of post-Soviet Union with - with Russia and - and the rest of the USSR in 1991 was really instrumental in ending the Soviet Union. I mean, without Ukraine, Russia really saw no purpose in - in keeping the Soviet Union going and - or trying to keep it going. So in that sense, Stalin was right that a - that a revived national Ukrainian state would destroy the Soviet Union, and eventually it did. So Stalin destroyed it for a time but he didn't destroy it forever, and it did come back. And the Ukraine that we have today is one that knows this history, and it knows the history of the 1920s and the history of the famine. And that's part of what makes up its identity right now.

GROSS: My guest is Anne Applebaum, author of the new book, "Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine." After a break, we'll talk about how Russia spread disinformation in Germany's recent election. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Anne Applebaum, author of the new book, "Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine." It's about the famine in Ukraine that was orchestrated by Stalin in the early 1930s with the help of disinformation. Applebaum has also been examining Russian disinformation today. She's a columnist for The Washington Post and a professor at the London School of Economics. Her previous books are about Stalin's labor camps and how the Soviet Union crushed Eastern Europe after World War II.

One of the things you do at the London School of Economics is that you help run a project that studies disinformation. So are you studying disinformation in elections, and what have you been looking at?

APPLEBAUM: So it's a project that looks at - we have a range of things we're doing, and one of them, yes, was a project that examined Russian attempts to manipulate the German election campaign, mostly online but not only, and looking at ways in which the Russian government and agents of the Russian government or representatives of the Russian government or even just ordinary Russians were attempting to help the far-right win the German election campaign. What were the techniques and tactics that they used online? What were the messages that they used? How were they trying to create divisions really within Germany because that was the messaging that the Alternative for Germany, the German far-right, was trying to use?

And you know, since we're on the topic of my book, it's really not an accident that I (laughter) got interested in this issue because so much of why the Ukrainian famine was possible, so much of why Stalin's atrocities were possible was because of the way in which the Soviet Union used disinformation, propaganda and what we would now call hate speech to encourage people to do terrible things. So why did people go along with totalitarianism? Why did they go along with dictatorship? They were persuaded to do so by this very divisive and bitter rhetoric.

I don't want to make a direct comparison between the Soviet Union and the president. Things are very different. And that's an interesting conversation to dissect why, but they are. But nevertheless, some of the, you know, some of the thinking of the current Russian government, of the people who run its propaganda system has echoes of the past and particularly this idea of divisiveness, scapegoating.

You know, what's wrong with my life? You know, it can't be ever my fault. What's wrong with my society? It can't be our own decisions. We have to find a scapegoat. We have to find enemies. This is what the German far-right does. It identifies Muslims and Islam and refugees and foreigners as enemies, and that gives them the reassurance that they need...

GROSS: That seems to be a theme right now, doesn't it?

APPLEBAUM: It is a very broad theme all across the West. And it's something that the Russians have identified as something they can use, they can push to help divide and disorganize Western democracies. And they've done it in multiple countries. You know, they did it in our country, in the United States, and they were doing it in Germany.

In Germany, it was a much smaller operation. They have a wide range of interest in Germany, so it's not just in the far-right. They also have some other kinds of stakes there. But it's not an accidental link. I mean, they think about, how do we make people angry? How do we make people afraid? How do we create scapegoats? You know, they understand that those are ways you can unify people to do all kinds of things if you can make them all angry at the same enemy.

GROSS: What does Russia want in Germany?

APPLEBAUM: Russia wants in Germany what it wants everywhere in Europe, which is, it wants to end the European Union, which it sees as a - as something that thwarts its ability to do corrupt deals and do bilateral deals in Europe. And so it supports political parties that are against the European Union. It wants to end NATO because it wants the United States and its influence out of Europe.

More generally, it seeks to undermine and dislodge liberal democracy wherever it can partly for practical reasons because, you know, for Russian companies, it would be a lot easier to do - you know, they do business using corrupt methods, and it would be more useful to them to do business in states where rule of law isn't so respected and they can bribe people. And in other words, they're looking to export corruption rather than - and it helps to undermine democracy to do that.

But I think they also seek to undermine democracy for a bigger reason, namely that democracy rhetoric or the ideals of rule of law and freedom of speech and freedom of decision - these are ideals that are undermining for the current Russian regime. It's an oligarchic corrupt dictatorship, and so what it fears the most is the - is, you know, people on the streets calling for democracy. And so the extent to which it can undermine its neighbors and undermine their democracies is good for them. Then they can point to their own people and say, look; you know, democracy is a disaster. It doesn't work in the United States. It doesn't work in Germany. And so why should you want it either?

GROSS: So Angela Merkel won the election in Germany, but the far-right gained seats. It did very well in the election. So do you attribute that to the Russians?

APPLEBAUM: No, I don't. The Russians don't invent the far-right. They can't - they don't invent political parties in foreign countries. Actually, although they have tried to a few times, it - that doesn't usually work. What they do is they seek to help either sometimes with money, sometimes with advice and sometimes with online trolling and bot campaigns and so on. They seek to help the far-right. In really almost every European country, they have allies.

In the French election campaign, they supported Marie Le Pen. That they did with money. She was given financial aid. She's the far-right candidate in France. In Germany, they had advisers. They had an online campaign that was designed to help the far-right using techniques that they've been working on and perfecting over a number of elections actually going back many years. This is something they've been working on for a long time.

GROSS: What does the far-right stand for in Germany? Is it still connected to the former Nazi party? Is it deeply anti-Semitic?

APPLEBAUM: No. The modern far-right actually tries not to be connected to the Nazi party not least because Nazism is illegal in Germany, literally illegal. You're not allowed to display a swastika. The far-right has instead organized itself around anti-European and anti-immigration issues. So it agitates against Germany's membership of various international clubs, and it argues for heavy restrictions on immigration and deportation of immigrants.

Some of the language that they use is a little bit, you know, what in America we call dog whistling. So sometimes they say things that have anti-Semitic echoes, or one of their leaders did say something about how it's time to stop being ashamed of the German soldiers who fought in World War II, and we should remember - implying that we should remember the Wehrmacht more positively. And so there are some echoes of those links. But no, they can't be openly pro-Nazi in Germany because it's against the law.

GROSS: So how effective do you think the Russians were in helping the far-right getting new seats in Parliament?

APPLEBAUM: It's very hard to measure the Russian impact, but they were certainly trying to help the far-right. They certainly have close links to the far-right. They certainly helped their online campaign to a considerable degree. They helped boost the far-right's presence on German social media.

They particularly helped the German far-right inside the - there's a large Russian-speaking community in Germany, mostly people who emigrated from the old Soviet Union. And they made huge efforts to attract those people to the German far-right as well. So you can't do an exact measurement, but they may well have had an impact.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Anne Applebaum. She's the author of the new book "Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine." She teaches at the London School of Economics and is a columnist for The Washington Post. Let's take a really short break. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Anne Applebaum, author of the new book "Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine." She's a columnist for The Washington Post and teaches at the London School of Economics.

One of the people being investigated in America now in the investigations into the Trump campaign and Russian interference in the election is Paul Manafort, who was an adviser in Ukraine. He advised President Viktor Yanukovych and his party, and Yanukovych fled the country in 2014 after there were protests against him and his anti-democratic efforts. So you were studying Ukraine at the time that Paul Manafort was doing that advising. How soon did you find out about him, and what - how did you interpret his role there?

APPLEBAUM: So when Paul Manafort was appointed to be Trump's campaign manager, I had this horrible feeling of my worlds clashing. So I'd been working on Ukraine, which is a - you know, from the American point of view, it's not a mainstream subject. It's somewhat off to the side. So I did know about Manafort's role there, and suddenly I saw him brought into the center of U.S. politics. You know, I suddenly realized that everything he'd done and all of the ways in which Ukrainian politics had been conducted over the last seven years was suddenly going to be relevant to the U.S. election, as indeed it was.

The kinds of campaigning that he was part of or would have known about in Ukraine, the - for example, the just - the use of online trolling, the use of extensive Internet disinformation campaigns - this is something I knew from Ukraine. This is what the Russians did in Ukraine and others - the creation of these big kind of violent rallies where people get beaten up. This is another Ukrainian election tactic. In a way, he brought this post-Soviet form of politics to the United States. And when I saw that happening, it was a kind of shock, as I say. It was not something I expected to see.

I mean, you know, there's a way in which the - you know, perhaps we've come full circle. I mean, the United States and Western Europe exported liberal democracy and democratic politics to the East in the 1990s, and we've now had a kind of re-export. So their way of doing politics - this, as I said, violent, divisive, angry politics designed to pit people against one another and to build political coalitions based on hate campaigns - you know, this is something that's been done in Ukraine. It's been done in other parts of the post-Soviet world. He brought it, or he and others brought it to the United States.

GROSS: What was Manafort known for in terms of his campaign style in Ukraine?

APPLEBAUM: One of the things he was known for was his remake of Viktor Yanukovych. So Viktor Yanukovych was the president of Ukraine who had previously been part of an attempt to buy an election. A few years earlier, he'd been part of an attempted election fraud.

And so Manafort's job was to remake him, you know, to - I don't know - comb his hair and buy him better suits and teach him how to speak properly and to organize his campaign and probably also to organize the publicity and the - you know, the online campaign around him. And that's what he was known for. So in a way, he was he took a very thuggish former criminal, actually, and made him into somebody who seemed more presidential. And this is what he was best known for in Ukraine. He was also known for corruption.

One of the things that happened during the U.S. election campaign that I don't think got that much attention was that a group of Ukrainian MPs and journalists went back through their records and went - did a little bit of investigation and found there was a kind of party ledger from the president's - Yanukovych's party that described who they'd been paying bribes to or who they'd been paying, you know, off-the-books money to during - while Yanukovych was in power. And of course one of them was Manafort. And this was publicized during the Trump election campaign while Manafort was the campaign manager.

GROSS: So you felt when you were watching the Trump campaign during the period that Manafort was the campaign manager that you were seeing the exportation of Russian-style politics and disinformation being imported by Manafort into the U.S.

APPLEBAUM: Yes. I actually wrote this column in the spring of last year saying that what we're - what Manafort is and what we're seeing with the Trump campaign is Russian-style politics in the United States.

GROSS: You're actually writing about Russia, the former Soviet Union, Ukraine at a very good time to be studying this because archives were opened after the fall of the Soviet Union. You drew on those archives to write your book about the - about Stalin's war on Ukraine when he orchestrated a famine in 1932 and '33 in Ukraine.

What are some of the things you found in the archives 'cause I'm thinking, like, the things that Stalin did were kept secret, and they were kept secret for decades - you know, officially secret. It wasn't taught - the famine wasn't taught in schools. It was covered up. Did they keep records?

APPLEBAUM: So it's a very interesting thing. Yes, the Soviet Union kept extensive records. It kept extensive records of its gulag camps. It kept records of its mass murders. All of that is absolutely available in the archives. And remember; this was a political system that never expected to collapse. It imagined it would go on forever and, you know, nobody would ever see those archives and certainly nobody like me or you would be discussing those archives.

And so the archives were kept for their own reasons to keep their own - keep track of their own population. The KGB also used archives and used its own history - kept track of its own history in order to study it. The KGB would study past operations in order to learn from them. I've actually seen, you know - sort of the KGB wrote its own histories which it kept in its archives, and you can read that and see that as well now, too.

GROSS: Were there actual ledger books kept of about how many people were deported each day, how many people had food taken away from them each day?

APPLEBAUM: There were ledgers kept of deportations, more or less. So they - because they needed to know the numbers - how many trains, how many people would end up in camps and so on. The numbers - statistics on numbers of people who died are more complicated because as the famine was happening, the state decided to conceal it. And so there's a lot of circumstantial evidence and some other evidence showing that doctors, for example, would put false reasons for death on people's death certificates. So they wouldn't say that somebody died of famine. They would give some other reason.

And so the numbers for famine have only been recently calculated using as - by demographers going into birth and death records and looking at, statistically, how many people should have died in a given year and comparing them to the actual numbers. But yeah, the state certainly kept numbers of, you know, who was where and how many people - you know, how many people were available, certainly, to work in the labor camps.

GROSS: So you're living in England and Poland. Do I have that right?

APPLEBAUM: That's correct.

GROSS: But you're American. So you've been watching...

APPLEBAUM: I am American.

GROSS: You've been watching American politics from the perspective of living in Europe. So how does it look to you from where you are? Like, what are you seeing? What are you hearing around you? That's a really broad question, but I just figure you have a different perspective, being an American but living in Europe right now.

APPLEBAUM: You know, most Europeans look on the United States right now with a kind of distress that you would feel if you were stranded on a desert island and you saw, off in the distance, the ship that was coming to rescue you, sinking. You know, the United States, for Europeans, has been, for many decades, a kind of a source of comfort, stability. And the nuke, you know, offered - for countries that don't have nuclear weapons, it offers a nuclear umbrella. But it's not just the - a military link. It's a ideological link, a political link, an economic link.

You know, the United States has really been the anchor of the West - you know, the most important Western country, the biggest country but also the one that was most convinced of its own ideals that was most devoted to the idea of democracy and to the ideas of, you know, free speech, and free commerce, and free trade and all the things that have made the West rich and prosperous. And the last year has caused many to wonder whether - how long that's going to go on being true.

You know, not only does Trump not speak the language that American presidents have spoken for the last - you know, certainly since the Second World War of alliances and friendships. He also doesn't seem to speak the language of democracy. He doesn't talk about it. He doesn't promote it. He doesn't seem interested in it when he makes big speeches. He seems to tiptoe around it.

You know, they see him as somebody who chooses to be divisive rather than unifying, and people worry for the whole Western alliance, for the Western camp. You know, how long can we continue to be cohesive? How long can we continue trading with each other as seamlessly as we've been trading? How long will we main - remain a power and a voice in the world if he is the first of many of a different kind of American president?

GROSS: Well, Anne Applebaum, thank you so much for talking with us.

APPLEBAUM: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.

GROSS: Anne Applebaum's new book is called "Red Famine: Stalin's War On Ukraine." After we take a short break, Maureen Corrigan will review the new book "The Obama Inheritance," a collection of sci-fi and noir short stories inspired by conspiracy theories about Obama. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF DANIEL FREEDMAN'S "LOVE TAKES TIME")

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'Red Famine' Revisits Stalin's Brutal Campaign To Starve The Peasantry In Ukraine

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TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Russian disinformation campaigns of the present and the past are the subjects of today's interview. My guest, Anne Applebaum, is a Washington Post columnist who co-directs a new think tank that's devoted to analyzing, reporting on and combating disinformation.

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The Ukrainian Crisis: In Russia's Long Shadow

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The Ukrainian Crisis: In Russia's Long Shadow

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https://origins.osu.edu/article/ukrainian-crisis-russias-long-shadow

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The Ukrainian Crisis: In Russia’s Long Shadow

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What lies at the heart of longstanding tensions between Russia and Ukraine?

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From Ukraine With Love Weekly Podcast by The Kyiv Post

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From Ukraine With Love Weekly Podcast by The Kyiv Post

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https://www.kyivpost.com/multimedia/podcast/from-ukraine-with-love-1-05-2020-podcast

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The Ukrainian Film Club at Columbia University

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The Ukrainian Film Club at Columbia University

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http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ufc//index.html

Established in 2004, the UFCCU shows both classic and new films from Ukraine to the public in New York. Includes a list of films in the club’s library. Please note that they do NOT loan out their DVDs, but this is a great resource to help you find new films.

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The events are held on the Columbia University campus, usually in one of the lecture halls at the Department of Slavic Languages, Hamilton Hall, seventh floor. There are also off-campus lectures/presentations in other U.S. cities and in other countries. The UFCCU has held screenings at Rutgers, Ohio State, and Harvard universities, the University of Toronto as well as at non-academic venues in Philadelphia, Edmonton, Toronto, Chicago, Hartford, CT, Yonkers, NY, and other cities. The Club offers its film collection and expertise to facilitate film presentations on invitation from interested parties outside Columbia University. Inquiries should be sent to Yuri Shevchuk.

The on-campus events usually take place every third Thursday of the month at 7:30 PM during the regular academic year with Christmas and summer holiday breaks. The events are announced on this website as well as on various internet mailing lists, Brama, in the Ukrainian Weekly and at other New York City universities such as New York University, City University of New York, the New School for Social Research and, of course, Columbia.

The Ukrainian Film Club at Columbia will hold the event

Citizen Filmmakers. Stefan Bugryn and Steven Zelko

This special event will feature the Australian film director Stefan Bugryn and producer Steven Zelko in person. Their documentary short "War Mothers. Unbreakable" is competing at 2019 Tribeca International Film Festival. The Melbourne-based filmmakers will show the first part of their documentary project "War Mothers," 2017 about the grassroot response to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and discuss their experience shooting the events both on the war front and in the Ukrainian rear.

When: Thursday, April 25, 2019, 7:00 PM
Where: Deutsches Haus, Columbia University, 420 West 116th Street (off Amsterdam Ave.)

Yuri Shevchuk will introduce the guests and mediate the discussion. The event is free and open to the public.

"War Mothers" is the story of three women: Halyna, Svitlana, and Yulia. They live in the town of Zaporizhia, which is along the eastern front of the ongoing war in Ukraine. All three women are mothers, all three have felt the impacts of the war first hand, and all three have decided not to settle for the tragedy being dealt to themselves, to their country and it's people. They are mothers of war, they are War Mothers.

'Highly poetic & moving' - Time Out Australia
'Heartbreaking...not to be missed' - FilmDude

Facebook.com/warmothers

To read the story behind the film.

For additional coverage.

Official IMDB Page.

War Mothers. Unbreakable. 2019. World Premiere - 2019 Tribeca Film Festival

The Hospitalliers are an ancient order of battle medics, charged with caring for the wounded in times of strife. When the war came to Ukraine in 2014, 18 year old Yana Zinkevych watched as her countrymen returned to little or no care, so she set about creating a local chapter of the ancient order of medics. Three years into the conflict, her organization had grown from a handful of dedicated followers, to a battalion of veterans, but early one frosty winter morning, Yana's life and work came to a crashing halt as she found herself lying in a ditch, with a car bearing down on top of her....

Stefan Bugryn is an Australian director & producer based in Melbourne, Australia. Since 2012, his shorts have screened locally and internationally at festivals such as the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, FilmQuest, and Middle Coast Film Festival. In 2018, Stefan won Best Director: Short Film Category, and Best Short Film at the 2018 Melbourne Documentary Film Festival for the first instalment of his War Mothers documentary project. The premiere of this film was officially backed and supported by Time Out Australia.
Steven Zelko holds a BA in Cinema and English, and has been actively making films for the past 10 years. He has worked in both fiction and non-fiction, education, music, and drama, and has shot everything from a feature film about aliens, to a family program about saving marriages for the Victorian Government, to Iron Maiden performing to a sold out audience at Rod Laver Arena.
Steven grew up the son of Yugoslavian migrants who settled in Melbourne in the 1960's. He was an active member of that community until the Bosnian war in the early 1990's, a war which cost him the life of his grandfather. He currently spends part of his time working for LaTrobe University production department, assisting students with disabilities.

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The Zombie Woodpecker

Written and directed by established Ukrainian director Volodymyr Tikhyi, The Green Jacket (2013), Zelena Kofta in Ukrainian, is a psychological thriller that exposes our most human vulnerabilities.
The film focuses on a family living in the suburbs of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, specifically on the teenage daughter Olia (played by Oleksandra Petko). The family is sent into a state of emotional purgatory as something happens to the six-year-old son, Mykhas (Ivan Baklan), while under Olia's care. As the story unfolds, it becomes evident that Olia's hysterical mother (Lesya Kalynska) and apathetic father (Taras Tkachenko) are unable and almost unwilling to deal with the recent events. Witnessing the incapability of the adults in her life, Olia decides she must take matters into her own hands to save her brother, and perhaps even herself. Read >>>

Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's The Tribe is perhaps the most-talked about Ukrainian film since independence. More importantly, it has been the most internationally decorated film by a Ukrainian film director ever.
Born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1974, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy graduated from the filmmaking department of the Ivan Karpenko-Kary State Institute for Theater, Film, and TV as a feature film director. He has worked at the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv and the Lenfilm Studios in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has also worked as a script writer for numerous made-for- TV movies and published a number of short stories. One of them, "The Chornobyl Robinson," took first place in the All-Ukrainian Script Contest Coronation of the Word in 2000. Read >>>

Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's The Tribe is perhaps the most-talked about Ukrainian film since independence. More importantly, it has been the most internationally decorated film by a Ukrainian film director ever.
Born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1974, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy graduated from the filmmaking department of the Ivan Karpenko-Kary State Institute for Theater, Film, and TV as a feature film director. He has worked at the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv and the Lenfilm Studios in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has also worked as a script writer for numerous made-for- TV movies and published a number of short stories. One of them, "The Chornobyl Robinson," took first place in the All-Ukrainian Script Contest Coronation of the Word in 2000. Read >>>

This year, Ukraine will be represented at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards (the Oscars) in the best foreign language category for 2014 by the director Oles Sanin's the latest work The Guide. To mark its 10th anniversary, the Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University is organizing a series of screenings of the film in five US cities with the participation of the film director himself: New York City (December 2), Philadelphia (December 3), Cambridge, MA (December 4), Chicago (December 5), and Detroit (December 10). The unofficial US premiere of the film will take place on December 2, 2014, Tuesday at 7:30 PM, at Columbia University, 501 Schermerhorn Hall, the Morningside Campus. Oles Sanin will present and discuss his film with the viewers. Read >>>

The International Translation Workshop

Ukraine. A View from the West

Ukrainian themes in Hollywood

Ukrainian film in an International Perspective >>>

Olena Yershova's Retrospective at Columbia

Exploring Today's Ukraine through Film

Since its inception 14 years ago, the Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University has primarily focused on the work of directors and actors. Now for he first time, we would like to take a closer look at producers, the profession that is relatively new and in the process of defining itself in Ukraine's contemporary film industry.

Producer Olena Yershova will be present at the screenings of Frost and Volcano to discuss her work and the current state of the Ukrainian film industry. All films are with English subtitles. Every event is free and open to the public. The retrospective is scheduled to take place at Columbia's Deutsches Haus, 420 W116th Street, New York, N.Y.
Read >>>

Volodymyr Tykhy's "Brama". A Review.

A few weeks ago, I went to see Volodymyr Tykhy's Brama (Ukrainian: Брама) on an incredibly last-minute whim. Interrupted during a Skype call on one of my last days in Lviv, I was promised that the film had received rave reviews and that I had to see it because it was actually a Ukrainian-made film, not just another Ukrainian-dubbed Hollywood hit. And so I wrapped up my Skype call and headed to the cinema, knowing nothing other than that the title Brama meant 'gate' or 'portal,' a tidbit I had learnt a few weeks prior when reading up on the Zaborovskyi Gate at St. Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv.

I'll admit right off the bat that my knowledge of Ukrainian and Russian combined was not always enough to understand every line of dialogue in the film. Nevertheless I was able to understand the better of the plot despite the characters speaking with dialectical quirks and surzhyk. Tykhy's Brama centers on a three-person and three-generational family residing in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone in present-day Ukraine. At the head of this family is Grandmother Prysia, a seasoned veteran of many life struggles, including Nazi invasion. Grandmother Prysia's daughter, Slava, on the other hand, is of weak character and is depicted as sickly, lazy, and shameless. She is a symbol of the new, 'lost' generation of Ukraine. Slava's husband, and father of her son Vovchyk, long ago deserted the family. His disgust at his life, his wife, and Vovchyk who suffers from some unspecified mental handicap propelled him to leave the Exclusion Zone.
Read >>>

Trauma, Resiliency, and Remembrance in Ukrainian Cinema. The Case of The Guide and The Tribe.

On August 24, 1991, in the wake of a failed coup in Moscow, the Ukrainian parliament declared independence. A few months later, in December of that year, 90% of voters chose to ratify this declaration through a referendum, transitioning Ukraine into a postcolonial, post-Soviet state grappling with questions of national identity. Film became national cinema, aiming to mythologize the legacy of the Ukrainian people through their collective adversity under Soviet rule in the 20th century. The myth building of culture culminates in national experience, which differentiates the nation from other communities through its confrontation with antagonistic forces that seek to destroy it. Andrew Higson notes, "Histories of national cinema can only therefore really be understood as histories of crises and conflict, of resistance and negotiation". As such, contemporary Ukrainian cinema focuses on the nation's past maltreatments, "built up on a binary opposition between self and other, where the other [is] the intruder, the colonizer, the enemy" (Pavlyshyn). The two films this review examines, The Guide (2014) and The Tribe (2014), each focus on marginalized communities that persist in opposition to an antagonistic colonizer, whether the Soviet state or, in the case of The Tribe, the apathetic environment leftover from colonization. Viewed together, these films demonstrate the importance of reclaiming past traumas and acts of resistance in post-Soviet Ukraine, crafting a national identity that remains acutely aware of the extreme violence it has been forced to endure through decades of subjugation.
Read >>>

"The Ukrainian Sheriffs" in New York. An Important Story Missed by the World

True to its mission of giving international exposure to young Ukrainian filmmaking talent, the Ukrainian Film Club held a special screening of "The Ukrainian Sheriffs". The feature documentary was directed by Roman Bondarchuk and produced by Dar'ya Averchenko. For both the film is their debut in the genre of the feature length documentary. The very well attended Columbia screening was immediately followed by another such event at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York, N.Y. on December 7. Both were attended by Mr. Bondarchuk and Mrs. Averchenko who were in the United States promoting their film, which is Ukraine's official entry for the Oscar consideration in the best foreign language film category.
Oscars or not, "The Ukrainian Sheriffs" should be seen by everybody who would like to understand the present-day Ukraine in its complexity and outside the easy, simplistic, and inevitably misleading dichotomies so dear to a great majority of foreign observers writing about that country: nationalist east vs pro-Russian west, Ukrainian-speakers vs. Russian-speakers, Orthodox Christians vs Greek Catholics, etc.). At first glance, the film is about an ordinary village community in the south of Ukraine (Kherson Province), that the Russian imperial propaganda calls Novorosiya or New Russia, implying that these areas are in spirit Russian and should be "returned" to the imperial fold. Read >>>

Silent Ukrainian Film, Considered Lost, Is Found in Germany

Pigs Are Always Pigs (Pupky Station), a silent comedy produced at the Ukrainfilm Odesa Film Studio in 1930 by director Khanan Shmain, was long considered lost. Last year, the Russian film scholar Piotr Bagrov discovered the film in the Bundescarchiv German Federal Archives. The director of the Bundesarchiv contacted Mr. Ivan Kozlenko, the director on the Oleksander Dovzhenko National Film Archive in Kyiv in February 2015 with the offer to transfer the seven reels of film, both positive and negative prints, that were in their collection to Ukraine. It was arranged for the film to be sent by diplomatic post. Pigs arrived in Ukraine on August 22.
The return of Pigs is the third great triumph toward reaching the goal of enriching our film archives with the rarest exemplars of early Ukrainian cinema. Petro Chardynin's Taras Triasylo (1926), a film that was believed to have been lost up until the mid-1990s, was returned to Ukraine in 2014, and Mykhailo Kaufman's A Novel Expedition (1931) was introduced into scholarly circles last year. Breaking the news on his FB page, Ivan Kozlenko notes that " Pigs is an unbelievably witty, dynamic comedy that simultaneously makes fun of Soviet bureaucracy, formalism pushed to the limits of the absurd through utter mayhem and sabotage, anti-intellectualism, and provincialism far from the historical challenges of the age. The spirit of the film is similar to that of Mykola Shpykovsky's philistine comedies, especially his legendary Self-Seeker (Shkurnyk, 1929), which was aimed at an immanent critique of the new Soviet life. Taken together, the two films form a separate body of early Ukrainian satirical comedies." Read >>>

The Zombie Woodpecker
February 24, 2014, New York, N.Y.

The Ukrainian Film Club at Columbia University held an event with Fedir Aleksandrovych and Artem Ryzhykov, two Ukrainian crew members of the feature documentary "The Russian Woodpecker", dir. Chad Gracia, US-UK-Ukraine coproduction, which has just been awarded the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary category at the hugely prestigious Sundance Film Festival and is headed for theatrical release and distribution in the U.S. in the near future. Mr. Aleksandrovych conceived the idea of the film and appear as the narrator in it. Mr. Ryzhykov is its cinematographer.
In their most recent discussion of the critically-acclaimed The Russian Woodpecker, filmmaker Fedir Aleksandrovich and cinematographer Artem Ryzhykov wholeheartedly presented the backstory to their impassioned art, becoming one step closer to cementing their selves with their work forever as their audience grows bigger. Their presence was anything but pretentious, nor was it projected in controlled tempos of self-promotion. Both are young, and placidly believe that their "version of what happened" will remain a mere version until the international community pursues an objective investigation. Read >>>

Secrets of "The Russian Woodpecker": Columbia Discussion with Crew of the Sundance Winner
February 22, 2015, New York, N.Y.

On February 19th, the Columbia University community had a unique opportunity to talk with two members of the team behind the winner of the 2015 Sundance Film Festival's prestigious World Cinema Jury Prize for a documentary feature - "The Russian Woodpecker." Fedir Aleksandrovych, a theatrical artist and the documentary's main figure, and Artem Ryzhykov, the cinematographer, were present to discuss the film's conception, research, and other behind-the-scenes details.
"The Russian Woodpecker" follows Fedir's investigation into the events of the Chornobyl nuclear accident, prompted by chatter on Russian message-boards and social media about the real cause of the disaster being tied up in some shadowy conspiracy. These theories lead the documentary team to discover the existence of the enormous "Duga-3" radar system--nicknamed the "Russian Woodpecker," for the tapping sounds it generated--built by the Soviet Union within 7 kilometers of the Chornobyl reactor. Intriguingly, the existence of the Duga-3, now inside the Chornobyl exclusion zone, is almost completely unheard-of in Ukrainian society, and many people present at the discussion, including Dr. Shevchuk, expressed their surprise at this revelation. Despite standing 150 meters tall and spanning a full kilometer in length, the "Woodpecker," supposedly built as a first-warning system for American missile activity "beyond the horizon," remains largely secret. Read >>>

The Green Jacket, director Volodymyr Tykhyi. Film Review
February 10, 2015, New York, N.Y.
Written and directed by established Ukrainian director Volodymyr Tikhyi, The Green Jacket (2013), Zelena Kofta in Ukrainian, is a psychological thriller that exposes our most human vulnerabilities.
The film focuses on a family living in the suburbs of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, specifically on the teenage daughter Olia (played by Oleksandra Petko). The family is sent into a state of emotional purgatory as something happens to the six-year-old son, Mykhas (Ivan Baklan), while under Olia's care. As the story unfolds, it becomes evident that Olia's hysterical mother (Lesya Kalynska) and apathetic father (Taras Tkachenko) are unable and almost unwilling to deal with the recent events. Witnessing the incapability of the adults in her life, Olia decides she must take matters into her own hands to save her brother, and perhaps even herself. Read >>>

Critics Sound for Slaboshpytskiyi's The Tribe
February 9, 2015, New York, N.Y.
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's The Tribe is perhaps the most-talked about Ukrainian film since independence. More importantly, it has been the most internationally decorated film by a Ukrainian film director ever.
Born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1974, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy graduated from the filmmaking department of the Ivan Karpenko-Kary State Institute for Theater, Film, and TV as a feature film director. He has worked at the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv and the Lenfilm Studios in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has also worked as a script writer for numerous made-for- TV movies and published a number of short stories. One of them, "The Chornobyl Robinson," took first place in the All-Ukrainian Script Contest Coronation of the Word in 2000. Read >>>

UKRAINIAN FILMMAKERS COME TO NYC TO SHOW DOCUMENTARY ON DEVASTATING WAR
January 29, 2015, New York, N.Y.
Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's The Tribe is perhaps the most-talked about Ukrainian film since independence. More importantly, it has been the most internationally decorated film by a Ukrainian film director ever.
Born in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1974, Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy graduated from the filmmaking department of the Ivan Karpenko-Kary State Institute for Theater, Film, and TV as a feature film director. He has worked at the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv and the Lenfilm Studios in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has also worked as a script writer for numerous made-for- TV movies and published a number of short stories. One of them, "The Chornobyl Robinson," took first place in the All-Ukrainian Script Contest Coronation of the Word in 2000. Read >>>

Ukraine's Entry for the Oscar to Be Screened at Columbia University
October 16, 2014, New York, N.Y.
This year, Ukraine will be represented at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards (the Oscars) in the best foreign language category for 2014 by the director Oles Sanin's the latest work The Guide. To mark its 10th anniversary, the Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University is organizing a series of screenings of the film in five US cities with the participation of the film director himself: New York City (December 2), Philadelphia (December 3), Cambridge, MA (December 4), Chicago (December 5), and Detroit (December 10). The unofficial US premiere of the film will take place on December 2, 2014, Tuesday at 7:30 PM, at Columbia University, 501 Schermerhorn Hall, the Morningside Campus. Oles Sanin will present and discuss his film with the viewers. Read >>>

The Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University (UFCCU) is a forum of Ukrainian Cinema in New York City. It is a non-for-profit educational and cultural initiative within the expanding Ukrainian Studies Program at Columbia University. It was organized in October 2004. Its events are free and open to all. Its goal is to promote knowledge of Ukrainian cinema in the world. >>>

The UFCCU collection consists of the films donated by their directors to the Club or acquired through open commercial distribution. The films are made in Ukraine or in other countries on Ukrainian subject matter. Films are in DVD format with the exception of a few on VHS. Ukrainian-made films have English subtitles. As a matter of policy the Club neither loans nor duplicates the films in its collection, most of which are unique copies with English language subtitles. Instead we gladly accept invitations to screen films at various outside venues. >>>

Typically, a UFCCU event consists of a brief introduction by Yuri Shevchuk, the founding director of UFFCU and lecturer of the Ukrainian language and culture at Columbia; a screening; and a discussion with the audience participation. Events are organized thematically, around a chosen film either made in or related to Ukraine, or around an individual director or group of filmmakers. Ideally the Club would like to screen films with the participation of their directors. We have already hosted Taras Tomenko, Serhiy Bukovsky, and Taras Tkachenko of Kyiv, Ukraine, and Andrea Odezynska of New York, NY. >>>

Parallel to film presentations and lectures, the UFCCU runs various projects aimed at promoting the knowledge of Ukrainian cinema and Ukraine in the West. Among its on-going projects are:

The International Translation Workshop

Ukraine. A View from the West

Ukrainian themes in Hollywood

Ukrainian film in an International Perspective >>>

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ukrainian film club of columbia university

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Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University

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The events are held on the Columbia University campus, usually in one of the lecture halls at the Department of Slavic Languages, Hamilton Hall, seventh floor. There are also off-campus lectures/presentations in other U.S. cities and in other countries.

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Discover Ukraine Through Film – Kyivan Rus & Cossack Ukraine

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Discover Ukraine Through Film – Kyivan Rus & Cossack Ukraine

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https://en.hromadske.ua/posts/discover-ukraine-through-film-kyivan-rus-cossack-ukraine

Includes both free-to-stream and paid access; films are in English or have English subtitles

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Stuck at home and looking for something to watch? Why not use the time to brush up on your Ukrainian history? We've compiled the definitive list of 50 films to guide you through 1,000 years of Ukrainian history.
We first look back at Ancient Ukraine - the times of kings and Cossacks, princes and peasants, and above all else - conflict. Discover some of Ukraine's most important historical figures, including Volodomyr the Great, Ivan Franko, Bohdan Khmelnytskyi, Ivan Mazepa, and even the "Greatest Ukrainian", Yaroslav the Wise.

Kyivan Rus Ukraine (882 - 1240 CE)
Yaroslav the Wise (Yaroslav Mudryy) (1981)
We begin our journey to discover Ukraine through film with western Ukrainian director Hryhoryy Kohan's "Yaroslav the Wise". Featured on the 2 hryvnia bill and coin, Yaroslav was voted the "Greatest Ukrainian" in a 2008 Ukrainian television series. The film rather faithfully depicts the events of the earliest days of Kyivan Rus. Yaroslav's father - Volodomyr the Great (of the 1 hryvnia bill and coin fame) - had just converted the kingdom to Christianity. In doing so, he abandons many of his wives, including Yaroslav's mother. A bitter Yaroslav plots his revenge and eventually refuses to pay tribute to his father. After Volodomyr's death, a bitter sibling feud arises, of which, as you can imagine, Yaroslav ends up winning. Unusual for the time, the Soviet film was directed by a Ukrainian, stars Ukrainian actor Yuri Muravitsky as Yaroslav, and is co-produced by Ukraine's preeminent film studio - Dovzhenko Studios (which we'll hear more from later). The epic drama took home the jury award at the Tallinn All-Union Film Festival in 1982.

One of the most anticipated films in Ukrainian history when it was released last year, John Wynn and Akhtem Seyitablayev's 'The Rising Hawk' is a big budget, high-octane retelling of Ivan Franko's seminal 'Zakhar Berkut' (The Rising Hawk). Ivan Franko, of course, is one of Ukraine's most influential writers, which is why you will find him on your 20 hryvnia bill. The joint American-Ukrainian epic action flick tells the story of a local band of Carpathian mountaineers battling the onslaught of the Mongolian 'Golden Horde'. Starring the likes of 'Terminator 2''s Robert Patrick and 'Braveheart''s Tommy Flanagan, the film required more than 200 actors, two stunt teams, 600 costumes, and 3,000 historically-accurate pieces, like weapons and jewelry - it is simply the most ambitious film project out there about Kyivan Rus Ukraine. While this tale tells of the heroic nature of Ukrainians defending their homeland, it was the Golden Horde that ended the nearly four-century reign of Kyivan Rus in the 1240s.

Cossack Ukraine (1492 - 1764 CE)
With Fire & Sword (Ogniem i Mieczem) (1999)
Starring Bond girl Isabella Scorupco ("Goldeneye") and Ukrainian acting legend Bohdan Stupka as Bohdan Khmelnytskyi - one of the most famous Ukrainian Cossacks of all-time (and featured on the 5 hryvnia bill and coin) - the Polish production of "With Fire & Sword" ("Ogniem i Mieczem") views like an Eastern European "Braveheart". The most expensive Polish film ever made when it was released in 1999, it tells the story of the Khmelnytsky Uprising - one of the most significant events in Ukrainian history. The success of Ukrainian Cossacks against the Polish-Lithuanian Empire was a defining moment in the decline of the latter and led to centuries of conflict and mistrust between Ukraine and Poland. Featuring a love triangle between a Polish knight and a Ukrainian Cossack, the film is surprisingly deft at exploring the relationship between the two nations, ending with the poignant words "Hatred poisoned the hearts of two brother nations".

Where to watch: On YouTube for free

Can I watch in English? Yes

Trailer: youtube.com/watch?v=qfuTBc6oHtM

Learn more: Bohdan Khmelnytsky Museum & Residence, Chyhyryn, Cherkasy region, 255 km south-east of Kyiv

Some Things Never Change: Taking years to build something is not only a modern phenomenon in Kyiv. The Bohdan Khmelnytsky Monument in St. Sofia's Square was delivered to the city in 1879. It took nine years (!) to find the funds to build the pedestal, so it wasn't opened until 23 June 1888.
A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa (Molytva za Hetmana Mazepu) (2002)
This film is for lovers of true art house cinema, yet despite its epic scope about one of the most controversial characters in Ukrainian history - Hetman Ivan Mazepa, played by the inimitable Bohdan Stupka - can be a bit of a chore to sit through. That said, its importance to Ukrainian cinema is monumental - not only because of the topic, and because it is one of the only post-independence / pre-Orange Revolution films to make our list, but because it is the seminal work of one of the towering figures of Ukrainian cinema - Yuriy Ilyenko. With his work banned under Soviet rule, "A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa" was his only post-independence feature. If you can manage through the disjointed storytelling, in-your-face camera work, and gratuitous sex and violence, you can at least become acquainted with one of Ukraine's most intriguing historical figures - Hetman Ivan Mazepa. Reviled in Russia and revered in Ukraine for abandoning the Russian Empire for an independence guarantee from the Kingdom of Sweden, his bid for an independent Ukraine was crushed when the Swedes lost the Battle of Poltava in 1709. He was anathematised and publicly cursed in Russian churches for over 150 years after his death. Considered a traitor by the Soviets, Mazepa's image was rehabilitated post-independence and he was added to the 10 hryvnia bill (and upcoming coin), leading to this popular anecdote in Ukraine: "Do you think the Russian Patriarchate priest will accept a 10 hryvnia donation?". Found in its entirety on YouTube with English subtitles, this strange, early-independence epic will whet your taste for one of Ukraine's most important Cossacks.

Where to watch: On YouTube for free

Can I watch in English: In Ukrainian, with English subtitles

Trailer: Not available
Taras Bulba (1962)
The only Oscar-nominated film on this list is the 1962 adaptation of Ukrainian writer Mykola Gogol's epic Cossack adventure "Taras Bulba". Starring Academy- and Tony Award-winning actor Yul Brynner in the title role and the dashing Tony Curtis (father of Jamie Lee Curtis) as his son Andriy, the film was a big budget ($6 million) historical epic. Set in the 16 th Century when Ukrainian Cossacks were defending their villages from Polish-Lithuanian and Turkish Tatar invasions, the film tells the story of the relationship between Bulba and his son, a love story between the younger Bulba and a Polish princess, and betrayal. While taking liberties, the plot follows more closely Gogol's second, more Russian-friendly version of the story. Ukrainians only became aware of the author's original, truly Ukrainian version after its release in 2005, some 170 years after it was first published. A true, Hollywood, swashbuckling action-adventure, the film's score is considered one of the greatest written for the big screen and might have won the Academy Award were it not for the equally impressive arrangement in "Lawrence of Arabia". The film did, however, popularise Gogol's words known nearly universally to parents around the planet, "I gave you life. It is on me to take it away from you."
Taras Shevchenko: The Last Samurai (Autumn 2020)
One of the most fascinating examples of the cultural renaissance occurring in Ukrainian cinema right now is Roman Perfiliev's highly anticipated "Taras Shevchenko: The Last Samurai". Due to be released sometime after quarantine, this uber chic, million-dollar effort to reinvent one of the country's most famous citizens - remember, he's featured on the 100 hryvnia bill - is sure to surprise audiences worldwide. A mash-up of Western and Samurai genres, much like a Ukrainian "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" or "Kung Fu Hustle", the comedy tells an alternate life story of the Ukrainian "Kobzar". Seeing our hero carry pistols and a katana might be jarring, but the film promises to be a modern, patriotic look at Ukraine's great national poet. Expected to be released in Autumn 2020, the film took top honours at the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture's Patriotic Cinema competition in 2018.
/By Lee Reaney

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Discover Ukraine Through Film - Kyivan Rus & Cossack Ukraine

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Stuck at home and looking for something to watch? Why not use the time to brush up on your Ukrainian history? We've compiled the definitive list of 50 films to guide you through 1,000 years of Ukrainian history. We first look back at Ancient Ukraine - the times of kings and Cossacks, princes and peasants, and above all else - conflict.

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https://modeldiplomacy.cfr.org/pop-up-cases/defending-ukraine

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the biggest test to European stability and, more broadly, of the liberal world order since World War II. The war has the potential to widen to Ukraine’s neighbors, many of whom are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance. NATO members have so…

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https://www.clevelandmaidan.info/

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Cleveland Maidan Association started as a grassroots organization in 2014 aimed at providing financial aid to families of fallen or wounded veterans. We have been fighting on the political front, organizing rallies to keep the community informed and active and bringing media attention to the needs of Ukraine.

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Eating at You: Food and Chernobyl (Origins OSU)

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Eating at You: Food and Chernobyl (Origins OSU)

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https://origins.osu.edu/milestones/april-2016-eating-you-food-and-chernobyl

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It's not accidental that Ukraine is called the "bread basket" of Eastern Europe. Walking the streets of Kyiv on a summer day is to navigate the cornucopia flowing from women's baskets lining the sidewalks, selling tomatoes, cucumbers, apricots, peaches, and berries of all kinds. Before the locavore, organic food movement emerged, villagers and townspeople in Ukraine had mastered the arts of growing, cooking and preserving fresh, local, organic food.

Food-getting it, husbanding it, putting it up-formed a major portion of daily life in the late Soviet Union. Despite decades of rhetoric in the West about the watchful, pervasive Soviet state, rural citizens fended for themselves in the most important categories of daily life: food and fuel.

A woman on the outskirts of Kyiv carrying a bucket of apricots, 2015, photo by author

The state did not regulate villagers' and townspeople' self-provisioning, and that gave rural Soviet life, though poor, a sphere of independence. And, for many, knowing where your food comes from, intimately, down to the moisture of the soil, inspires rich sensory experiences that make cooking and eating one of humanity's most sensuous acts.

Those pleasures came to a skidding halt 30 years ago in the spring of 1986 when Ukrainians learned about the April 26 explosions at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power plant. As the plant's fuel burned at 2,000 degrees Celsius, clouds spreading invisible radioactive isotopes passed over fields, pastures, gardens and forests.

Women pulling up weeds in their gardens suffered burns. Grazing animals lost hair and bled from orifices. Men and women in white coats and beeping instruments swept along streets and the edges of fields, while low-flying planes, also taking measurements, passed slowly overhead. In the wake of the accident, the bushels of fresh milk, eggs and brightly colored berries and fruits at the open-air farmers markets were now poisonous.

A Przewalski wild horse in the city center of Chernobyl, 2004, photo by author

"The psychological weight," biologist Dmitri Grodzinskii remembered in 2015, "is hard to express. Nature is what we most love, and then to have to start to consider it dangerous-that was wholly alienating. It triggered a complex of seeing ourselves as victims of our own immediate environment."

What do you do when your food is too hot to handle? How does a consumer make choices to provision both calories and safety for the family table?

In June, 1986, the Soviet Ukrainian Republic organized a new division of "radioactive hygiene" and sent out medical and sanitation workers to measure radioactivity of air, water, soil and food. They took 950,000 measurements and analyzed them in labs. They followed the flow of radioactive isotopes in the cascade of rivers and lakes from the northern border of Ukraine, where the smoldering reactor was, south towards Kyiv, home to millions of people.

They watched the decay of short-lived but damaging radioactive iodine and then tracked the long lasting isotopes-radioactive cesium, strontium and plutonium-up the food chain and into bodies. From this mass monitoring effort, Soviet doctors learned that radioactive isotopes were everywhere and were getting into everything.

The Ministry of Health sent out orders to food processing factories and farmers markets to measure 100% of all food before sale. Produce was to be transported in hermetically sealed trucks and could not be sold in open-air markets. Every dairy and every market was to have a "radiological lab."

It was easy enough to write this order, but carrying it out was another matter. The quality of panic is palpable in the 1986 official correspondence. There were not enough people trained to measure radioactivity in food, nor enough dosimeters and labs to do the analysis. Dairies, food-processing plants, and town markets did not have clean rooms with warm, running water to fashion into labs.

Once they tested samples, Soviet citizens needed to know thresholds for "clean" and "dirty" food. (In this period, Soviet officials always wrote the word "clean" in quotation marks.) Permissible norms had long been established for meat, milk and wheat, but what, inspectors asked, about honey, eggs, rye, beets, potatoes, tea, herbs, black currants, gooseberries, raspberries, blue berries, and cranberries? The requests for measurements went on and on.

Each kind of food should have a particular permissible level. The same food, such as meat, had varying permissible norms depending on the part of the animal it came from. Animal flesh, for example, was less radioactive than organs and bone marrow. A farmer or sales clerk after April 1986 had to have the knowledge of a physicist to decipher long charts with average rates of radioactive decay for every type of food.

Once they sorted clean from dirty, Soviet officials were loath to toss out contaminated food, so they issued yet more orders about how to process radioactive provisions. Contaminated milk was to be dried and powdered. Irradiated sugar beets were to be turned into starch, dirty berries into preserves, contaminated vegetables into pâté, and radioactive meat to be scattered evenly among sausages (as long as none of those sausages reached Moscow, the orders stipulated). The processed food then was to be stored for months or years until the most pernicious isotopes had time to decay.

It was easy for things to get lost in all this new regulation. In some markets, radiologists released contaminated produce back to sellers to sell. In 1990, KGB officers unearthed four refrigerated train cars with 618 tons of radioactive meat that had been rolling around the southwest railroad for four years. No one wanted the hot meat or the contaminated train cars, just as no communities today want to host America's homeless radioactive waste.

Officials in agro-industry sent out regulations for farmers. Collective farms were to be divided into "zones" depending on the level of contamination. Farm workers in the zone with more than two curies a square kilometer were to wear jump suits, respirators, hats and gloves. They had to shower after work, could not lie on the grass, eat outdoors, or ride in trucks with the windows down.

They could not burn branches and leaves, could not graze livestock in June and July, nor burn local wood or peat in wood stoves winter or summer. They could not use manure and ashes to fertilize their gardens. Farmers could not gather herbs, mushrooms and wild berries in the forests. Better not to even enter the forests, which were the most heavily contaminated. Farmers basically were ordered to treat their farms as if they were the premises of a nuclear power plant.

Modern disasters require a modern state to clean them up. The problem was that rural Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, where the greatest volume of fallout from the burning reactor landed, were anything but modern. And in 1986, the state authorities came up short. Terribly short. While officials quietly tried to fix the innumerable, intractable problems, they issued soothing public statements and banned journalists from exploring the topic further.

But in 1989, a few journalists and doctors broke through the wall of censorship, and people started to learn just how contaminated their homes and gardens were. Local doctors, parents, and teachers had suspected as much. They did not feel well, and their children were pale, listless and frequently ill with chronic diseases of the digestive track and the respiratory and immune systems.

Medical investigators showed that villagers had been gradually absorbing radioactive isotopes from contaminated food, and were suffering from multiple disorders caused by long-term exposure to low doses of radiation. In the most contaminated areas, 80-90% of children had one or more chronic illness.

After the accident, rates of cancers, miscarriages, birth malformations and perinatal death rose markedly. Villagers sent petitions to the Ministry of Health, complaining that their milk and produce were contaminated. They gathered in town squares, and contacted journalists and officials. They generally demanded the state secure their safety from radioactive isotopes, which the state had issued into the atmosphere.

Soviet officials responded rapidly to these demands. They decreed again that the contaminated regions should get shipments of "clean" food. These orders, however, only raised yet more questions.

"An atom is not a soldier, an atom is a worker," Chernobyl, 2006, photo by Andrey Shlyakhter

Before 1986, rural shops carried few food items. How could stores without refrigerators sell fresh milk and meat? How could Soviet suppliers with open trucks deliver produce without irradiating the food along the way? How could the pitted, unpaved country roads sustain the increased traffic? And where in the world would Soviet suppliers find the extra food stocks to feed four million people who had formerly fed themselves?

Officials wrote more directives, ordering the gasification of towns and villages so people would not burn contaminated wood. They ordered roads be asphalted so they did not churn up radioactive dust. They called for comprehensive school lunch and breakfast programs that required outfitting rural schools with modern kitchen facilities. Instead of playing in radioactive fields, lakes, and forests, children needed playgrounds, gyms and swimming pools. The nuclear accident basically mandated the full-scale modernization of the Soviet countryside.

Officials in Ukraine tried, made some progress, but as the costs of the disaster mounted, Soviet agencies were less and less able to service exposed people in contaminated regions. The supply of produce to stores dropped in the late eighties. The number of doctors willing to live in contaminated regions fell sharply. People exposed to Chernobyl fallout were left gradually to fend for themselves as the Soviet state and economy crumbled around them.

In short, the reality of dealing with the fallout from the Chernobyl disaster was kind of impossible.

Abandoned house in Pripyat, 2001 (left) and a rooftop view of the abandoned city of Pripyat, 2004, photo by author (right)
It might be tempting to view Chernobyl as merely a chapter from the history of the failed Soviet state and believe that today more developed countries would respond better and more comprehensively.

The experience, however, in Japan after the 2011 meltdown of three Fukushima reactors hardly inspires confidence. The Japanese government and Tepco, the corporation that owns the plant, failed to acknowledge the meltdown and release of radioactive isotopes for two full months after the tsunami. The denials delayed the evacuation of exposed residents.

State officials only minimally monitored food and soils, so citizens were forced to organize their own dosimetry. Meanwhile, the Japan government raised the annual radiation dose to 20 millisieverts, several times higher than the International Commission on Radiological Protection recommends.

Today, solid and liquid waste from the accident is piling up, awaiting a final nuclear storage site. Likewise in limbo, over 100,000 evacuees in temporary quarters are waiting to either return home or receive new ones. Already, researchers have recorded an alarming spike in thyroid cancer among exposed children. Research on the health of the ecology and marine life near Fukushima has been scarce, and funded by small, private foundations so that scientists today cannot provide basic answers about the accident's harm to either health or the environment.

In 1939, the physicist Neils Bohr famously observed that it would take "an entire country" to develop nuclear reactors for an atomic bomb. He could not have known at the time that it would prove beyond the means of entire countries to manage the remnants of the massive energy unleashed from the nuclei of atoms.
[Research for this article was generously supported by a grant from ACLS]

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It's not accidental that Ukraine is called the "bread basket" of Eastern Europe. Walking the streets of Kyiv on a summer day is to navigate the cornucopia flowing from women's baskets lining the sidewalks, selling tomatoes, cucumbers, apricots, peaches, and berries of all kinds.

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https://easterneuropeanmovies.com/

Paid service to access films from across Eastern Europe (searchable by country). $5/day for streaming; $30 (monthly) and $100 (unlimited) plans allow for downloading. Preview of movies available for free.

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Eastern European Movies on English Online

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Eastern European Movies in English Online

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Watch online Eastern European Movies with English Subs

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Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland, Ohio

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Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland, Ohio

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https://www.umacleveland.org/

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Research

The UMA's diverse holdings include postage stamps and currency, commemorative buttons and pins, programs and fliers, posters from the early-20th c. to the present day, sheet music - including first editions of Mykola Lysenko's compositions - historic passports and other documents, letters and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings, and over 300 videotapes - a complete collection of the US Information Agency's "Window on America" television program that is beamed by satellite into Ukraine.

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Research The UMA's diverse holdings include postage stamps and currency, commemorative buttons and pins, programs and fliers, posters from the early-20th c. to the present day, sheet music - including first editions of Mykola Lysenko's compositions - historic passports and other documents, letters and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings, and over 300 videotapes - a complete collection of the US Information Agency's "Window on America" television program that is beamed by satellite into Ukraine.

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BIPOC & Slavic Ukrainian Refugees Resources: Disabled Ukrainians

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BIPOC & Slavic Ukrainian Refugees Resources: Disabled Ukrainians

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https://linktr.ee/ksvarnon

Created by Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon (U. of Pennsylvania), this list consists of numerous organizations that help send aid to Ukraine.

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Resources: BIPOC & Slavic Ukrainian Refugees Resources: Disabled Ukrainians

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The Kyiv Independent - News from Ukraine, Eastern Europe

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News, analyses, investigations, opinions, podcasts and more. On-the-ground reporting from Ukraine

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Ukraine: The Breadbasket of Europe (Origins OSU)

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Ukraine: The Breadbasket of Europe (Origins OSU)

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https://origins.osu.edu/read/ukraine-food-war-agriculture

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After Russia launched its on February 24, 2022, international agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) expressed significant concern about the war's impact on global agricultural commodity markets: the disruption to Ukrainian agricultural production and exports and the expected knock-on effects to the world price of staples such as wheat and to the food security of developing countries.

While one would expect an organization such as the FAO to be informed on food questions, the sheer number of stories in the popular media suggest the wider world had been unaware that Ukraine is so important to the world's food supply.

In fact, since the in 1991, Ukraine has returned to its pre-revolutionary position as a major agricultural exporter of key commodities. It has a significant global market share by volume in wheat (10%), barley (13%), corn (15%), and sunflower oil (50%) and is ranked the fifth, second, third, and first largest exporter respectively of these crops.

Wheat harvest on a collective farm near Lviv, Ukraine, 1991.

Ukraine has close to 104 million acres of agricultural land, of which 79 million are currently cultivated, an area larger than Italy, making it one of the most highly cultivated countries in the world. It has several advantages in producing agricultural commodities: a favorable climate and high-quality soils, half of which are the fertile or black soils; lower costs of production than its European and North American competitors; and access to deep seaports on the Black Sea.

Ukraine's emergence as a principal player in global agricultural markets has evolved over the past two decades. Before its breakup, the USSR was an importer of grain largely due to a decision in the early 1970s to expand the livestock sector as a means of increasing consumption of meat and dairy products.

Through subsidies, as well as price and trade controls, meat production increased by over 60% between 1970 and 1990. However, the Soviet Union could not produce enough animal feed to support its growing livestock sector and, as a result, it became a major importer of animal feed to the benefit of North American and Australian farmers. During the late-Soviet period of 1987-91, 35 million tons of grain were imported per year.

Soviet propaganda in Ukraine promoting the agricultural developments of the ninth Five Year Plan from 1971-1975. (Image by daves_archive1)

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its subsequent economic transformation, expansion of the livestock sector was reversed as subsidies were largely eliminated. Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan all became net meat importers. At the same time, between them they ended up exporting 36 million tons of grain per year by 2010, with Ukraine accounting for 40% of those exports.

The grain trade turnaround in Ukraine has been impressive, but during the transition in the 1990s, its agricultural sector witnessed a significant drop in production as it moved away from a legacy of distorted prices, inefficient collectivization, and government intervention. It was not until the late 1990s that structural reforms in the agricultural sector really began to occur, with privatization and restructuring of collective farms.

Looking back to the collapse of the Soviet Union, it would have been rather optimistic to have forecast Ukraine's rise to being a major agricultural exporter, but land reform and technological change made it possible.

A carriage transports hay near Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast, Ukraine in 2012.

Land reform resulted in the development of large-scale, privately-operated farms with owners investing in new technology and introducing best management practices. The net result has been increased crop area, especially for corn and oilseeds, and higher productivity.

By 2018, cereal yields had increased by almost 40%. Ukraine re-established itself as the "breadbasket" of Europe. In the language of economist David Ricardo, Ukraine is now truly exploiting its "comparative advantage."

With Russia currently controlling a large portion of Ukraine's cultivated agricultural land in the south, as well as blockading ports on the Black Sea, a significant amount of grain for export is stranded in Ukraine.

Map of the situation in Ukraine as of June 7, 2022. Yellow represents territory held by Ukrainian forces and red represents Russian held territory.

There has also been a significant reduction in the planting of spring crops this year. Prior to the invasion, 90% of Ukraine's exports went through the Black Sea ports at 5 million tons per month, a rate currently down to 0.5 million tons per month, most of which is being transported by rail to Ukraine's western border.

Not surprisingly a market shock of this magnitude has affected both the volatility and level of grain prices. In turn, the increase in grain prices is having a significant effect on global food prices and hence food security. The G7 countries predict 43 million people are being pushed towards famine.

The UN World Food Program estimates that the cost of buying food will rise by $23 per month - a significant increase to those living on $1.90 per day, the World Bank definition of poverty. Countries in the Middle East and North Africa such as Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia are very dependent on grain imports from both Ukraine and Russia. The risk of food price inflation could stir up political and social unrest.

Empty shelves at a supermarket in Germany, 2022. (Image by 7C0)

In addition, other exporting countries are adopting "beggar-thy-neighbor"-type controls on grain exports to protect their own populations that will simply intensify the food price spike.

Importantly, even before the invasion, global food markets were under pressure from the effects of the pandemic, climate change and an energy price shock. Disruption to Ukrainian agricultural production and trade is simply adding to what The Economist magazine recently described on its front-page as

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After Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, international agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) expressed significant concern about the war's impact on global agricultural commodity markets: the disruption to Ukrainian agricultural production and exports and the expected knock-on effects to the world price of staples such as wheat and to the food security of developing

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The causes and consequences of the Ukraine war A lecture by John J. Mearsheimer

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The causes and consequences of the Ukraine war A lecture by John J. Mearsheimer

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qciVozNtCDM

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onmmKGgqefg

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https://ukrainianartcentersocal.org/

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The Ukrainian Art Center in Los Angeles has a leading role in introducing our cultural heritage to Southern CA. Thousands have attended our open houses and exhibits over the years. Even more have learned about our folk art through stories about the Center on network local television, in the Los Angeles Times, and in other major publications.

We present exhibits of fine art by Ukrainian-Americans and artists from Ukraine; workshops on folk arts, and educational programs at libraries, schools, museums, and exhibitions.

We also serve as an information source for cultural institutions, artists, scholars, and filmmakers. We hold two major open houses each year to showcase our art and holiday traditions. Our long-term goal is to establish the West Coast's first museum of Ukrainian art. We've already begun cataloging artifacts for that permanent collection. The Center works with other Ukrainian-American organizations in presenting cultural events, and interacts with local ethnic arts organizations, state and local government offices, and other agencies involved in supporting and enriching the multicultural diversity of Southern California.

The activities of our non-profit organization are supported, in part, with grants from the State of California, California Arts Council Multicultural Program, and the City of Los Angeles, Cultural Affairs Department.

A major portion of our support, however, comes from tax-deductible membership fees and donations from our supporters. And our programs depend on the hard work of our volunteers. Please help us continue and enhance our successful programs. Join us as a member and volunteer - contact us today!

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The Ukrainian Art Center in Los Angeles has a leading role in introducing our cultural heritage to Southern CA. Thousands have attended our open houses and exhibits over the years. Even more have learned about our folk art through stories about the Center on network local television, in the Los Angeles Times, and in other major publications.

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Volodymyr Zelensky's first interview with Russian journalists since start of full-scale invasion (with English subtitles)

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Volodymyr Zelensky's first interview with Russian journalists since start of full-scale invasion (with English subtitles)

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On Sunday, March 27, 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky granted his first major interview to Russian journalists since the start of Moscow’s full-scale invasion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQRTKvoLAEM

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Первое интервью Зеленского российским журналистам после начала войны

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A weekly English language roundup of what’s been happening in Ukraine, with a focus on the main story.

https://hromadske.radio/en/podcasts/ukraine-calling

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Громадське радіо

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«Громадське радіо» — незалежна «розмовна» радіостанція, яка надає неупереджену, об’єктивну та достовірну інформацію й аналіз подій в Україні та світі.

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https://origins.osu.edu/connecting-history/51314-top-ten-origins-stories-crimea

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The Crimea that most people have come to know is a peninsula occupied by Russian forces, ostensibly annexed to the Russian Federation, and one epicenter of an international conflict over Ukraine that seems far from resolution. While we look to history for answers and explanations of these current events, this place has a tremendous story to tell in its own right. Here are ten fascinating moments from this remarkable center of contact and conflict in world history.
(But First ) From the Steppe to the Sea: A Geographical Overview

A peninsula jutting into the Black Sea, most of Crimea is steppe (prairie, often cool and dry), including all of its northern regions, Simferopol, the northern environs of Sevastopol in the west and Feodosia in the east. The Crimean Mountains, which slope right into the sea, create a second warmer and sunnier climate zone along the south coast of the Black Sea, where lush tourist resorts such as Yalta are located.
1. Crimean Antiquity
Settlements first appeared in Crimea in the 9 th to 6 th centuries BCE, particularly towards the coastline's mountain slopes. Herodotus, ancient Greece's original historian, called Crimea's local peoples the Tauri when he came to the region to visit Greek colonies. Greeks had settled at the magnificent Chersonesus, now just east of Sevastopol, among other places According to Herodotus, the Greeks and Tauris fought relentlessly and he went so far as to call their Tauri foes marauding pirates. Crimea's classical name, used often until the twentieth century, was Taurica (Tavrida in Russian).

2. The Emergence of the Crimean Tatars

Beginning in the thirteenth century, Italian merchants (from the city-state of Genoa) took control of trade along the south coast of Crimea for two hundred years. Crimean Tatars, a Turkic-language speaking peoples who inhabited the steppe north of the coast, combined forces with the Ottoman Empire and expelled the Genoese merchants from Caffa, their largest trading port (now Feodosia). Caffa became infamous during a siege in 1347 when, Mongols hurled corpses infected with the plague over city walls-one of the first recorded cases of biological warfare in human history. Infected traders and residents likely spread the famous Black Death to Europe. Partly independent and partly subject to the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Khanate existed from 1441-1783.
3. Russia Annexes Crimea
Beginning in the 1760s, under the guidance of Empress Catherine the Great, plans were laid for an invasion of the peninsula with the goal of subordinating the "barbarous and savage" Crimean Tatars. After a series of wars from 1768-74, which resulted in Russian victory and the expulsion of Ottoman influence, Catherine ordered the creation of a Crimean state, independent from Russia. In 1783, after the Tatar ruler she imposed proved unpopular and with no one powerful enough to stop her, she announced the formal annexation of Crimea into her empire.

4. Catherine's Grand Tour

In 1787, Empress Catherine the Great set out on a Grand Tour of the lands her forces conquered in the south. Her "favorite" (and lover) Grigorii Potemkin prepared extensively for this visit, to the point where "Potemkin Villages-facades set up to impress the Empress-became the stuff of legend (though it is likely that Potemkin Villages were actually just that: legends propagated as part of court intrigue). The most crucial feature of Catherine's Crimean tour was how it symbolized the importance of Crimea to Russia, as the ancient site where, according to medieval Russian documents, Prince Vladimir "the Baptist" founded the Russian Orthodox Church in 988 CE.
5. The Crimean War (1853-56)
In 1853, Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire, ostensibly over the mistreatment of Slavs and Orthodox Christians who lived under Ottoman rule. Britain, France, and Sardinia responded by successfully invading Crimea, fearing Russian control of the straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Military debacles and disease plagued both Russia and the invading allies. Often evoked in Russia through Tolstoy'sSevastopol' Sketches, the war is best remembered in the West for the tragic heroism of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem Charge of the Light Brigade and for Florence Nightingale, who founded the modern nursing profession while serving British soldiers.
6. The Russian Riviera 7. Sevastopol: Hero-city
German aircraft during World War II besieged Sevastopol for 250 days from October 1941 to July 1942. Defended by navy units, Sevastopol became the location for a full-scale Soviet push-back against Nazi forces. Despite the efforts of thousands of Soviet factory workers, medical personnel, and soldiers, a Nazi bombardment that destroyed much of the city's infrastructure in June 1942 proved decisive. Soviet troops withdrew, but returned in 1944 to liberate the city. 50,000 men and women were awarded a special medal "For the Defense of Sevastopol" and the city itself was given the prestigious title of "Hero-city."
8. The Deportation of the Tatars
When the Red Army recaptured Crimea in 1944, the entire Crimean Tatar community was unjustly accused of collaborating with the Nazis. Thousands of NKVD agents (Stalin's secret police, precursor to the KGB) in mechanized infantry units moved into Crimea on May 18, 1944, surrounding virtually every Tatar village. With one hour to collect their belongings, the NKVD transported Tatar communities at gunpoint to train stations, and loaded them into cattle cars modified only with a small pipe for defecating in the corner. The entire community was deported, mainly to Uzbekistan, and because many of the trains were sealed, and the victims given virtually no food, thousands died during the voyage.
9. Crimea and Ukraine
In 1954, to commemorate the 300 th anniversary of Russia's union with Ukraine, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea to a different administrative division of the USSR, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. This shift in borders within the USSR was of little consequence at the time. However, when Ukraine emerged as independent state in 1991, the interested parties came to the following agreement to prevent a crisis in the predominantly Russian Crimea: Crimea remained a province of independent Ukraine but Russia kept their naval forces in Sevastopol (on a contractual lease) and the Crimeans received autonomy and recognition of their special historical status inside Ukraine.
10. The Santa Barbara Affair

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The Crimea that most people have come to know is a peninsula occupied by Russian forces, ostensibly annexed to the Russian Federation, and one epicenter of an international conflict over Ukraine that seems far from resolution. While we look to history for answers and explanations of these current events, this place has a tremendous story to tell in its own right.

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10 Things Everyone Should Know About Ukraine. Trailer.

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10 Things Everyone Should Know About Ukraine. Trailer.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKgk4bQhu7U&list=PLGxknRy5g11goasluNRgUqRWda5W7uBIY

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10 Things Everyone Should Know About Ukraine. Trailer.

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Chernobyl’s Radioactive Wildlife | Tim Mousseau | Wondros Podcast Ep 78

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Chernobyl’s Radioactive Wildlife | Tim Mousseau | Wondros Podcast Ep 78

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YUJVChMzKU

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Chernobyl’s Radioactive Wildlife | Tim Mousseau | Wondros Podcast Ep 78

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The Effects of Radiation at Chernobyl: A Science Headliners Interview with Dr. Timothy Mousseau

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The Effects of Radiation at Chernobyl: A Science Headliners Interview with Dr. Timothy Mousseau

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er_lMeXcY5c

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The Effects of Radiation at Chernobyl: A Science Headliners Interview with Dr. Timothy Mousseau

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https://www.facebook.com/UkrainianCulturalAssnOhio/

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Ukrainian Cultural Association of Ohio, Westerville, Ohio. 988 likes · 76 talking about this. The Ukrainian Cultural Association of Ohio, Inc. (UCAO) was founded in 1983 in Columbus as a nonprofit...

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Ukraine war in maps: Tracking the Russian invasion

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Ukraine war in maps: Tracking the Russian invasion

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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60506682

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Ukraine's counter-offensive has now been under way for more than four months and may have now achieved a breakthrough ahead of the usually harsh winter.

Here are the latest developments:

Ukraine says its forces have gained a foothold on the eastern bank of the Dnipro river - potentially allowing it to transfer vital equipment across the river

Russia has been focusing its efforts on eastern Ukraine with fighting continuing around Bakhmut and near Donetsk

Ukraine's claims foothold across river

Ukrainian forces say they have gained a foothold on the eastern bank of the Dnipro river about 30km (19 miles) from the city of Kherson.

The river has separated Ukrainian and Russian forces since Moscow's troops withdrew from Kherson a year ago.

If the area is held it would mean a significant advance for Ukraine as it may be able to begin transferring armoured vehicles and air defence systems across the river putting it a step closer to breaking through to Crimea, the peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.

The success was claimed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's chief of staff Andriy Yermak shortly after US-based experts said that marginal advances had been made into the village of Krynky, 2km (1.25 miles) inland from the river.

Russia conceded on 15 November that "small groups" of Ukrainian forces had set up positions in the village but insisted they had sustained heavy losses and had no chance of breaking through.

Vladimir Saldo, the Russian-installed official in charge of the Russian-occupied areas of the Kherson region, said they faced a "fiery hell", adding: "Our additional forces have now been brought in. The enemy is trapped in Krynky."

His admission that Ukrainian forces had gained a foothold came two days after Russian state media published and then swiftly retracted news of a retreat from positions on the eastern bank.

Ukrainian forces have conducted several raids in small boats across the Dnipro, Ukraine's longest river, during the spring and summer. However, Kyiv lacks air superiority, which made the task more difficult.

The battle for Bakhmut

Russia's main effort has been focused on eastern Ukraine, according to analysts from the US-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

The city of Bakhmut, which has endured some of the heaviest fighting of the war, has been under Russian control for several months and, although Ukraine gained some ground in the surrounding areas over the summer, including the villages of Kupyansk and Andriivka, the battles continue.

Russian forces are also claiming to have made advances around the town of Avdiivka near the city of Donetsk.

President Zelensky said on 14 November that fighting was escalating near the town but added that Russian forces were losing men and equipment trying to capture it.

The UK Ministry of Defence says Russia is "almost certainly attempting a pincer movement to encircle the town", and notes its proximity to Donetsk means it holds political importance to Russia.

The MoD assessment is that recent advances suggest Russian forces are closing in on the coke and chemical plant to the north of the town, which is still held by Ukrainian forces and occupies a key tactical position.

The plant dominates the main road into Avdiivka and, the MoD believes if Russian forces were to secure it, resupplying the town would "become increasingly difficult for Ukraine". However the building gives Ukraine a "localised defensive advantage" and the MoD says that Russian forces will probably suffer significant losses if they attempt to assault the facility.

Attacks on Crimea

As part of its counter-offensive Ukraine has also stepped up attacks on the Crimean peninsula - including a missile attack on the port of Sevastopol on 22 September which it says killed 34 Russian officers.

That attack came just over a week after another major attack on the same city, which is the headquarters of the fleet, that is thought to have destroyed a ship and a submarine.

It also caused significant damage to the dry docks, which are vital for maintenance of the entire Russian Black Sea fleet.

The next day Ukraine said it had succeeded in destroying a sophisticated Russian air defence system - the S-400 - on the peninsular.

Attacks in late August destroyed another S-400 and others knocked out Russian radar positions on offshore gas platforms.

Russia's Black Sea fleet is an important target for Kyiv - its ships have launched missiles at Ukraine causing devastating damage.

It has also been threatening to block the Black Sea shipping routes that Ukraine has been using to export grain - which is a particular sticking point for Kyiv currently.

Moscow pulled out of the internationally brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative in mid-July, which guaranteed safe passage of non-military vessels, arguing that Russia's own agricultural exporters were being disadvantaged.

In its place Ukraine exported a limited amount of grain using ships that hugged the western coast of the Black Sea - through Romanian and Bulgarian territorial waters - to evade Russian attack. Ukraine has also been exporting an increasing amount of grain from Reni and Izmail, on the Danube river.

The Black Sea route was previously used as a humanitarian corridor, to allow passage for empty ships which had been trapped in Ukraine's ports since the start of the conflict.

However, earlier in November Ukrainian officials said a harbour pilot had been killed and four other people injured after a Russian missile hit a civilian ship that was supposed to transport iron ore to China as it was entering Odesa.

More than a year of fighting

Russia's invasion began with dozens of missile strikes on cities all over Ukraine before dawn on 24 February 2022.

Russian ground troops moved in quickly and within a few weeks were in control of large areas of Ukraine and had advanced to the suburbs of Kyiv.

Russian forces were bombarding Kharkiv, and they had taken territory in the east and south as far as Kherson, and surrounded the port city of Mariupol.

But they hit very strong Ukrainian resistance almost everywhere and faced serious logistical problems with poorly motivated Russian troops suffering shortages of food, water and ammunition.

Ukrainian forces were also quick to deploy Western supplied arms such as the Nlaw anti-tank system, which proved highly effective against the Russian advance.

By October, the picture had changed dramatically and having failed to take Kyiv, Russia withdrew completely from the north.

More than a year since the invasion, Ukraine is now hoping its latest counter-offensive can turn the war in its favour.

By David Brown, Bella Hurrell, Dominic Bailey, Mike Hills, Lucy Rodgers, Paul Sargeant, Alison Trowsdale, Tural Ahmedzade, Chris Clayton, Kady Wardell, Mark Bryson, Zoe Bartholomew, Sean Willmott, Sana Dionysiou, Joy Roxas, Gerry Fletcher, Jana Tauschinsk, Debie Loizou, Simon Martin and Prina Shah.

About these maps

To indicate which parts of Ukraine are under control by Russian troops we are using daily assessments published by the Institute for the Study of War with the American Enterprise Institute's Critical Threats Project. To show key areas where advances are taking place we are also using updates from the UK Ministry of Defence and BBC research.

The situation in Ukraine is often fast moving and it is likely there will be times when there have been changes not reflected in the maps.

Copyright 2023 BBC. All rights reserved. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read about our approach to external linking.

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Ukraine in maps: Tracking the war with Russia

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Ukraine's counter-offensive may have achieved a breakthrough ahead of the expected harsh winter months.

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https://www.newseumed.org/

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The Freedom Forum's mission is to foster First Amendment freedoms for all.

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https://origins.osu.edu/read/ukrainian-architecture-war

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"It is hard to talk about heritage preservation while people are being killed. But heritage is not just bricks and walls. Heritage is memory."

During the first days of the , Ukrainian President Zelensky recorded one of his daily video addresses in front of the House with Chimeras in the capital city of Kyiv. This Art Nouveau building from 1903, designed by the Ukrainian-Polish architect Władysław Horodecki, is covered in sculptures of mythical creatures and large animals.

The front façade of the House with Chimeras in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Architecture is a way of understanding the world: recording its history, sharing its culture, and connecting with people. We need to consider Ukraine's architecture during war first and foremost because it is important to . Ukrainians are not only fighting for the right to live on their territory, they are fighting to preserve their

Derzhprom building, Kharkiv, Ukraine, 2019. (Photo by Ashley Bigham, 2019).

Park of Memory, Kyiv, Ukraine, 1968-80, designed by Avraam Miletsky, Vladimir Melnychenko, and Ada Rybachuk. (Photo by Ashley Bigham, 2019).

Hotel Salut, Kyiv, Ukraine, designed by Avraam Miletsky. (Photo by Ashley Bigham, 2019).

Saltivskyi Market Hall, designed by Alla Anishchenko, Kharkiv, Ukraine. (Photo by Ashley Bigham, 2019).

Since Russia's full-scale in February 2022, architects in Ukraine have shifted their focus toward using their skills to meet the immediate needs of their society.

A residential building in Kyiv after shelling in March 2022.

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"It is hard to talk about heritage preservation while people are being killed. But heritage is not just bricks and walls. Heritage is memory." During the first days of the , Ukrainian President Zelensky recorded one of his daily video addresses in front of the House with Chimeras in the capital city of Kyiv.

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A Postcard from Kyiv: A Year of Reckoning for Ukraine

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A Postcard from Kyiv: A Year of Reckoning for Ukraine

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https://origins.osu.edu/connecting-history/2102015-postcard-kyiv-year-reckoning-ukraine

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A Postcard from Kyiv: A Year of Reckoning for Ukraine

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From the Editors: 2014 was a year of tremendous and unfinished change for Ukraine: a dramatic political revolution in Kyiv’s Independence (Maidan) Square and the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych, the surprise annexation of Crimea into Russia, ongoing fighting in the eastern regions of Ukrain…

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https://origins.osu.edu/connecting-history/postcard-chernobyl

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In the early hours of April 26, 1986, the staff of the 4 th Reactor at the Chernobyl' nuclear power station in Ukraine, then a republic of the Soviet Union, conducted tests that went wrong. Trying to correct the problem manually, they switched off the automatic system designed to shut down the reactor.

The result was disaster.

A power surge led to a series of explosions that blew off the roof (weighing 12,000 tons), caused a fire inside the reactor that burned for ten days, and spewed radioactive vapor and particles up into the atmosphere and onto the surrounding land. Over the following days and weeks, a radioactive cloud spread over much of Europe.

Ariel view of the destroyed reactor, 1986 (left), and radioactive cloud (right).
Fire fighters and power station workers struggled to put out the fire. Two people were killed in the explosion and around 28 were exposed to fatal doses of radiation. The power station management and authorities in Kyiv, the capital of the Ukrainian Republic, tried at first to conceal and minimize the accident. Only when the radioactive cloud was detected over Sweden did the full extent become known to the authorities in the Soviet Union's capital in Moscow and to the wider world.

Over the next few months, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly military conscripts and reservists, were mobilized in a desperate struggle with the consequences of the explosion. They became known as "liquidators." Robots were used, but some could not cope with the high levels of radioactivity. Instead, people ("biorobots") were sent in, with minimal protective clothing, and serious and sometimes fatal consequences for their health.

Robots, now cleaned up and on display near the doomed reactor, 2016 (left, photo by Anna Olenenko), and 'Biorobots' clearing radioactive debris from the roof of the reactor (right).
In the months after the explosion, workers and robots built a shelter over the destroyed reactor. Known as the "sarcophagus," it also serves as a monument both to the heroism of the "liquidators" and the human folly that caused the disaster. While the sarcophagus was being built above ground, miners tunnelled underneath and installed a cement shield to try to prevent the reactor core, which had melted, from contaminating the ground water.

Twenty years after the disaster, it was revealed that the "liquidators" had averted a far more serious, second explosion, with the destructive force of a 3-5 megaton atomic bomb, which would have left large parts of Eastern Europe uninhabitable for generations.
Monument to "those who saved the world." (Photo by Anna Olenenko)
When we-an international, multi-disciplinary group of scholars-visited in June 2016, we posed for a sombre photograph in front of the sarcophagus.
Group in front of sarcophagus. (Photo by Voicu Sucala)
Near the reactor is the larger "new safe confinement," nearing completion, which will slide over the decaying sarcophagus. Built at a cost of over $1.5 billion with funding from many countries, it is planned to protect the environment from further contamination until it is possible, in a few decades time, to dismantle and dispose of the still highly-radioactive remnants of the explosion.
New Safe Confinement nearing completion.
After the explosion, to the eternal shame of the authorities, the surrounding population was not evacuated immediately and iodine, which could have helped avert health consequences, was not distributed promptly to all those who could have benefitted, especially the children. The authorities allowed parades to celebrate May Day, a major Communist festival, to go ahead in the towns and cities around the disaster area, including Kyiv and Minsk, the capital of the adjoining Belorussian republic. Millions were exposed to the radioactive cloud.
Pripiat': A Moment Locked in Time
Most of the power station's workers and their families lived in Pripiat', a model town built to house them. Pripiat' was evacuated two days after the explosion. The abandoned town lies deserted, looted of anything of value (in spite of the radioactivity), and thoroughly vandalised.

We tramped around and went inside the kindergarten, school, sports center, stadium, hospital, apartment blocks, and the amusement park with its carousel, dodgem cars and ferris wheel. Peeling walls, collapsing ceilings, broken floors, and above all the crunch, crunch, crunch of broken glass under our feet accompanied us at every step.

The ruins of Pripiat' are trapped in a time warp of the 1980s. The faded Soviet posters and slogans, the fizzy water vending machines, and the school text books all created a bizarre sense of nostalgia for those of our group who had been exchange students in the Soviet Union or had lived there as children. Glimpses of a lost, Soviet world, we thought never to see again.

Poster on Civil Defense in the event of a NATO nuclear attack on classroom wall (left, photo by Voicu Sucala), and rusty fizzy water vending machines (right, photo by Nadia French).
An enduring memory of our visit will be the forest that has returned to the town. Public squares, sidewalks, roads, the sports field, amusement park, even the insides of buildings have been taken over by the native vegetation. Pripiat' is now a thirty-year-old forest.
The view from the roof of an apartment block with more forest than buildings. (Photo by Anna Olenenko) Nature in the Exclusion Zone
Nature was severely harmed by the explosion and radioactive debris. The pine forest next to power station turned red from radioactivity. "Liquidators" felled, chopped up, and buried the radioactive trees of the "red forest." Thirty years on, a new pine forest has grown back.
The "Red Forest" after the accident.
Slowly, after the explosion and the evacuation of the population, nature has returned to the "exclusion zone" inside a 30 km radius of the power plant. We saw not just trees, but flowers, insects (including butterflies), birds, and caught glimpses of larger mammals that live in the forest. Chris Thomas, an ecology professor in our group, regularly went off to look at the flora and fauna. Some of our group heard wolves howling during the night we spent in the hotel in Chernobyl'. In the cooling pond near the power station we saw ominously large cat fish.
Cat fish in cooling pond. (Photo by Anna Olenenko)
The cat fishes' size was not because they were radioactive mutants, but because they were left in peace by their main predators: humans. Nature has become resurgent when its main, human, rival has left. Chernobyl' has become an unexpected nature reserve.

Which is more harmful for "nature": humans or radioactivity? Some scientific studies indicate an abundance of wild life, especially large mammals, including bears, wolves, deer, living in the exclusion zone largely abandoned by people. Others scientists urge caution, and point to long-term health effects on the wild life as a result of the radioactivity.
Visitors to the World's Worst Nuclear Accident
We were permitted to visit the exclusion zone on an official tour. We were stopped at check points at the entries to the 30 km outer and 10 km inner zones and checked for radiation when we left. To advise us on the risks and precautions, we had a radiation protection officer, Dr Ian Haslam of the University of Manchester, in our group. He advised us of the risks, the need to wear closed footwear, long trousers and sleeves, not to stray from the roads and paths, which had been cleaned, not to touch or eat or drink anything in the open air, and to wash ourselves and our clothes thoroughly after we left.

He monitored the radiation with his dosimeter and Geiger counter. He explained his readings. Some were quite low in the outer zone, not much higher than in the nearby city of Kyiv. Inside the 10 km inner zone, near the reactor and red forest, they were higher. And there were hotspots, away from the roads and paths, where radioactive debris from the explosion had sunk into the soil. A lethal dose of radioactivity-which proved fatal to some of the power station workers, fire-fighters and "liquidators" in the aftermath of the disaster-is many, many times the low levels we were exposed to on our two-day visit.
Dr Ian Haslam with Geiger counter and dosimeter. (Photo by Voicu Sucala)
Before our trip, Ian advised us that a short visit to the zone would not cause long-term consequences for our health, if we followed the safety advice. Far, far less fortunate were those people lived and continue to live in the region around the disaster zone.

Debate rages about the total deaths, and likely future deaths, that can be attributed to the disaster. Estimates vary from 4,000 to 93,000 and more. The differences can be explained partly by difficulties in attributing cancers and other diseases directly to the disaster and to disagreements over the health consequences of exposure to low-level radiation.

The divergences in opinion also seem to depend also on who is doing the calculations and where their interests lie. The United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IATA) and World Health Organization (WHO) are responsible for the lower estimates; independent scientists and non-governmental environmental organizations for the higher.

Our visit to the Chernobyl exclusion zone was funded by the Leverhulme Trust << https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/ >> and the Georgetown Environment Initiative << https://environment.georgetown.edu/ >>, and was part of a larger project on environmental history. http://www.york.ac.uk/history/research/majorprojects/russiasenvironmentalhistory/

'The Battle of Chernobyl', documentary film, 2006.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1tj4nruBZg
Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl (New York: Picador, 2006)

(Oral history by Nobel Prize winning author)

Mary Mycio, Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl (Washington, DC, Joseph Henry Press, 2005)

(Account by journalist who, to her surprise, found 'thriving' flora and fauna in zone)
Selection of articles offering differing perspectives:
Kate Brown, "Eating at You: Food and Chernobyl," Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, April 2016
/milestones/april-2016-eating-you-food-and-chernobyl
Jim Green, "Chernobyl - how many died?" The Ecologist, 26th April 2014
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2370256/chernobyl_how_many_died.html
Timothy J. Jorgensen, "Forget Fukushima: Chernobyl still holds record as worst nuclear accident for public health," The Conversation, April 25 2016
https://theconversation.com/forget-fukushima-chernobyl-still-holds-record-as-worst-nuclear-accident-for-public-health-57942
David Moon and Anna Olenenko, "Interview with Ivan Ivanovich Semeniuk - a returnee to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone," The Ecologist, 25th November, 2016
http://www.theecologist.org/Interviews/2988387/interview_with_ivan_ivanovich_semeniuk_a_returnee_to_the_chernobyl_exclusion_zone.html
Timothy A. Mousseau, "At Chernobyl and Fukushima, radioactivity has seriously harmed wildlife," The Conversation, April 25 2016
https://theconversation.com/at-chernobyl-and-fukushima-radioactivity-has-seriously-harmed-wildlife-57030
Mike Wood and Nick Beresford. "Wolves, boar and other wildlife defy contamination to make a comeback at Chernobyl," The Conversation, 5 October 2015
http://theconversation.com/wolves-boar-and-other-wildlife-defy-contamination-to-make-a-comeback-at-chernobyl-48600
World Health Organization, "Chernobyl: the true scale of the accident," 2005
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
Multimedia project by Russian journalists who visited exclusion zone in early 2016: "The Land of Exclusion: Chernobyl and its Surroundings Today - A Kommersant Special Project," April 21, 2016. http://kommersant.ru/projects/chernobyl/en

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In the early hours of April 26, 1986, the staff of the 4th Reactor at the Chernobyl' nuclear power station in Ukraine, then a republic of the Soviet Union, conducted tests that went wrong. Trying to correct the problem manually, they switched off the automatic system designed to shut down the reactor.

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https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1985-2/meltdown-in-chernobyl/

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On April 26, 1986, a surge of power at the Chernobyl nuclear power station's no. 4 reactor in northern Ukraine triggered a massive explosion that became the world's worst nuclear accident. Radioactive dust spewed into the air and was carried by prevailing winds over nearby Belorussia. Even while the Kremlin maintained a cautious silence, refusing to release any information about the blast, monitoring devices in Sweden were picking up significant traces of radioactivity. In the meantime, wild rumors were circulating throughout the region of the blast producing panic. Authorities evacuated some forty thousand people from the town of Pripyat closest to the accident. Thirty-eight people were killed instantly as a result of the accident, and it has been claimed - though not confirmed - that as many as 100,000 subsequently died or suffered severe harms to their health from radiation. Among them were workers - many of them volunteers - who were rushed to the scene to shut down the reactor and build a concrete sarcophagus around it. By the time Gorbachev went on television almost three weeks later to report on the accident, his credibility had suffered a severe blow.

One of the consequences of the accident was economic. The cost of the clean-up, including the provision of housing and other resources for evacuees, eventually ran into billions of rubles, burdening an already shaky economy. Another consequence was the Gorbachev administration's reassessment of its information policy. The Chernobyl disaster marked a watershed in the government's commitment to glasnost ', which until then had been little more than a slogan. Not only did the government welcome international assistance in treating victims of the accident, but the media was unleashed and began to engage in investigative reports about environmental degradation and accidents elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

Finally, and notwithstanding changes in official policy, the accident fueled resentment in both Ukraine and Belorussia against the central authorities. In Ukraine in particular, it added to an already acute sense of victimization derived from the famine of 1932-33 and brutal repression of Ukrainian nationalists after the Second World War.

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On April 26, 1986, a surge of power at the Chernobyl nuclear power station's no. 4 reactor in northern Ukraine triggered a massive explosion that became the world's worst nuclear accident. Radioactive dust spewed into the air and was carried by prevailing winds over nearby Belorussia.

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Holodomor Eyewitness and Survivor Accounts and Analysis

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Holodomor Eyewitness and Survivor Accounts and Analysis

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https://holodomorct.org/holodomor-survivor-eyewitness-accounts/

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Holodomor Survivor and Eyewitness accounts of the Ukrainian genocide

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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905.) This page now incorporates groups of quotations by Holodomor survivors and witnesses along with entries that were previously found here: SURVIVOR ACCOUNTS AND MEMOIRS in the INFORMATION LINKS pages.

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https://gis.huri.harvard.edu/

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The MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine program, undertaken by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University and its partners, brings the latest innovations of information technology to studies of modern Ukrainian history and contemporary political geography.

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https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/

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Національний музей Голодомору-геноциду

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National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide is a state museum that preserves the memory of Holodomor victims and highlights the history of the genocide of the Ukrainian nation in 1932-1933. The museum is a center of commemoration of millions of Ukrainians killed during the Holodomor.

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https://origins.osu.edu/read/kyiv-rus-ukraine-russia

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In 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote a long essay entitled, " On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." It laid out historical claims to the territory of Ukraine, walking through a specious reading of history beginning with the medieval period and moving through the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991.

The 2021 television special Direct Line with Vladimir Putin.

Medieval history is popular when it is turned into shows such as "Game of Thrones" and "Vikings," but that of eastern Europe rarely registers on the radars of most Americans. Ukrainians and Russians, (and Belarusians), trace their ancestry back to a medieval kingdom known as Rus. This kingdom was the largest territorially in medieval Europe, stretching from the Baltic in the north to near the Black Sea in the south.

A map of Rus after the death of Yaroslav I in 1054.

They retained contacts across the breadth of medieval Europe. Members of the Rusian (of or relating to Rus) royal family married into the royal families of England, France, the German Empire, Hungary, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, as well as concluding marriages with the nomadic peoples of the steppe north of the Black Sea. If one were to map this, it would be easy to see that the web of relations stretches across the entirety of the continent.

The tenth century baptism of Volodymyr Sviatoslavich was depicted by Viktor Vasnetsov in 1890.

A modern Ukrainian stamp commemorating Eupraxia of Kyiv, Holy Roman Empress, and wife of Henry IV.

The Russian government's rationale for the war in Ukraine is not about oil, coal, or natural resources. It is about asserting specious historical claims. Those claims are broadcast widely in Russia and have been widely accepted.

The main street in Bucha, Ukraine after a Russian attack, April, 2022.

For instance, a Russian soldier, in the fourth week of the war, evicting Ukrainians from an apartment in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv, told them that he was repossessing the territory of Rus for Russia. This ordinary soldier tells us so much about what Putin wants and why.

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In 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin wrote a long essay entitled, " On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." It laid out historical claims to the territory of Ukraine, walking through a specious reading of history beginning with the medieval period and moving through the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991.

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How Russia's current war in Ukraine echoes its Crimean War of the 1850s

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How Russia's current war in Ukraine echoes its Crimean War of the 1850s

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https://www.npr.org/2022/07/13/1106123496/russia-ukraine-invasion-crimean-war-history

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KYIV, Ukraine - Here's a widely held view of Russia's war: Russia had a more powerful army and expected a quick victory. It didn't think Western powers would intervene. Yet a poorly planned military campaign led to a fight much tougher than expected.

To be clear, we're not talking about Russia's current war in Ukraine. We're talking about Russia's war in Crimea in the 1850s.

Even if you're not familiar with the Crimean War, you know some of the monumental figures who emerged from it, like Florence Nightingale and Leo Tolstoy.

But this isn't just history. That long-ago conflict is still relevant today. For starters, when Russia fought the Ottoman Empire in 1853, the focal point was Crimea - the very same territory Russian President Vladimir Putin seized in 2014 when he first invaded Ukraine.

During the first Crimean War, The Economist magazine - the same one that's still going strong - wrote a scathing piece in 1854 on Russia and its leader, Czar Nicholas I.

"That vast state is in great measure composed of spoils which she has torn from surrounding nations," The Economist wrote. "Her frontier provinces are filled with injured, discontented hostile populations ... many of whom wait, with patience and desire, the blessed day of emancipation and revenge."

Sounds a lot like Ukraine today.

"There are very distinct parallels. And I think Putin has probably overstretched himself in the same way that Nicholas I did," says Orlando Figes, a British historian and the author of The Crimean War: A History.

"Nicholas, who wanted to counteract the influence of liberal democracy in Europe, came up with the slogan, 'Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationalism,'" Figes says. "That might just as well stand for Putin's ideology. This is a war backed by the Orthodox Church. He is an autocrat. He sees himself as a bulwark against liberal principles coming from the West.''

Professor Vladislav Zubok, a Russian historian at the London School of Economics, has a similar take.

"It's a classic case when history does definitely rhyme," says Zubok.

He notes that Russia had a huge army in the 1850s but planned poorly for the Crimean War.

"Very quickly after the outbreak of the war, it turned out that Russia was so weak that it couldn't even properly supply the troops on its own territory," Zubok says.

Much like today, where Russia has suffered recurring logistics failures since invading Ukraine in February.

Nicholas I also thought Western powers would not interfere with his war against the Ottoman Empire, which he called "the sick man of Europe." He was stunned when Britain and France joined the fight against Russia.

"He could not imagine that the leading powers of Europe would turn against him," Zubok says. "He definitely provoked the Crimean War by his arrogance, by his wrong assumptions about Europe and other powers. And he essentially blundered his way into this war."

Britain and France aren't fighting in the current war. But recently, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and French President Emmanuel Macron were among five European leaders who took trains to Kyiv and stood side-by-side in solidarity with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

"Putin did not believe that the Europeans and the United States would together push back against what Russia was doing," says Angela Stent, a Russia expert at Georgetown University. She's met many times with Putin during his more than two decades in power, and is the author of Putin's World.

"He also didn't believe that Europe and the United States would agree on these very tough sanctions. So he was wrong on a number of counts," she adds.

Of course, the Crimean War was also filled with folly. A disastrous British military operation was immortalized by Britain's Alfred, Lord Tennyson in his epic poem, the Charge of the Light Brigade, which includes these enduring lines:

"Forward the Light Brigade
Was there a man dismayed
Not tho' the soldier knew
Some one had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred."

Tennyson wasn't alone in turning tragedy into art. A young Russian artillery officer, Leo Tolstoy, drew on his experience when he later wrote War and Peace.

And Florence Nightingale became one of the most famous women in the world as she ushered in a new era of military medicine by using more sanitary methods to treat wounded troops.

Decades later, in 1890, she made a recording about her time in Crimea and the place where she set up her field hospital, Balaklava.

"When I am no longer a memory - just a name - I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life," she said. "God bless my dear old comrades of Balaklava and bring them safe to shore."

The war did, however, further damage the reputation of Nicholas I. He died in 1855, while the fighting still raged. His 30-year rule left Russia isolated, impoverished and badly in need of reforms.

Russia lost the Crimean War a year later and was forced to accept humiliating terms.

Russia pledged not to place warships in the Black Sea - where it desperately wanted to project naval power.

Today, Russia is projecting naval power in the Black Sea. In an escalating crisis, some 20 Russian warships are blockading the southern coast of Ukraine, keeping the country from exporting its abundant grain to the world.

"I think this is again a historical continuity," says Georgetown's Stent. "Russia trying to dominate the Black Sea. The goals haven't changed that much."

Russia has long portrayed itself as a leading military power. Putin recently compared himself to Peter the Great, the czar who expanded Russian territory through conquests in the early 1700s.

So its current invasion of Ukraine comes as no surprise to Volodymyr Viatrovych, a prominent Ukrainian historian.

"This is, of course, an imperial war," says Viatrovych, who's also in Ukraine's parliament and is a member of the armed forces who helped defend Kyiv in the early days of this war.

"Russia today acts as an empire. It is intending to expand. They're trying to take land that they perceived to have belonged to them in the past," he says.

While Russia has had many military triumphs, he says its overall record is decidedly mixed.

"If we look throughout the course of history, not only the 20th century, but also the 19th century, Russia lost more than it won," Viatrovych says.

Russia was part of the winning side in World War II. But it was defeated by Japan in a 1904-'05 war, had an abysmal showing in World War I that helped pave the way for the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the Soviet Union lost a war to rebels in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

"Russia, has really built this myth of being a global superpower," says Viatrovych. "But what we've seen since the invasion of Ukraine is that they are not a superpower."

Russia's current leader loves talking about his country's historical conquests. He's much less forthcoming on its defeats.
Greg Myre is an NPR national security correspondent. Follow him .

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How Russia's current war in Ukraine echoes its Crimean War of the 1850s

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KYIV, Ukraine - Here's a widely held view of Russia's war: Russia had a more powerful army and expected a quick victory. It didn't think Western powers would intervene. Yet a poorly planned military campaign led to a fight much tougher than expected. To be clear, we're not talking about Russia's current war in Ukraine.

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https://ukrainianart.com/

Contains online images of art from Ukrainian Realist, Impressionist, and Contemporary artists.

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A counter current of interest was from Western art historians, specializing in Russian art, who told each other "Go to Kyiv, there is Bohomazov." As it turned out, the roots of Russian Avant-garde could be found in Ukraine. For example, what was Goncharova's paintings inspired with?

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https://origins.osu.edu/review/ukraine-nutshell

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Serhy Yekelchyk's fascinating book The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know should be required reading for any student studying the Black Sea region, and for any government official tasked with working on the issues in that troubled part of the world.

A professor at the University of Victoria, Yekelchyk masterfully presents the history, politics, culture, background, and motivations for the Ukrainian crisis. It would take years of study to appreciate the intricacy of the Ukraine-Russia relationship from the time of Volodymyr the Saint (~ 988) to the present, and it would require dozen visits to Ukraine to understand the land and its people. Yet, in only 166 to-the-point but deeply researched pages, Professor Yekelchyk presents and discusses an incredible amount of detail and provides the reader with a clear, both-sides-of-the-story analysis of Ukraine, Russia, and the Black Sea region.

Yekelchyk starts his book by wasting no time with unnecessary or 'nice to know' information about Ukraine. Instead, each section of the book is cleverly framed as an answer to the most relevant questions surrounding Ukraine's conflict-ridden existence. He begins with such vital questions like "What is the Maidan, and what made it top news around the world?", "How and why did Russia annex the Crimea from Ukraine?", "Why did fighting breakout in eastern Ukraine in the Spring of 2014?", and "Why did the Ukrainian crisis cause tensions between Russia and the West?" Yekelchyk's brief, yet impressively thorough answers to these initial framing questions both educates and engages the reader.

The reviewer's photos during the peaceful component of the pro-democracy EuroMaidan protests.
December 2013.

As current news broadcasts and websites talk of the plight of today's Crimean Tartars, many people are not cognizant of the fascinating and repeatedly tragic history of these people. So Yekelchyk asks the question, "Who are the Crimean Tartars?" He then, in just two and a half clearly written pages, proceeds to answer by providing an impressive summation of the culture, history, and challenges of the Crimean Tartars. Yekelchyk also presents his own assessment of the current Crimean Tartar situation with the very astute appraisal that hits to the core inconsistency that frames the (il)legality of the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and its tragic consequences to the Crimean Tartar people:

Map of the Crimean Khanate 1600.

"The notion of the Crimea as a "Russian land" glosses over the peninsula's rich multicultural past before its conquest by the Russian Empire. It also conceals the inconvenient fact that ethnic Russians came to constitute a majority in the Crimea only after Stalin had all the Crimean Tartars deported on false charges of treason in 1944." (119)

As the example above shows, throughout his book, Yekelchyk does a masterful job of dispelling the ethnocentric notion that politicians and a populace can simply start history at a time most compatible with their own mythological narrative.

The only drawback to the publication is a lack of maps and/or diagrams to help the reader in his/her spatial understanding of the historical events and varied places that served as precursors to and motivations for the Ukrainian crisis. Conflict, whether on land or sea, is always dynamic and as such, maps are vital in discussing the spatial relationships that show who is/was doing what and why. In future editions of this necessary book, this reviewer looks forward to more line diagrams, photos, and even appendices such as the full United Nations' text of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum ( http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/49/765).

After reading this tightly written but wide-ranging book, one is sure to learn about the most relevant historical events, cultural influences, regional motivations, and political intentions of the current Ukraine-Russia War. Yekelchyk's depth of research vividly and accurately describes a myriad of issues, such as the Post-Soviet nostalgia in Crimea and eastern Ukraine that this reviewer can attest to with first-hand experience from the 'kitchen table' conversations in Feodosiya, Crimea. Thus, the author has done a brilliant job in capturing so much of the unique intricacies of the Ukrainian and Russian national psyches that led to the war, that continue to promote the war, and that are attempting to end the war.

Yekelchyk ends his book with three questions about: 1) the most challenging topics facing Ukraine in its armed conflict with Russia, 2) the vital, all-encompassing list of national reforms in which Ukraine must succeed, and 3) the fluid and uncertain relationships Ukraine will have with the rest of the world. In the final question that frames his book, Yekelchyk asks "Has the Ukrainian crisis sparked a new Cold War?" His answer to that question, and to all the other questions throughout his brilliant book, give readers of all backgrounds the necessary details and evidence to make their own informed answer.

So, along with Charles King's The Black Sea, Andrew Wilson's The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, and Anna Reid's Borderland, this reviewer strongly believes that Sergey Yekelchyk's The Conflict in Ukraine should be in the library of scholar and student of Ukraine and the wider Black Sea region.

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Serhy Yekelchyk's fascinating book The Conflict in Ukraine: What Everyone Needs to Know should be required reading for any student studying the Black Sea region, and for any government official tasked with working on the issues in that troubled part of the world.

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Crimea: A General Introduction (Origins OSU)

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Crimea: A General Introduction (Origins OSU)

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https://origins.osu.edu/review/crimea-general-introduction

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Until 2014, Ukraine was a country little known and poorly-understood by many in the West. While the Ukrainian Revolution of February 2014 and the subsequent annexation of the Crimean peninsula by Russia have certainly given the country more name recognition, understanding is still hard to find. Neil Kent attempts to fix that and introduce Crimea to a wider audience with his new book Crimea: A History.

Kent, who is much better known for his work on Arctic and Scandinavian history, takes a broad view of history for this book. Considering its relative shortness, this means moving quickly through a rapid succession of ancient peoples who have inhabited the Crimean peninsula , including the Scythians, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Goths, among others. This comprises the first chapter of Kent’s history. The next three chapters take the reader through the Middle Ages, the Crimean Khanate, and the Ottoman Empire, leading into Crimea’s integration, along with Ukraine (then called Novorossiya, or “New Russia”) into the Russian Empire.

The remaining six chapters deal with the history of Crimea almost exclusively through the lens of its relationship with Russia. These chapters are devoted to its consolidation into the Empire, its experience of the Crimean War and both World Wars, the immediate post-war period, and the transference of the peninsula from Russia to Ukraine by Khrushchev and its role in the late- to post-Soviet world. The book finishes with an epilogue about Crimea in the twenty-first century, primarily focused on the protests and revolution of 2014 and Crimea’s annexation by Russia. The chapters are brief, and split further into small sections organized for the benefit of readers who are unfamiliar with the subject.

Kent’s basic argument is that Crimea is, at its core, a part of Europe, with much more in common with the West than the East. He writes that “its peoples and culture were European, not Asiatic, even if over a millennium ago many of those who had settled [there] had come from far to the east” (1). Other than its statement early on, however, the argumentation is fairly subtle; he rarely comes out and restates it, but it is implied in how he deals overwhelmingly with Crimean interactions with Russia, and, to a lesser extent, with Western Europe. After the fourth chapter, the focus is almost entirely off the East.

In some ways, Kent’s book is a very welcome addition to the scholarship surrounding Crimea. Nearly every book that has been written about it is set within the context of a war. Very few general histories have been written about the peninsula itself. Some might argue that this leads the book into an almost old-fashioned political history. This should not necessarily be considered a weakness, however. The book is clearly intended for a more general audience, and if Kent’s intention was to encourage interest from the public in Crimean history, this kind of history was likely the most effective way to get it.

There raises some more serious concerns, however. The first chapter, despite speeding through thirteen centuries of Crimean history, contains not a single citation. The second chapter contains three, and the following chapters range anywhere from seven cited sources to seventy. Even when citations are prevalent, they might make the academic reader a bit uneasy. In the third chapter, fifteen out of thirty-two citations come from Maria Ivanics’ book on the Crimean Khanate. In chapter six, thirty-four out of sixty-nine come from Orlando Figes’ book on the Crimean War, and in chapter eight Paul Robert Magocsi’s book on the Tatars accounts for nine of the fifteen. This may not seem like a serious problem, considering that the book is marketed to a general audience, but it forces any reader to raise an eyebrow and wonder if Kent relies too heavily on a single sources.

There are also a few concerns about factual inaccuracies. For example, Kent refers to the “last official census before the current political upheavals,” which occurred in 2001. He claims that in that census, 63 percent of citizens claimed to identify as Russians (7), when, in actuality, the number is closer to 58 percent.[1] Later, in the epilogue, when Kent discusses the actions of the Russian Unity party, a pro-Russian political party based in Crimea, he mistakenly refers to it as the United Russian Party (154, 155), which, technically, does not exist; it seems as though he’s mixed it up with United Russia, the political party in Russia with which Vladimir Putin is affiliated. It is absolutely critical to a meaningful study of Crimea that these be distinguished properly.

The biggest concern regarding Kent’s book, however, lies in his argument. He says that Crimea is, at its heart, European, but he justifies that claim of Europeanness primarily by way of its association with Russia. The trouble with this is that perhaps the biggest, most fundamental and long-standing question in Russian history is whether or not it can be considered European. Is Russia European, or not? Is it Asiatic? Is it both? Something else entirely? Historians have gone back and forth on this issue for centuries now, and so to hang Crimea’s Europeanness on a country whose own Europeanness is hardly certain seems dubious at best, and perhaps academically irresponsible.

Overall, if Kent’s primary goal for Crimea: A History is to provide a general audience with a way into understanding this pivotal peninsula, then he is successful. The prose flows well and is quite readable, and the text is broken up into very manageable pieces that guide and direct the reader, while allowing for digestion and comprehension. Ultimately, and especially considering the dearth of comparable titles, this book would serve as a perfectly suitable introduction to Crimean history for the uninitiated, even if it does not quite hold up to academic standards.

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Until 2014, Ukraine was a country little known and poorly-understood by many in the West. While the Ukrainian Revolution of February 2014 and the subsequent annexation of the Crimean peninsula by Russia have certainly given the country more name recognition, understanding is still hard to find. Neil…

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Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective (The Ohio State University)

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Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective (The Ohio State University)

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https://origins.osu.edu/tag/ukraine
Collection of curated articles about Ukrainian culture and history, modern events, and the effect of Russia's 2022 invasion on Ukraine and the global community.

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Showing 1 - 21 of 21

Heroes Never Die

Ukraine: The Breadbasket of Europe

Rus not Russia

Understanding the War in Ukraine: Insights from the Recent Past, 1991—Present

“The Tragedy Has Never Left Us.” On the War in Ukraine

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Chernobyl and the Cost of Lies

Russia’s Lost Empire

From Romanovs to Reds: Russia's Revolutions at 100

A Postcard from Chernobyl

Crimea: A General Introduction

Eating at You: Food and Chernobyl

Ukraine, In a Nutshell

NATO's New Order: The Alliance After the Cold War

A Postcard from Kyiv: A Year of Reckoning for Ukraine

"The Greatest Geopolitical Catastrophe of the Century"

Top Ten Origins: Stories from Crimea

The Fate of Crimea, the Future of Ukraine, Part II

The Ukrainian Crisis: In Russia's Long Shadow

The Fate of Crimea, the Future of Ukraine, Part I

"Ukraine, Headed for a Revolution?"

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One the largest and most dynamic private contemporary art centres in Central and Eastern Europe. With over 3 million visitors, the PinchukArtCentre has become an international hub for contemporary art, developing the Ukrainian art scene while generating critical public discourse for society as a whole.

Please note that some resources may only be available in Ukrainian.

https://new.pinchukartcentre.org/en

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PinchukArtCentre is an international centre for contemporary art of the 21st century. It is an open platform for the artists, the art work and society.

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Teaching and Studying Ukraine (Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University)

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Teaching and Studying Ukraine (Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University)

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https://huri.harvard.edu/teaching-resources-list

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As professors, students, and scholars adapt to remote course instruction and limited access to libraries, HURI offers this list of resources that may be useful to those studying and teaching Ukraine. We will continue to add to the list as we identify additional resources, and we invite the scholarly community to send us suggestions for inclusion (please email our communications manager at kconroy@fas.harvard.edu). Thanks to Emily Channell-Justice and John Vsetecka for their initial work compiling resources.

(See also the Jordan Center's database, which was the inspiration for this list. Its primary focus is Russia but some of the materials are relevant to Ukraine, as well.)

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As professors, students, and scholars adapt to remote course instruction and limited access to libraries, HURI offers this list of resources that may be useful to those studying and teaching Ukraine. We will continue to add to the list as we identify additional resources, and we invite the scholarly community to send us suggestions for inclusion (please email our communications manager at kconroy@fas.harvard.edu).

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This guide serves as a starting point to find information on Ukraine, especially content that covers the issues that have lead up to the current crisis. On this page, you will see books, videos, articles, news sources, theses, and maps. On the left, you'll see topical pages, which will lead you to additional resources. Please reach out to the guide authors for additional assistance.

https://guides.osu.edu/ukraine