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How the Post-Soviet ‘Crisis of Hegemony’ Explains Class and War in Ukraine: A Review of Volodymyr Ishchenko’s Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War

Published this month by Verso, Towards the Abyss  offers a Gramscian account of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, alongside a personal perspective from its author, Volodymyr Ishchenko. Verso’s and LeftEast’s readership, likely familiar with Ishchenko’s polemical articles and his theoretical framework, is now offered an edited collection of texts composed and published across […]

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“The Most Important Battlefield Is the Ideological Battlefield”: An Interview with the Workers’ Front of Ukraine

In the social tapestry of post-Soviet nations, an enigmatic phenomenon has quietly taken root that might be called the “neo-Soviet renaissance.” Western commentators typically represent this movement as a misguided and inaccurate “Soviet nostalgia,” one conveniently harnessed by savvy politicians like Vladimir Putin for their own agendas, but this phenomenon is both deeper and more […]

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The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Should Forever Change How Sanctions Are Approached

After it invaded Ukraine, Russia became the most heavily sanctioned country in the world. This has provoked a new wave of discussion about the effectiveness of sanctions as a tool of political influence. Many commenters have pointed out that sanctions rarely achieve their goals, and, as Daniel W. Drezner points out, the sanctions currently imposed […]

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KOMBINATAS: Regional solidarity with Ukraine and anti-war resistance in Russia

This August’s Kombinatas festival brought dozens of leftist researchers and activists from the region to its camp in Saugus Atstumas (Lithuania). Predictably, Russia’s war on Ukraine was the most discussed topic and the festival’s organizers shared with us videos of two related panels. Oppositional movements and anti-war resistance in Russia Why did Putin start a […]

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Untimely Thoughts: Notes on Revolution and Ukraine

andrew is a communist from Ukraine and author of “Letters from Ukraine,” published in Endnotes (see Part I, Part II, and Part III) and Tous Dehors. This article is based on a presentation given at Woodbine NYC on September 10th. Wars and crises, in suspending normality and reminding both of the suffering sustaining capitalism and […]

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The Superfluous People of Eastern Ukraine

Imagine you are a Russian-speaker in some bombed-out Eastern Ukrainian city, waiting to be liberated. Some of the “liberators” will be first checking your closets for young men to mobilize and use as a Z-branded canon fodder. The other liberators make it clear that they see you аs nothing more than a “vatnik,” a Homo […]

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Works by major Ukrainian folk artists under attack in Ukraine

LeftEast reprints this piece from the Turkish gender, art, and politics platform 5Harfliler.com. In one of the first days of the ongoing invasion of Russia in Ukraine, the Russian troops burnt down the historical museum in Ivankiv, a town near Kyiv. The museum holdings included a collection of early-medieval archeological artifacts, rare Polissia (North Ukrainian […]

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Who stands with Ukraine in the long term? On the invisible labour of Ukrainian migrant communities 

One of Warsaw’s major railway stations, working as an information point for Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s invasion, was full of people. It was early May, and the crowds had shrunk as the number of those crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border had decreased. Yet, there was a dire need for volunteers speaking Ukrainian and Russian ready to provide […]

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Russia’s War on Ukraine: Imperial Ideology or Class Interest?

Note from LeftEast editors: This discussion, moderated by Barnaby Raine from Salvage journal, was organised took place on the platform of Salvage and Haymarket Books. It started from the premise that one of the main lines of argument on the Left and among social scientists today has been about the causes of the war. Why […]

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[VIDEO] War on Ukraine, the impact on West Asia and North Africa and solidarities from below

This discussion is a collaboration between LeftEast, Dis:orient, and the Bildungswerk der Heinrich-Böll-Foundation. As Russia’s war in Ukraine enters its fourth month, its impact on West Asia and North Africa (WANA) remains only sporadically analyzed. This, despite the multitude of political, military, and economic ties both Russia and Ukraine hold with WANA. This virtual talk […]