Lefteast
Note from LeftEast editors. This article is a report of the closing panel discussion of the multilingual ELMO series CEE housing movements resisting neoliberal urban transformations. All articles from the ELMO series, as well as the introduction, are available here in English. At the end of each English language article you can find links to CEE […]
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 […]
She posted this video in the chat room in the second week of the war. When Russia attacked, Ukraine closed its borders to those with “male passports.” When the general mobilization was announced, thousands of transwomen, transmen, and non-binary individuals were trapped. In the video, she, tired and dirty, happily reported that she had escaped. […]
On September 21, Putin announced “partial” mobilisation. What does it mean? Who are the most vulnerable to mobilisation? How does it affect civic infrastructures and women’s status? We asked a group of left activists, journalists, and sociologists from Russia, who have been running the anti-war media “Nevoina” (“Notowar”) since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Russia’s political capitalists waged war in order to survive as a class, to continue accumulating wealth through the exploitation of the state – says Volodymyr Ishchenko, a research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. – However, this war, depending on what happens on the battlefield, may equally bring about a fall or a radical transformation of the whole post-Soviet order. Interview by Małgorzata Kulbaczewska-Figat.
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 […]