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Mobilisation in Russia: a perspective from the Left

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.   […]

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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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Why Russia’s Political Capitalists Went to War – and How the War Could End Their Rule

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.

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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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The political logic of Russia’s imperialism

Volodymyr Artiukh presented this text at the conference ‘New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Capitalism’ in Budapest 26-27 May, organized by the Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission of Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology-IUAES in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, ‘Capitalism Nature Socialism’, ‘Focaal – Journal […]

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Ukrainian identity map in wartime: Thesis-antithesis-synthesis?

Denys Gorbach presented this text at the conference ‘New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Capitalism’ in Budapest 26-27 May, organized by the Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission of Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology-IUAES in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, ‘Capitalism Nature Socialism’, ‘Focaal – Journal […]

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Without shelter: housing policy in wartime

This article is part of the multilingual ELMO series CEE housing movements resisting neoliberal urban transformations and it originally appeared in English and Ukrainian on Spilne/Commons on 2nd April 2022. Translated from Ukrainian by Yuliia Kulish. “The realtor said that today there were more than 300 requests, with only 5 apartments successfully found.” “We searched all […]