Ukraine

Carl Mirra — A careful evaluation of recent history illustrates that the claim that US and NATO expansion threatens Moscow’s existence is an exaggeration. That Russia would inflate fears of NATO to pursue its global aspirations is understandable. What is less comprehensible is the degree to which influential Western thinkers, particularly on the anti-imperial US left, have promoted this narrative.

Renfrey Clarke and Dave Holmes — The fact that Russia is not part of the imperialist world has enormous implications for the way the conflict in Ukraine must be interpreted.

Michael Pröbsting — Since Kyiv is hardly in a position to pay for reconstruction and arms purchases, Western governments would like to cover their costs with Russian money. At the same time, efforts to identify and freeze sanctioned Russian oligarch money are also going slowly and so far, only a total of $22 billion has been identified. How can this be explained?

Daria Krivonos — The move to build solidarities and to seek connections between postsocialism and postcolonialism, Europe’s East and the “Global South”, has been unidirectional and has predominantly, if not exclusively, come from those located in the East of Europe.

David Finkel — For the international left, the Ukraine war and Palestine catastrophe, both on their own and together, pose very big tests of theory and more importantly, of politics.

Chelsea Ngoc Minh Nguyen — Ukraine’s civilizational and exclusionary approach has been self-constraining, self-defeating and even half-hearted in genuity when it comes to achieving a more respectable and broader appeal, support, and a sense of a shared struggle in many countries of the global south.

Michael Pröbsting — Politicians of Western governments never tire of asserting that aid from the US and EU for Ukraine is “unprecedented”.

Boris Kagarlitsky offers a courageous and politically indispensable take on the Russia-Ukraine war.

Klaus Dräger — The invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s army heralds a global ‘turning point’, so western pundits and politicians claim. How is the European Union (EU) dealing with this? And what about the EU’s aspirations to become a leading independent world power?

Pierre Rousset — The world that allowed the Chinese economy to take off and expand internationally is no more. Sino-American tensions are sharpening against the backdrop of the crisis of commercial (de)globalization.

Taras Bilous is a Ukrainian historian, an editor of Commons: Journal of Social Criticism, and an activist in Social Movement. He is currently serving in the Ukrainian army. He was interviewed by Stephen R. Shalom

Alexander Tushkin speaks to Sergiy Movchan, a left-wing activist and participant in the Marker Project tracking far-right violence in Ukraine, about Ukrainian nationalism, the far right and antifascists in the Ukrainian army, and how the war has affected their position in society.