(estimated reading time: 9 min)

• What do you tell a person who says occupation is just living under a different flag?

• What do you tell a leftist who can’t reconcile Lenin with empire?

• What do you tell anyone who still calls Eastern Europe russia’s backyard?

• Plus: a novelist who spent three decades decolonising Ukraine’s voice in the world, and an archive of Jewish life in Ukraine that survived a century of imperial erasure.

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Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

end the empire. upgrade.

By popular demand, and for anyone wanting an alternative to supporting this newsletter on Substack or Patreon. Subscribe via Buy Me Coffee.

THIS WEEK’S READING LIST:

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(estimated reading time: 10 min)

• Reading russian literature after 225,000+ war crimes committed by russians in Ukraine: Oksana Zabuzhko on the two centuries of great novels that taught a country to pity the criminal instead of condemning him.

• The parallels between indigenous resistance in North America and Ukraine.

• Qazaqstani economists tracked 811,000 export transactions and found that sanctioned microchips flow to russia from exactly the regions where Qazaqs speak russian at home.

• From pulling down minarets for the lead to bulldozing Crimean Tatar cemeteries for a highway: two Ukrainian historians expose the same erasure playbook russia has been using in Crimea for 250 years.

• The final stage of imperial erasure is when a place stops appearing in news reports. A Ukrainian colleague writes a personal essay from such a place, in the region I grew up in.

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Before we move on with a usual weekly reading list, here is a short personal message. It has been an especially dark week in Ukraine, facing extra russian evil. Gathering thoughts and energy to write this brief has not been easy for me, to be honest. However, every time you feel powerless, hear a Ukrainian speak. I want to share this clip of Kateryna from my native city, Zaporizhzhia: after surviving russian bombing, she still managed to send a very clear message to russian terrorists that their efforts are futile.

russia’s main objective, in all situations, is to paralyse our action - of any kind. So we feel too powerless or too disillusioned or too heartbroken or too angry or too confused to do anything. But here’s a simple fact: one cannot do everything, but everyone can do something. And that something, taken together, is what has kept russia from winning for almost five years. It is the same thing that paved the way for the largest failures of russian imperial expansion in the past, too.

So do something every day. If you don't know where to start today, supporting this frontline fundraiser for a friend would make a great choice. Vlad Solodovnyk is a brilliant marketing guru who recently enlisted in Ukraine’s Armed Forces to defend all of us living in democracies. (Bank wire or PayPal: vladyslav.solodovnyk @ gmail.com)

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

end the empire. upgrade.

By popular demand, and for anyone wanting an alternative to supporting this newsletter on Substack or Patreon. Subscribe via Buy Me Coffee.

For centuries, russia has hidden its dark imperialistic side behind a facade of romantic myths. Myths that paint it as a victim, a liberator, a misunderstood missionary. But what if the truth is much simpler? If you are in Prague on Monday, October 12th, stop by the legendary publishing house Laichter House for a special event on russian colonialism, featuring my lecture, a performance by Crimean-Tatar artist Aziza Eskender, and a conversation led by Ukrainian-Czech artist . Seats are limited, so register here.

THIS WEEK’S READING LIST:

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(estimated reading time: 12 min)

• A reader asks who actually documented the indigenous nations russia erased across the Arctic and North Asia, and whether the empire simply forbade anyone from trying.

• My answer is on an island at the end of the earth — and the two people who recorded it — not russians, and not foreigners either. The empire came for their work, too.

• In this week’s reading list — the Estonian school of North Asia research, a unique anthology on indigenous North Asia, a Scottish historian who called North Asia a colony in 1992, and the anti-colonial films about North Asia you can stream.

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RUSSIAN COLONIALISM INFO DESK.

In this space, my paid readers ask their questions about russian colonialism, request reading suggestions, or seek advice on where to look for insights and what to pay attention to. This week’s question comes from John:

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

end the empire. upgrade.

By popular demand, and for anyone wanting an alternative to supporting this newsletter on Substack or Patreon. Subscribe via Buy Me Coffee.

Dear John,

The record exists; other colonised people inside the same empire made it as an act of anti-colonial solidarity, and the West has never seen it because those documentarians were themselves subject to imperial erasure.

Let me share with you an example.

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(estimated reading time: 17 min)

• A talk with one of the most important anti-colonial voices of wartime Ukraine around her collection of essays, just published in English.

• Why some of the most insightful Ukrainian writing today isn’t about the battlefield at all — and how it can help the rest of us to survive what’s coming.

• Learn the origin story of russian imperialism that russia keeps setting on fire.

• How the world prefers victims who stay victims, and why Ukrainians refuse the role.

• Learn more about the unlikely fighters of the Ukrainian resistance and the lessons they offer for the survival of democracies elsewhere.

• The number of must-read Ukrainian writers we mention is just wow.

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Let me be perfectly honest from the start: nothing in this interview resembles impartial journalism. It is a conversation between a long-term fan and the person he considers a brilliant voice of his generation.

If you read this brief long enough, , the head of the INDEX Institute, is not a new name for you: her essays on decolonisation are at the top of my reading lists. For several years I have been begging her to put them into a book for a foreign audience. Finally, it is here. “Apocalypse Baroque” is finally out for your order. I was lucky to read an advance copy this summer — it moved me even more than I expected.

If you love reading me, I have no doubt that you will be wow-ed by Apocalypse Baroque. Still, I wanted to catch up with Sasha before her book tour so you can see a very special side of her and the context behind her writing, which will make your journey with this book even more meaningful and illuminating.

BY THE WAY, if you’d like a chance to work with Dovzhyk in Ukraine, her institute is running a prestigious literary residency in Lviv named after late Ukrainian writer and journalist Victoria Amelina. The topics of your work must relate to the causes, consequences and realities of the russian invasion of Ukraine. The application call is now open.

The interview will be open to everyone for free, and the reading list stays behind the paywall. If you like this conversation, please stop by a fundraiser I am supporting to empower Ukrainian heroes from the 3rd airborne assault battalion "Phoenix" of the 79th Air Assault Brigade with new frontline trucks. If you donate, you get a chance to get a signed copy of Russian Colonialism 101, among other cool things. Manufacturing imperial regret, with your help.

MAKSYM: Let’s start with the title. “Baroque” is a word many Ukrainian thinkers, writers, and artists are mentioning these days. We are referring to the era of the Ukrainian Baroque in the 18th century. Ukraine’s most celebrated living writer, Oksana Zabuzhko, likes to point out that it was perhaps Ukraine’s most distinctive contribution to European culture. But also a strain of the European Baroque that stopped at the Ukrainian border. russia has never experienced it. You yourself build the bridge between today and that era as our multi-generational existence between light and darkness. Why was it important to you to put Baroque right in your title?

SASHA: For me, the Ukrainian Baroque is an intense era in Ukrainian history and culture. We built a major centre of learning and art, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, where I also studied. It educated a brilliant generation of theologians, writers, and thinkers. Then they went to Moscow and helped shape the intellectual foundations of the russian empire. So russian imperialism has a Ukrainian origin story. russia has spent centuries trying to erase that legacy, including the destruction of Ukrainian Baroque architecture. Even today, during the invasion, Baroque churches are burning once again. The Baroque carries historical weight for me, but it also appeals to me aesthetically: the interplay of darkness and light is embedded in its very language.

MAKSYM: Wild, isn’t it? Ukrainians absorbed the impulse of the European Baroque era, developed it into something distinctly their own. And then turned it into the original sin of the russian empire by designing russian imperial mythology and culture. This brainchild of Ukrainian Baroque thinkers, like Theophan Prokopovych, Innocent Gizel, and Stefan Yavorsky, still lives on. Moreover, it tries to erase its origins, both literally burning the land and figuratively destroying its cultural blueprint. Because all of this tells us a story russia doesn’t want the rest of the world to know.

SASHA: Something important is buried there. A paradox that keeps haunting us. There’s also something about Ukrainian agency in this story, right? It’s not only us being a victim of this constant russian invasion and erasure. We are also shaped by our own choices. Well, at least by the choices of our ancestors.

MAKSYM: Speaking of the myths and the past, in this book you weave your favourite tales with the real-life stories you documented in wartime Ukraine. Every time I encounter references to Greek, Norse, or Biblical mythology in your work, it brings me so much joy because I see lots of Lesia Ukrainka in it. We both agree she is the most important Ukrainian writer ever to live, and she too turned to ancient European and Jewish mythologies. She was hardly alone. From Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko to Oksana Zabuzhko and Moisei Fishbein, generations of Ukrainian anti-colonial voices have found inspiration in these stories. What can a colonised (and modern post-colonial) culture say through these borrowed myths that is harder to say through its own, very ancient, I should add, material?

SASHA: There is power in old tropes, in taking a familiar vessel and filling it with new wine. When you use a symbol or story everyone recognises, such as Little Red Riding Hood, it speaks to readers immediately. But if you then subvert and reinvent it, the effect is even stronger. People react viscerally to stories from their childhood or formative years. I want Ukrainian stories to engage readers beyond Ukraine. So it’s a very conscious choice. At the same time, the book draws on Ukrainian tales as well. It is in the interplay between Western and Ukrainian narratives that the book’s subversion, in form, content, and style, becomes most effective.

MAKSYM: With this, you also do the same bridge-building that Lesia Ukrainka did when Ukraine was partitioned and occupied by empires. She was rebuilding the bridges between European and Ukrainian cultures, which, especially under a russian colonial occupation, were constantly burned. To present Ukraine as alien to the West, integral to the East.

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SASHA: Yes, and not only European tradition is appealing to me. For example, the Scheherazade tale from One Thousand and One Nights is one of my favourite characters I mention in the book: a woman who keeps telling tales to survive. She is particularly relevant in Ukraine today. At the moment we stop telling our story, we stop existing.

MAKSYM: This also strongly echoes the tradition of the Ukrainian avant-garde writers from a century ago. Especially the quero-futurists, like Mikhail Semenko: they embraced Ukraine's borderline state between Western and Eastern mythology, seeing its potential to revitalise the rest of Western culture. Returning to Ukrainian ancient mythology, my absolute favourite essay in the entire book is built around the Ukrainian tale of Kotyhoroshko (Rolling-Pea). He is a superhero short king who never yields to treacherous fate, always finds ingenious ways to survive and resist. And is often resented for it.

SASHA: The most bewildering part of the story, right? (Both laugh.)

MAKSYM: Absolutely bizarre. But you walk the extra mile, and, in your signature unapologetic vulnerable way, you connect this to your reflection on your own Jewish roots and to the way Holocaust survivors were often faced with public irritation. We were all raised on this tale, but we also always wondered why superhero Kotyhoroshko was hated by so many despite his exclusively good deeds.

SASHA: I’m surprised that anyone but me liked this story because I think it’s quite risky to mix Ukrainian and Jewish stories of survival. Many don’t like the comparison. However, I just went straight into it.

The scholar who first helped me make Kotyhoroshko make sense was Volodymyr Dibrova. In his collection Retellings, he writes about how Kotyhoroshko encounters hostility from almost everyone around him, including his own family. Dibrova explains that Kotyhoroshko embodies the miraculous. People struggle to stand before a miracle. The miracle is blinding. The miracle does not accept transactional logic. Kotyhoroshko acts according to higher laws, exposing the shortcomings of those around him, especially their inability to stand up for freedom. People who sacrifice so much for freedom set an inexcusably high standard for others.

Perhaps this also helps explain why Ukrainians cannot always rely on the support of their neighbours and allies. I was writing this story in 2025, during one of the darkest moments of russia’s war against Ukraine. It was around the time of President Zelenskyy’s horrible, scandalous meeting with Trump in the Oval Office. It was offensive. Whatever one’s view of Zelenskyy, he represented the entire Ukrainian nation that day. Retelling the Kotyhoroshko story became my way of making sense of that moment.

MAKSYM: Zelenskyy is also a short king, right? (Both laugh.) And also a Jewish Ukrainian person sitting in there, being lectured about gratitude and what is feasible and not feasible in the fight for survival. This is still little known abroad, but the mix and intertwining of Jewish and Ukrainian culture on Ukrainian territory has been going on for centuries. At the break of the 19th and 20th centuries, a third of all Jewish people lived on the territory of modern-day Ukraine. Many Jewish cultural figures found their home in Ukrainianness. Hrytsko Kernerenko, Raisa Troyanker, Leonid Prevomaiskyi, Alex Averbuch. Ukrainian scholars Myroslav Shkandrij and Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern wrote wonderful books about it. But you mentioned earlier that some people might not be comfortable with others being exposed to this nexus, which you are also trying to figure out for yourself. Both in your writing and in your identity-finding quest as someone with Jewish roots. Why do you think it’s uncomfortable? Where do you think this tension comes from, and why?

SASHA: I bring up the Holocaust in a tale about Ukraine not to compare tragedies, but to think about survival and what it demands of those who witness it. The Jewish survivors of the Holocaust are a miracle because they were not supposed to survive. Yet, here they are. That makes the rest who witnessed the massacre uncomfortable, right? We can sort of understand this logic even when we think about the current massacre in Ukraine. We often prefer victims who remain victims, whose suffering can be mourned at a safe distance. Ukrainians are inconvenient precisely because they have refused that role. It would be easier for many outside observers if Ukraine simply succumbed to the slaughter.

Instead, Ukrainian resistance, and the defence mounted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, keeps asking this open question of the world: how do you sit alongside a people who are still being hunted, yet insist on surviving?

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MAKSYM: I’m grateful that you also introduced us in this book to the stories of those Ukrainian fighters rejecting the helpless victim narrative. For example, in the Bookman/Swordsman chapter, you tell the story of Vitalii Pyvovarov, a librarian who joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine and was killed defending us. You say he didn't fit the conventional idea of a warrior. I always think about this gap between what a modern war for freedom really looks like and what the rest of the Free World expects it to look like. Many in other democracies still struggle with the idea that a civilian librarian takes up arms. But the democratic survival over the next decade will require exactly this kind of total defence and the mobilisation of everyone’s skills. Pyvovarov’s loved ones explain his decision to mobilise as an inability to stand aside in the face of injustice. Is that explanation complete, do you think?

SASHA: I simply do not know. I never met the man who died defending me. I can only reconstruct him through photographs and through what others tell me. At the centre of the story is an irreducible absence: the person himself is gone. The accounts I hear from his relatives and friends are, understandably, incomplete and sometimes contradictory. They cannot bridge that gap. When you hear “librarian,” you do not imagine a stereotypical macho: someone bookish, perhaps wearing glasses, not carrying a machine gun. Whether he just couldn’t tolerate the injustice? I guess this is the only explanation I can rely on. This is what his relatives tell me and tell themselves. For me, the absence of a person and of an answer to your question is what moves this story forward. That compels me to write it down.

MAKSYM: We know so many of such unlikely heroes fighting in Ukraine today. Many would tell you about the personal responsibility they feel to defend their homes and their freedoms. When the existential test comes, it isn’t someone else’s professional job to defend it. Everybody has to mobilise. Doesn’t mean everyone ends up in a trench, but everybody has to contribute something daily. And you do feature others, your friends or former colleagues who now resist russian imperialism with arms. One essay portrays Yan, your schoolmate who now serves, whom you also see as a living Cossack Mamay - a semi-fictional fighter from another era of the Ukrainian fight for independence. By the way, I don't know how many handsome Yans our shared home city, Zaporizhzhia, birthed, but I also had a classmate Yan heading our school gang.

SASHA: Also a hooligan?

MAKSYM: Yes, but not the same Yan; I checked (both laugh). How widely do Ukrainians, and soldiers in particular, feel this continuity between generations of anti-colonial resistance? Do they consciously claim it, or is it something writers see in them?

SASHA: I try very hard not to put my own words into my characters’ mouths. In Yan’s case, that’s easy because I did not invent the Mamay comparison; he chose that call sign himself. He consciously fashions himself after a Cossack, wearing an oseledets (a traditional Ukrainian male hairstyle featuring a long lock of hair sprouting from the top or the front of an otherwise closely shaven head - ed.) and a Cossack moustache. Before the full-scale invasion, he worked as an actor in a Cossack reenactment theatre. He clearly sees himself as part of that tradition of resistance and rebelliousness. What matters about Cossack Mamay is that he is not only a warrior but also a storyteller, preserving the memory of Cossack glory. Yan eventually joined the cultural forces within Ukraine’s Armed Forces and became one of the people carrying that tradition forward. And now he’s one of the guys who is singing Ukrainian songs. Well, in his case, it’s not singing; it’s rapping. His work connects the past and present of the Ukrainian resistance. One recent track I heard was about Hetman Mazepa. So here we have another reference to Ukrainian Baroque tradition.

MAKSYM: Hetman Mazepa, basically the father of the Ukrainian Baroque. Tried, but failed, to end Russian colonial control over Ukraine in the early 18th century, and for that russian churches for centuries put his name as anathema, mentioning him in one breath with Antichrist in their liturgies.

SASHA: In russia he is the worst sinner, betraying Moscow. In Ukraine, he is the state builder to whom we are grateful for so many institutions and so much of our cultural heritage. And then in the West he is this mythologised figure featured as this orientalized duke riding a horse through endless steppes, completely wild, having amazing adventures, but also presenting something not quite rational.

MAKSYM: Which is probably the same Western characterisation that Ukrainian fighters, like Yan, would face still today.

SASHA: Precisely.

MAKSYM: We often tell each other it feels like we are living in a warped reality. Seeing the past, present, and future at the same time. All intertwined into stories told centuries ago, yet also happening with us today. You close your book with “we tell a tale, we persevere.” Many Ukrainian writers, me included, live with the same doubt: that storytelling fails us and that taking up arms or building drones - or helping those building drones, like in my case - is a much better way to deploy our talents amid this apocalypse. Where does storytelling sit in this anti-colonial resistance? You are publishing a book, so you still believe in it, but what do you do when you feel it is insufficient?

SASHA: I believe culture is a matter of national security, second only to armed defence itself. One reason russia’s war against Ukraine, beginning in 2014, was so easily ignored abroad is that Ukraine barely existed on the global mental map. There were few cultural associations, few points of reference. Ukraine was a big unknown. After 2022, Ukraine forced its way onto that map through the heroism of those who chose to fight. This was the miracle we spoke about: the world could no longer ignore a nation willing to defend its survival at such cost. But imagine if people had encountered Ukraine much earlier. If they had read Lesia Ukrainka in school, seen Ukrainian plays in their theatres, or grown up watching Ukrainian films. Those experiences would have created an emotional connection and made Ukraine harder to dismiss as a country destined to fall in three days. They would have recognised Ukraine's multi-century tradition of resistance, expected us to resist, and supported us in a more meaningful way.

This is why I want to mention Victoria Amelina. She is a Ukrainian novelist who, at the start of the full-scale invasion, decides that storytelling has failed her. So she becomes a war-crimes investigator, documenting russia’s atrocities. Yet she could not abandon writing. The result was Looking at Women Looking at War, published posthumously after she was killed in a russian missile strike on Kramatorsk in 2023. The book continues her struggle for justice. It is read around the world, including in parliaments, moves people deeply, and is receiving prizes. I know it will remain on this bookshelf for decades to come - if the world survives for a number of decades. I know it will be read, and I know it will be carrying the story of Ukraine forward. Hopefully it will be one of those nails that anchor us on the mental map of the world. That will also help us not to disappear.

MAKSYM: Recently, I find myself always starting and ending my conversations with something from Oksana Zabuzhko. And I love it. But she has been repeating since 2022 that the only way any culture remains viable is if actual armed forces back it up. Take any culture universally cited worldwide: it's from a nation or state that had enough military power to survive and defend itself long enough. Lastly, let me ask you about the afterword. It is happening to Zaporizhzhia, the city where we both grew up, and which you see again after years of war. You describe that return through Freud’s 1919 essay and the German word “unheimlich”, the unhomely: “the doppelgänger shock of seeing your double, the double of the home city that raised you, in which everything is familiar yet slightly at odds with your memory because everything is touched by the proximity of death and forever loss”. I also believe our Zaporizhzhia tells a story central to understanding what this war is trying to erase.

SASHA: I think probably every good story is the homecoming story, right?

MAKSYM: Hell, yeah.

SASHA: Here at INDEX, where I serve as director, our central theme this year was “home.” It resonated deeply because so many Ukrainians have lost theirs. Even for those whose homes are still standing, something has been ruptured. The proximity of death and loss has touched everyone. We are all searching for a home that we will never find exactly as we left it. So we look for home elsewhere, right? In other people, in our work, in our communities. In that sense, the journey that you, I, and many Eastern Ukrainian kids of our generation have taken- the effort to decolonise our upbringing and rediscover our roots- is also a homecoming story. We are returning not to a place, but to an idea of home we are trying to build for ourselves, one beyond the reach of empire.

That is why Zaporizhzhia matters so much to both of us. It stands at the forefront of Ukraine’s fight and has undergone profound transformations during the war. It is also a place of miracles. The boys and girls we grew up with became the people who made the miracle of Ukrainian resistance possible. Nobody expected them to resist, including me. And yet, because of their resistance, I’m still alive.

So yeah, I had to go to Zaporizhzhia to look for these answers. There I encountered another kind of homecoming: seeing the aftermath of the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam. The receding water, the altered banks of the Dnipro, the transformed landscape - that is not the Dnipro that you and I remember. Zaporizhzhia ultimately poses a larger question: what kind of home do we want to rebuild? Do we simply recreate the homeland shaped by generations of imperial or modernisation projects, or do we imagine something new?

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

end the empire. upgrade.

By popular demand, and for anyone wanting an alternative to supporting this newsletter on Substack or Patreon. Subscribe via Buy Me Coffee.

THIS WEEK’S READING LIST:

This week’s suggestions connect to the interview with Dr Sasha Dovzhyk, so you can explore the Ukrainian context orbiting her work and all the many references we dropped:

• Dovzhyk shared her own top-10 list of Ukrainian books translated into English that she recommends: it includes the classics, jewels from the Ukrainian Renaissance, and great examples of the new Ukrainian wartime generation of writers by Kateryna Zarembo, Artem Chapeye, and Artur Dron.

To explore the world of the Ukrainian Baroque:

• Explore more: How Ukrainian Baroque was formed and flourished during the times of the Cossacks.

• Watch more: Maria Viksnina and her torban, a rare Ukrainian Baroque instrument on its way into classical music.

• Listen more: Ukrainian Baroque: Concordacii Animos. Re-recorded works by Mykola Dyletsky and anonymous Ukrainian composers from the early 18th century.

• Read more: about Hryhorii Skovoroda, the towering figure of the Ukrainian Baroque. Catching an Elusive Bird by Leonid Ushkalov and Precursor by Vasyl Shevchuk.

To explore the translated Ukrainian classics who wrote at the nexus of European and Ukrainian mythology:

• Read more: Cassandra by Lesia Ukrainka, Kobzar by Taras Shevchenko (in the Peter Fedynsky translation), Moses by Ivan Franko, Moses, a ballet performance based on Franko’s poem, Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabuzhko, Six Translated Poems by Moisei Fishbein, Ukrainian Futurism by Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj and Ukrainian Futurism: Re-Appropriating the Imperial Legacy by Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj.

To explore the world of Jewish-Ukrainian literature, from the past to today:

• Read more: Jews in Ukrainian Literature by Myroslav Shkandrij, Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Furious Harvests by Alex Averbuch.

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This is all, folks.

Meanwhile, if you have a follow-up question, an issue for me to investigate, or an interesting lead to share, just stop by our group chat, okay?

Thank you for your support.

The empire will fall.

m.

YOU MIGHT FIND THIS INTERESTING, TOO:

(estimated reading time: 9 min)

• The anti-colonial legacy of a murdered Ukrainian reporter that shaped me who I am today and how his work from 25 years ago explains threats to our democracies beyond Ukraine more than you’d expect.

• Three days in Almaty in December 1986 that cracked the Soviet empire three years before the fall of the Berlin wall and their often underreported anti-colonial nature.

• Moscow switched the Qazaq script twice in a decade to make it look like russian. But now treats Qazaqstan switching back as an act of aggression.

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The year they murdered Georgiy Gongadze, I decided to become a journalist.

He was an enigma for my generation of kids growing up in 1990s Ukraine: young, handsome and a badass reporter. Unapologetically patriotic, too, which was still counterculture in a country that had restored independence after seventy years of russian colonial occupation, but hadn’t even started decolonising yet. Plus, like me, he was Ukrainian with Georgian roots. He was my icon.

Then, he disappeared on 16 September 2000, aged 31, months after founding Ukraïnska Pravda — a newsroom that has been a pillar of Ukrainian democracy ever since. (Which is why working with them on the Russian Colonialism 101 audio show was quite an honour for me.) On 2 November, a man walking in the Tarashcha forest outside Kyiv found a headless body. Ukraine’s ruling elites at the time ordered his murder. One likely assassination organiser, Ukraine’s former interior minister, killed himself and four more were imprisoned. Yet no one has yet been charged with giving the order.

Gongadze’s murder remains one of the most traumatic events in modern Ukrainian history. It also launched a powerful public pushback that eventually resulted in the pro-democracy Orange Revolution in 2004 - the first revolution I participated in.

So when my dad learned I wanted to go into journalism because of Gongadze, he gasped: “Why would you want to end up like him?!”

It felt to me like if kids my age start being scared of becoming journalists, the tyranny wins. It is okay to be scared. It is not okay to let fear rule you. Teenage rebellion, generational Ukrainian stubbornness over freedom, whatever it was — I followed his example and never regretted it.

ONE JOURNALIST, FOUR IMPERIAL EDGES.

But there’s one more perspective on his legacy I started recognising only later: Georgiy Gongadze is also a fallen anti-colonial hero in a multi-generational line of so many Ukrainians who sacrificed everything for our freedom and democracy.

In 1987 he enrolled at the Tbilisi State Institute of Foreign Languages and was conscripted that same year into the Soviet army and sent to Afghanistan. He watched an illegal colonial invasion collapse from inside, wearing the occupier’s uniform, at eighteen.

When he came home in 1989, he walked straight into the next colonial crime: the Kremlin drowning in blood anti-colonial protests in Tbilisi with shovels and gas, killing twenty-one, most of them women.

Then Lviv in Ukraine in 1989, his mother’s hometown, where the third front found him. In his own words:

Gongadze chose a colonised identity and joined Ukraine’s fight for restoring independence. Waiving banned Ukrainian flags and singing banned Ukrainian national songs, getting harassed and attacked by the occupation authorities. His reporting on the collapse of russian colonial occupation in Ukraine shaped how we remember the heroes who ensured it happened.

Then the fourth edge came: Sakartvelo again. When moscow fueled and financed a civil war in his second home, Gongadze went back, kept reporting, and took up arms to defend the freedom that lets journalism exist at all.

All of it before he was 25.

WHY GONGADZE LEGACY MATTERS TODAY. BEYOND UKRAINE, TOO.

In many ways, Gongadze’s investigative reporting in the 1990s also exposed the Kremlin's attempts to rebuild its grip on Ukraine by corrupting and blackmailing Ukrainian economic, political, and cultural elites—testing the playbook russia would later deploy elsewhere in the West, including in modern-day America. Not tanks. No shots fired. Shady bank accounts, kompromat, voter manipulation and cognitive influence campaigns.

Today another generation of Ukrainian journalists report on and fight the same russian colonial crimes and tactics that Gongadze resisted. His legacy keeps inspiring them, too.

Thousands of my Ukrainian colleagues serve in Ukraine’s Armed Forces and defend their freedom of speech with arms. Like Gongadze did. At least 126 of them have been killed by russians while on this duty. An image of a journalist fighting imperialism and defending their right to report with a gun or drone still reads as shocking to democracies outside Ukraine. Yet, it a worrying reminder how many of us still take peace and our freedoms for granted, thinking that their defence is someone else’s job.

Thousands more of Ukrainian journalists are carrying on Gongadze's legacy by risking their lives daily and keep documenting the worst evil Europe has seen since the Holocaust. russians killed at least 8 Ukrainian journalists for doing their job and committed 971 documented crimes against Ukrainian media since 2022. Yet international aid for Ukrainian journalists has nearly dried up, exposing a harrowing lack of realisation of how crucial the Ukrainian frontline reporting and the work of Ukrainian journalists have been to European defences.

Whether kinetic or cognitive, the majority of attacks and tactics that russia is using against the West today have been tested on Ukraine first. Gongadze documented it, too: if you dig deeper into his work from 25 years ago, it is shockingly prophetic.

So when someone tells me that Ukrainian frontline reporting is a humanitarian charity case, I push back by reminding them that it is actually the oldest continuous field research on the resurging imperialism and how it can overwhelm any democracy. My problem is that some have benefited from these findings for free, and most haven't read them at all.

The Georgiy Gongadze Prize exists to keep those findings in circulation.

Thank you, Georgiy, for inspiring generations of people like me to never give up on freedom and democracy. To never give up on Ukraine.

MUST-WATCH:

• The Murder of Gongadze: 20 Years of Searching for the Truth. A documentary by Ukrainian investigative journalists on how Gongadze’s work and his murder became a turning point in the struggle of Ukrainian society for its democracy.

• The Shadows of War. Gongadze’s war documentary about the russian imperial invasion of Sakartvelo-Georgia in 1993 (use auto-translated subtitles)

MUST-READS:

• Georgiy Gongadze memorial page, documenting his life and work through memories of his family members, friends and colleagues.

• Defend and Remember the Storytellers. A 2024 essay by Gongadze’s daughter, a Ukrainian journalist, Nana Gongadze.

• The last morning. In memory of Georgiy Gongadze. A 2023 essay by Gongadze’s spouse and a Ukrainian-American journalist, Myroslava Gongadze.

• The truth is hard to accept. In memory of Georgiy Gongadze. A 2023 essay by Sevgil Musaeva, editor-in-chief of Ukraïnska Pravda.

• Gongadze’s quotes come from a Ukraïnska Pravda profile, done in collaboration with his family and The Georgiy Gongadze Prize.

MUST-FOLLOW: Ukrainian frontline newsrooms reporting in English:

• Ukraïnska Pravda

• United 24 Media

• Frontliner

• Mezha

• Vgoru, a frontline newsroom from Kherson

• Gwara and Nakypilo, from frontline Kharkiv

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

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THIS WEEK’S READING LIST:

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(estimated reading time: 6 min)

• The Soviet Union was Hitler’s most useful partner before 1941, so the empire built a story where Ukrainians were the collaborators. This week’s featured book has the numbers and fact-checks the alleged war crimes of the 25,000 Ukrainians drafted into the Waffen-SS “Galicia” Division. Let Ukrainians account for themselves.

• The Holodomor genocide left no landscape to point at, so two artists found the evidence somewhere the empire never thought to look: their own kitchen.

• A Ukrainian historian in 2000 laid out the exact mechanism russia would use to justify recolonising Crimea — and how Leo Tolstoy helped build it. The West filed it under history rather than warning. Now the historian tops every reading list abroad.

• What does garbage left by russians in their overseas colonies in North America tell us about their failed 83-year-long attempt to colonise it?

• Colonised indigenous people drafted by the Kremlin to kill Ukrainians: helpless victims or barbaric mercenaries? A sober and data-driven look by a Japanese researcher suggests neither. But it also doesn't expect much resistance. Yet.

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Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

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THIS WEEK’S READING LIST:

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(estimated reading time: 6 min)

• Every week I remind you what this brief is for: navigating our present and future. This week, a live demonstration — on the newest surge of alarmist Western coverage about a “cornered” Putin.

• The three times in history a cornered russia actually had to back down. Two of them ended with the Kremlin calling for peace talks.

• The lever that moves ordinary russians harder than sanctions do.

• How in 1993 and 1994 the Baltic states forced russian imperial troops to roll away.

“Cornered, Vladimir Putin plans to escalate his war.” “The risk of Russian sabotage in Europe: a fight that spirals out of control.” “Putin is desperate. But that’s when he’s at his most dangerous.” “Putin is in a corner. He may need to attack NATO.”

If you are outside Ukraine and have been reading the news, you might have already noticed a surge in such headlines.

Is it connected to the Kremlin’s war machine taking heavier blows from Ukrainian mid-range and deep strikes? Knowing russian cognitive warfare, I do not believe in coincidence. I won’t speculate either. But this coverage is alarmist and fear-peddling, and its premise is that a cornered Putin is about to lash out — as if five years of massacring Ukrainians were not escalation enough.

But here’s where this kind of coverage clashes with everything we know about the nature of russian imperial warfare.

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Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

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(estimated reading time: 6 min)

• Why russian warfare isn't a logical strategy. It's a 500-year messianic neurosis — and the interview that maps it out.

• The Ukrainian Marxist Lenin personally despised. Dead at 36, erased by the Kremlin, and still the sharpest takedown of russian communist imperialism ever written.

• The Qazaq anti-colonial novel the Kremlin buried for 60 years. It resurfaced from the personal archive of the man who killed its author.

• The Kazym War: one of the largest anti-colonial uprisings against russia in North Asian history, yet most people abroad have never heard of it. (There's a reason for that.)

• A 1941 Holocaust massacre in Ivano-Frankivsk, next to the genocide Ukraine is living through right now. Ukrainian wartime artists refuse to let one memory bury the other — and what does it have to do with decolonisation.

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Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

end the empire. upgrade.

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THIS WEEK’S READING LIST:

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(estimated reading time: 8 min)

• “Ukraine only wants what we wanted at the time. They want to determine their own path. Russia hasn’t changed since then –the country has a different name, but its foreign policy and its values are the same.”

• Volhynia memory wars. OUN and UPA get exactly two verdicts in today's Poland-Ukraine spat: guilty war criminals, or legendary anti-colonial heroes. And russian cognitive warfare thrives on this polarisation. One historian spent decades proving both black-and-white readings wrong.

• The single read on Ukrainian nationalism I'd hand anyone trying to understand how a colonised nation builds the ideology to fight back — Bandera doesn't even appear in it, and that's the point.

• Queerness and Ukrainian decolonisation. Why one of my favourite Ukrainian writers argues that equal rights for gay Ukrainians is an urgent item on the Ukrainian survival to-do list.

• What is “apocalyptic unlearning” — and how the story of Ukraine’s second-largest city finding its authentic voice teaches us to steer through the turbulent future ahead.

For twenty years, ever since Moscow helped the pro-russian parties in Czechoslovakia to steal the 1948 election and set up a tyrannical satellite regime, imperial russia has continued to tell the Czechs that so long as they cut themselves off from the rest of the West there will be no threat of russian tanks rolling down their streets. So long as they allow the Kremlin to control their foreign policy, their defence and their economy. So long as they always regard russian culture and russia as superior.

But “peace” next to an “empire” is an oxymoron. Empires expand, or they die. Czechs learnt the value of a russian word on the night between the 20th and 21st of August, 1968, as over 250,000 russian imperial troops crossed into their country.

As in Ukraine in 2022, few Czechs and Slovaks (who shared a state at the time) met the imperial invasion without resistance. Oftentimes unarmed, people would stop imperial tanks with their own bodies or homemade Molotovs. Czech and Slovak cities were plastered with graffiti and banners demanding that russian imperial troops go back home.

Among those anti-colonial resistance heroes was Bartolomej Horváth. A 21-year-old Romani Slovak, he was working at a construction site in downtown Košice when russian imperial tanks started rolling down the streets of his city around 1100 in the morning on 21 August. Horváth ran out from his work site and crawled onto one of the russian tanks. With his shovel, he was trying to break the glass of its periscope. An invading soldier then came out of the tank and fired a machine gun at Horváth. People took him to the hospital, where he fought for his life for another two weeks, but died from his injuries on 11 September 1968. No surviving picture of Horváth exists.

At least 137 Czechs and Slovaks were killed fighting russian invaders in the following days and months.

Unfortunately, Czechoslovak sovereignty was already too far gone by then. Having no arms or resources to face half a million well-armed invaders, the people saw their resistance crushed by the empire. The Kremlin smeared the uprising as russophobic, financed by the West and painted the Czechs and Slovaks as the nations desperate for liberation by their ‘big brother.’

These pictures of Czech and Slovak cities of 1968 look eerily similar to what russians are doing to other European cities in Ukraine today. Because what is happening today has happened many times before. Since russian imperialism has never been punished for any of this, today it keeps destroying more European cities.

While I am writing this, I am literally forced to stop and start over and over again because I am checking on the scale of destruction from the latest 24-hour wave of non-stop bombing of Zaporizhzhia, the city where I grew up. russian missiles, bombs and kamikaze drones keep raining down on Ukraine as I am trying to tell you a story of another russian invasion from 48 years ago.

Balabino, a suburb of Zaporizhzhia, on the morning of August 22nd, 2026, after an attack by several russian guided bombs.

The parallels are not lost on modern-day Czechs, either. In his 2023 speech honouring the memory of the fallen citizens in the 1968 uprising, Czech President Petr Pavel warned that nobody should have illusions that Ukrainians of today fight the identical imperial evil Czechs fought in 1968:

Here’s what’s practical about all this: you now know exactly what russian “peace” is. Disarm. Isolate. Renounce your dignity. Mute your own culture. All of it, if you even have a chance to survive in the first place. Czechoslovakia did that for twenty years and got invaded anyway. Whatever Moscow calls a peace plan for Ukraine this year sounds more like the same: disarm, isolate, and go quiet in exchange for “safety”. Ukrainians know better than to trust these 500-year-old lies. Do you think the rest of us are ready to learn the same lesson before it is too late?

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Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

end the empire. upgrade.

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THIS WEEK’S READING LIST:

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(estimated reading time: 11 min)

• How a 1926 assassination manufactured “Ukrainians are fascist” — and what this trope was built to erase.

• A Ukrainian currency printed in Yiddish. A Jewish poet who chose a banned Ukrainian. Lesia Ukrainka writing Babylonian captivity as russian occupation. The centuries of Ukrainian-Jewish cultural and national entanglement that the “Ukrainians are Nazis” trope was designed to make unimaginable.

• This week’s must-read: Myroslav Shkandrij’s Jews in Ukrainian Literature, a treasure trove for discovering Ukrainian literature from one of the least-known yet most rewarding angles.

• How to attack the “Ukrainians are Nazis” trope without flinching, but honestly: the sources, names and stories that let you do it. Useful for anyone who has been ambushed with it and had nothing ready.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

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Around a century ago, Ukraine was home to a third of all Jews.

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(estimated reading time: 7 min)

• From 19th-century bans to burning 1.5 million Ukrainian books in the last month alone, russian warfare recognises the power of a Ukrainian book better than most people abroad. Plus, new titles to update your Ukrainian anti-colonial bookshelf at home with.

• The Greek names on every map of Crimea and southern Ukraine aren't ancient history — they're imperial camouflage. Learn the indigenous towns russia erased underneath them.

• Why Algeria isn't expected to celebrate Camus and Ireland doesn't statue Spenser — but Kyiv gets called "authoritarian" for taking down a russian supremacist novelist.

• The invisible "filter" every Ukrainian-born scholar has to clear that no British historian writing about Britain ever will. And reading suggestions for lesser-known but no less brilliant Ukrainian historians who wrote in English - from the most celebrated historian of Ukraine.

UPDATE: after I hit publish, the next day russians attacked another publishing warehouse in Kharkiv, burning down 8 million more Ukrainian books. One of the worst attacks on Ukrainian books since 2022.

*****

Did you know that in July 2026 alone, russians destroyed over 1.5 million Ukrainian books? This is according to the latest data by the Ukrainian Book Institute. During the July 19th attack alone, they burnt 250,000 copies and destroyed yet another printing house in Ukraine.

Libraries, printing presses, and publishers' warehouses have remained targets of russian strikes since 2022. We do not know the exact number of Ukrainian books turned to ashes by russians since 2022, but various estimates run from 200 million in 2024 to over 350 million today.

Can you imagine how many books 350 million are? I cannot.

But I looked for comparisons. Turns out it amounts to a 4-year's worth of Ukrainian pre-war book printing output. If compared to how much books Ukraine printed last year, during a war, then just this July russians turned to ashes 5% of that.

Here’s another one. The world’s largest library, the British Library, has a catalogue of around 200 million books. In four years, russians destroyed the equivalent of almost two of the largest libraries on the planet.

Since the russian colonisation of Ukraine in the 17th century, book printing in Ukrainian has been subject to non-stop bans or restrictions. This month, on July 30th, 163 years ago, russia enacted one of them, the Valuev Circular, that banned most publications in the so-called "Little Russian" (Ukrainian) language. There were several after that in the 19th and 20th centuries.

But even after the end of russian occupation, the Kremlin aggressively flooded Ukraine with russian books, making Ukrainian-language books too expensive to print. For example, back in the late 1990s, russian agents in the Ukrainian parliament would legislate the highest tax on book publishing in the world - simultaneously with russia dropping any taxes on russian books altogether. What would it mean in practice? For me, as a kid growing up in independent Ukraine, it was a quest to find a Ukrainian-language book in a store or in a library. But a bigger challenge was to afford it.

The russian war on Ukrainian books never stopped, even if the occupation did.

Only after 2014 did Ukraine stop reacting to russian “that’s russophobia!” bullying against any law supporting Ukrainian-language books. Imagine France attacking Algerian state support for printing books in the official state language as ‘nationalistic.’ Or the UK economically blackmailing Ireland for funding book printing in Gaeilge. Yet, russia doing the same to its neighbours for the last 30 years? Crickets.

IF YOU WISH TO LEARN MORE ABOUT WHY A UKRAINIAN BOOK IS AN ANTI-COLONIAL ACT OF RESISTANCE, HOW TO EMPOWER IT AND ACCESS THIS WEEK’S READING LIST, PLEASE UPGRADE BEHIND THE PAYWALL.

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Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

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(estimated reading time: 5 min)

• What do Odesa and New Orleans have in common? More than you'd ever guess — two ports, two empires, one colonial machine. Oh, and lots of shared slavery insights that russia would hate for you to find out.

• How do you win the argument that "russia's empire was different from the real colonial ones"? One word from Central Asia can help.

• If Russia had no colonial ministry, as many other Western colonial empires did, was it even an empire? The absence is the answer.

• An amazing new project will help you to decolonise your bookshelf and keep being updated on the latest English translations of Ukrainian books.

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Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

end the empire. upgrade.

By popular demand, and for anyone wanting an alternative to supporting this newsletter on Substack or Patreon. Subscribe via Buy Me Coffee.

THIS WEEK’S READING LIST:

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(estimated reading time: 6 min)

And in this week’s reading list:

• Aqmescit. Aquar. Learn to spell Crimean cities right — it's the cheapest way to ruin a russian's day.

• Two governments in Central Asia declared freedom from imperial russia in the same winter of 1917. Moscow buried one with guns, bought the other with the same kind of lies it peddles today in Ukraine.

• A 1918 footage from Kyiv, eerily similar to what you see in 2026 - a century-old reminder of what russian occupation does to a city.

• Every real reform imperial russia has ever made came after losing a war.

• "Novorossiya" or "New Russia" was never a place. It was a recruitment poster for settler colonialism — and the land was never empty to begin with.

• Back in 1917, the Kremlin rebranded itself as an anti-colonial champion and promised every colonised nation the right to secede. The bait was real, by law. But the pen stayed with the russian settlers, not the people leaving.

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Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

end the empire. upgrade.

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THIS WEEK’S READING LIST:

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here is what's in store for you this week:

(estimated reading time: 8 min)

This week’s story:

• The harshest homophobic slur in my language isn't indigenous. It's an imperial prison-camp export russia still ships as "traditional values" — to prepare the ground before the imperial troops arrive.

And in this week’s reading list:

• An empire drained an entire sea to grow "white gold" — then wrote cotton into Uzbek schoolbooks, art and memory so the people would mourn the water without naming who took it.

• A man couldn't order coffee in Qazaq in his own capital, posted about it, and lit a national reckoning — proof that decolonisation in Qazaqstan runs not through laws but through the resistance of ordinary people.

• Soviet "indigenisation" of Crimea-Qirim looked like empowerment and worked like a census — Moscow counted the natives' strength precisely so it could erase their existence later.

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This weekend, Ukraine did something remarkable. While air defences were shooting down russian suicide drones over Kyiv, thousands still marched defiantly for equality — the largest civil‑rights demonstration since the full‑scale invasion began. Queer soldiers and veterans led Kyiv Pride, carrying the names and faces of Ukrainian heroes killed fighting a homophobic empire. Similar marches had already taken place in Lviv, Kharkiv, and Odesa.

What also struck me was how both Ukrainian fringe groups and russians online reached for the same slurs. I’ve known this since childhood: if you want to truly insult someone, you switch to russian — especially for homophobic slurs. Ukrainian speakers do it too. Even as the language of colonial occupation fades in Ukraine, its ugliest vocabulary still does the work.

The Ukrainian language has no shortage of swearing. It can be filthy and wildly inventive, with old traditions in doing so. But our curses never run on sexual abuse, and they don’t run on hating queerness. For that, you borrow.

It never once crossed my mind to ask why. The most violent thing I could say to someone came pre‑installed in another language. Someone else engineered it that way — and not just for Ukrainians.

Want to find out more? Empower my work and skip the paywall below.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

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Read more

here is what's in store for you this week:

(estimated reading time: 7 min)

This week’s story:

• A Kyiv florist now runs a women-led drone factory. Europe's legacy arms makers refuse to take her seriously — and she stands in a long line of women empires never seen coming, from Kateryna Zaretska of Ukraine to Queen Nzinga of Angola.

And in this week’s reading list:

• The couriers, nurses, organisers and armed fighters who built Ukraine's anti-colonial underground from the 1930s to the 1960s.

• In 1916, Central Asia rose up in the largest anti-colonial uprising the russian empire ever faced. Most of the world has never heard of it. That is not an accident.

• From the bachi of Turkestan to the "effeminate Bengali," empires built their authority by deciding which men counted as men, and Soviet homophobia ran the same script as British colonial masculinity.

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If russia did not exist, Kseniia Kalmus would keep living her dream life as an award-winning florist. Before 2022, she had a thriving floral studio in Kyiv. Today, she uses the same premises for a small drone assembly line. It started as a non-profit workshop to help friends and family fighting on the frontline, and now shipped over a thousand flying robots to fight imperial russia. Women-founded, women-led, women-engineered: Klyn Drones is a donations-powered factory that trains hundreds of volunteers to assemble affordable drones using 100% Ukrainian components (you can power them up: klyn.io/donations).

A news report by an American journalist, Jackie Koppell.

Over three years, Ukrainian anti-colonial resistance maximised such decentralised, citizen-powered networks to launch a defence revolution and rewrite the economics of modern war. These days, a drone worth several hundred euros can disable a tank worth millions. That math, run thousands of times, is what recently let Ukraine claw back the initiative against a far larger imperial army. No army in the rest of the democratic world is capable or ready to fight at the Ukrainian speed.

When Armin Papperger, chief of Rheinmetall — Europe's fourth-largest arms maker — was asked about it, he dismissed the people behind it as "housewives" with 3D printers in their kitchens, "playing with Lego." That misogynistic snap was not accidental. It was panic.

Count the legacy Western arms makers founded by women. Count the ones with women-led engineering teams. The number sits near zero — the same companies that spent a decade failing to see the warfare revolution coming now defending the relevance of their legacy products. These facts are connected.

After studying dozens of imperial invasions, I can say it plainly: decentralised structures are the only ones that have ever beaten imperial advances. Whereas, most of the legacy arms makers in the West trace their origins to Western imperialism — mimicking rigid, top-down imperial decision-making even today. Merit-based systems open the doors to asymmetric innovation; hierarchies keep them shut.

Ukraine’s defence isn’t a gender‑equality utopia, and men still make up most of it. But far more women innovate, build, and fight here than in most democracies. Not because of a special diversity program — but because Ukraine runs a resistance system where the person closest to the problem gets to solve it, and whoever builds what works wins the contract. Kseniia isn’t an exception. She’s the rule that made Ukraine a global leader in wartime innovation.

This rule is also not new.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

end the empire. upgrade.

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(estimated reading time: 5 min)

• My granddad liberated Berlin. His name is never mentioned in Soviet war memorials in Berlin. His language has never been inscribed there. And the statues there do not look like him.

• How Soviet war memorials have never been designed to honour the dead and their sacrifice. They are depicting the empire’s idealised self, standing on the bodies of the colonised.

• How Soviet war memorials in Germany aren't ageing history — but a cognitive weapons system that imperial russia is actively using in its war on Europe.

• A recorded video of a full public talk on decolonising Soviet war memorials, which I gave in a setting unlike anything before.

• A reading list attacking russian imperial myths regarding WWII.

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Just gave a public talk like nothing before.

Ukrainian civil-society activists (Vitsche, with Poland’s Pilecki Institute) invited me to speak on the street — beside one of the Soviet WWII memorials in Berlin’s Tiergarten.

We started a tad late: another speaker, Mariam Naiem, a Ukrainian imperialism researcher and author, couldn’t find the spot — lost, first time there. Then she clocked a group of russians talking about “repeating it again — можем повторить,” the WWII slogan that turns a war of extermination into a promise. So she followed them.

Next comes the part where I stopped calling it a memorial and started calling it what it is.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

end the empire. upgrade.

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I spoke with my back to the thing —

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Books and reads Maksym mentions in the chat:

• Olia Hercules, a Ukrainian-British celebrity chef: her cookbooks integrating Ukrainian traditional cuisine and a recent memoir about growing up in Southern Ukraine.

• Russian Colonialism 101, an illustrated guidebook into the latest 48 russian invasions of sovereign nations in the last century alone.

• “Ukraine Turns the Tide: Why a Cease-Fire Is Now a Real Possibility” by Jack Watling in the Foreign Affairs

• Ukraine Neutralizes 40% of Russia Primary Oil Refining Capacity Through Long Range Campaign

(estimated reading time: 7 min)

• How russia replaced indigenous clothing traditions with imperial caricature — and why Ukrainian fashion is now a frontline of anti-colonial resistance.

• russian deportation of nearly half a million Chechens and Ingush - reconstructed from archival documents and survivor memoirs. From secret planning through "special settlement" exile to partial rehabilitation in 1956.

• a russian director’s Cannes “anti-war” speech that never mentioned Ukraine once — Ukrainians explain why erasing the victim is not courage, it’s imperial logic.

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These days, you hear russians talk about a small Ukrainian village called Mala Tokmachka more than Ukrainians do.

It’s in my home region. It has become one of the longest-held defensive positions in the ongoing Ukrainian war for independence — an embarrassment for the russian empire, whose leader promised the whole thing would be over in a few days. The village itself is now gone. But Ukraine’s public broadcaster republished a 2002 archival recording from Mala Tokmachka this week: local women and the folk ensemble Tokmachanochka singing Ukrainian folk songs on a winter evening in what used to be one of the most brutally colonised stretches of land in the former russian empire.

I loved the defiance in it. But then something else rubbed me the wrong way.

The clothes.

The satin skirts, the kitsch embroidery, too busy with colours.

When I was growing up in Zaporizhzhia, just a couple of hours from Mala Tokmachka, a few students at our school wanted to wear the Ukrainian national dress for school plays. I would not, either. It was years after the end of the russian occupation. But we still felt about it as the leftover role, the costume you got stuck with. Everyone wanted to be a russian aristocracy, or a Victorian explorer in a pith helmet — something “civilised.” Being Ukrainian on stage meant a shiny, cheap costume, a plastic flower crown with poppies and guelder-roses.

Only later did I find out that the empire had crafted this caricature design decades before I was born. And it did not represent centuries-old traditions of Ukrainian indigenous clothing.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

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(estimated reading time: 8 min)

• A century ago, the russian empire's most dangerous indigenous critic learned firsthand that every Moscow peace deal is only a piece of paper. His memoir reads as if it were written this year.

• Essential sources on the Bashqort anti-colonial struggle, and why it is one of my favorite chapters in the Russian Colonialism 101 guidebook.

• A must-read on decolonisation in Central Asia documenting the region's accelerating break with russian imperial lies — evidence, in real time, that the empire is losing ground in territories Moscow has held for centuries. Useful for anyone arguing against the "russia is too big to push back on" line.

• The 1927 trial in Paris, where a French court effectively legitimised the russian imperial narrative about Ukrainian "antisemitism" — and where much of the Western Ukrainophobia you encounter today was first laundered into respectability.

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There is one name in particular russia would hate for the rest of the world to learn and appreciate. Ahmedzeki Velidi Togan.

That is the figure the Kremlin has spent a century erasing.

Togan was a founding father of the Bashqort independence movement and a major figure in the early movement to federalise the russian empire. When federalisation failed, he led his nation — at the western edge of North Asia — to independence in 1917, after almost two centuries of russian colonial rule. Bashqortostan became one of the first democratic Muslim republics in the world in 1917, before Atatürk's Turkey, before Pakistan, before anything that gets named first in Western histories.

He was also an international anti-colonial figure. He fought in the ranks of the Turkestan National Liberation Movement from 1920 to 1923, the largest anti-colonial uprising in Central Asian history.

But that is not the biggest reason the Kremlin spent decades smearing and erasing his name.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

end the empire. upgrade.

By popular demand, and for anyone wanting an alternative to supporting this newsletter on Substack or Patreon. Subscribe via Buy Me Coffee.

Read more

(estimated reading time: 6 min)

• A coded farewell letter from the parents to the daughter they gave away to save her from russian ‘re-education’ — written in a Ukrainian forest in 1950, decoded only seven decades later;

• The Eastern European resistance russia insists never happened — Polish Cursed Soldiers, Baltic Forest Brothers, Romanian Haiducs, Bulgarian Goryani, with their true stories now finally available without an imperial propaganda filter;

• The women behind the Baltic anti-colonial resistance of the 1940s and 1950s;

• The Ukrainian instinct to build its own resistance tools, faster than the empire can crack them, did not start in 2022.

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In the summer of 1950, deep in a Carpathian forest, two Ukrainian Insurgent Army fighters got married. Five years after World War II was officially over for the rest of the world. But forty years before it will be over for Eastern Europe, with the fall of russian occupation in 1989-1993.

Hryhoriy Vatseba — codename “Sulyma” — and Mariya Babinchuk — “Kalyna” — had a daughter that August. On her fourth day, Hryhoriy carried her at night to another village and left her with strangers, to keep her alive. Then he and Mariya hid in an attic and wrote farewell letters to a daughter they knew they would never see grow up. Because the alternative was watching her be taken to a russian orphanage for ‘re-education.’ They sealed the letters in a bottle along with an encrypted marriage certificate written in a cypher that Ukrainian intelligence services would need 70 years to break. The Ukrainian instinct to build its own resistance tools, faster than the empire can crack them, did not start in 2022.

russian occupation authorities killed both parents in July 1951 in an ambush. Their daughter Hanna grew up not knowing who they were until she turned sixteen.

The sacrifice of Hryhoriy and Maryia was not for nothing. The Ukrainian resistance to the Soviet occupation mobilised up to 200,000 people and lasted until 1960. It wasn't a professional army. It was a society that refused to submit to imperialism. Even after being officially crushed, the movement paved the way for the restoration of Ukrainian independence and continues to inspire Ukrainian anti-imperial resistance today. Hryhoriy’s and Maryia’s daughter lived to see a free and independent Ukraine. As of 2022, Hanna was still living in Western Ukraine. You can read her story here, auto-translated.

This is one of millions of Ukrainian stories the Kremlin spent eighty years erasing — and it is not a Ukrainian story alone.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network. What is happening to Ukraine has happened many times before, and the rest of the world has been conditioned to overlook or misdiagnose it. This isn’t history. It’s how you stop being shocked by what was always predictable.

end the empire. upgrade.

By popular demand, and for anyone wanting an alternative to supporting this newsletter on Substack or Patreon. Subscribe via Buy Me Coffee.

Read more