(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.

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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.

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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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.

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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

(estimated reading time: 9 min)

• russia did not save Europe from Nazism. It started World War II as Hitler’s ally, used non-russian soldiers as cannon fodder, and reopened Nazi camps to keep killing under the label of “denazification.” The May 9th parade exists to bury all of that.

• This week, a republished, updated and sharpened version of one of my favourite 2022 essays on how the founding myth of russian military glory was built — and a story from my own family that shows what it was built to erase.

• Plus, a short reading list with the stories from the World War II history that russian imperial propaganda worked hardest to bury.

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My father’s father served in the Soviet Red Army’s tank troops. When the offensive came in 1943, he ended up at the front line with many other Ukrainians — used as cannon fodder while the Moscow military command hid behind their backs.

His tank gets hit. The rest of the unit thinks he is dead and leaves him behind. Out of nowhere, Ukrainian resistance fighters from the UPA appear. At that moment, UPA was fighting both russian and German occupation. They take him in, hide him in a resistance camp, and nurture him back to life. After several days, they let him go to rejoin his Red Army unit and continue toward Berlin.

A risky decision, considering he could expose the rebel camp to his command — the same command following Ukrainian soldiers and mass-murdering their fellow Ukrainians on the liberated lands the moment those people minded a new, russian occupation.

But my grandfather didn’t snitch. Shortly after, he was among the Soviet soldiers entering the German capital in early May.

Why would they save him? I have a theory.

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.

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(estimated reading time: 7 min)

• Why "the empire produces the man, not the other way around" is the line Western analysts still refuse to think — and why every "is Putin an exception" debate falls apart once you do.

• What russia is actually doing in occupied Ukraine: a Kharkiv writer on the systematic erasure of every physical trace of Ukrainian life. Territory has never been the goal.

• Dostoevsky on russia’s “civilising mission”, in his own words. Racism is not a bug of “great russian culture.” It is the operating system.

• The 21-year-old Qazaq lieutenant who raised the first Soviet flag on the Reichstag was deleted from history. russia did not win WWII. Soldiers like Raqymjan Qoshqarbaev did.

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TAZ, Germany’s top left-wing newspaper, published a long review of my Russian Colonialism 101 guidebook, written by Danish journalist Jens Malling. If you don’t follow German news, this is significant because left-wing European outlets almost never discuss russia as a colonial and imperial power. After the review came out, several German friends DMed me, surprised and pleased to see TAZ cover this topic.

The history I write about isn’t hidden or unknown. Instead, it has been pushed aside by russian imperial forces, Western academic discomfort, and the habit of making Ukraine seem unimportant in russian stories. Through my guidebook and this newsletter, I want to make this overlooked pattern clear to anyone who hasn’t lived through it themselves.

Order Russian Colonialism 101 guidebook

What I appreciate most about the TAZ review is that it recognises how my book shows today’s russian leadership is not unusual. This is important because much of Western analysis still treats Putin as an exception or this war as a one-off event. The idea of ongoing colonialism challenges that view. That’s why people resist it, and why it’s important to make it clear and public.

The man does not produce the empire. The empire produces the man, and the next, and the one after.

The clear understanding of russian imperial violence is important everywhere. It still shapes how people see the war and leaves democracies unprepared for growing imperial threats.

Europe’s lack of planning for self-defence is both practical and mental. Except for Ukraine, no democratic country is ready for modern warfare. In Ukraine, drones cause 90% of enemy losses, and ground robots handle most logistics. No NATO country is close to reaching this level.

We are also not mentally prepared, because you cannot defend against something you refuse to imagine.

Just as with new ways of fighting, quickly learning from people who truly understand modern imperialism is the only way the Free World can survive the next decade or two.

I am grateful that the Russian Colonialism 101 book and this newsletter continue to reach readers and reviewers who are open to these arguments. This helps us imagine a clear path to a better, safer future for our democracies.

Read the TAZ review in full here.

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: 7 min)

• Petroimperialism and Fossil Fascism — Updating your vocabulary about what russia actually is.

• Kholodnyi Yar — The Ukrainian forest that still haunts the Kremlin.

• The Pushkin Problem of Odesa — What Ukrainian decolonisation actually looks like in practice. Spoiler: heated, rough, messy.

• Machism + Fascism + Extreme Patriarchy — How russian propaganda around the intensifying scramble for the Arctic exposes the operating narrative of modern russian imperialism.

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All my feeds have been filled with apocalyptic footage from a russian oil refinery ablaze, bombed by Ukraine earlier this week. But the much larger story behind it won't be covered in major news abroad.

This week, we learned about the biggest dynamic shift in the war for Ukrainian independence since 2022. For the first time, Ukraine has outbombed russia in deep strikes. The Ukrainian anti-colonial resistance continues to hit russian oil export infrastructure, ensuring the Kremlin fails to cash in on the energy crisis or keep expanding its environmentally-disastrous “shadow fleet”.

Independent calculations from the end of this March suggest that Ukraine halted at least 40% or more of russia’s oil export capacities. In 2025 alone, Ukrainian so-called ‘kinetic sanctions’ hit over 160 russian oil facilities.

This is a disruption of the russian fossil fuel industry at a scale no climate summit has ever achieved. It is the single largest forced reduction of russian fossil-fuel output in history — affecting roughly 13–14% of global fossil-fuel production from the world’s second-largest producer.

Ukraine’s goal is not only to cripple the russian war economy. It is to strike at the core engine of the russian empire itself: petroimperialism.

The terms ‘petroimperialism’ (an imperial power built on fossil‑fuel extraction, control, and coercive energy dependence - first articulated by a German political scientist, Elmar Altvater) and fossil fascism (the fusion of far‑right authoritarian politics with the defence and expansion of fossil‑fuel systems - coined by an American political scientist, Cara Daggett) are not new.

But as with so much else in the scholarship on imperialism and fascism, almost nobody applied this to russia, despite russia hitting every mark. Only thanks to the work of Radynski and an energy‑politics research by a Finnish scholar, Veli‑Pekka Tynkkynen, we have the first descriptions of russia as a petro-empire rooted in fossil fascism.

This is the pattern I documented in the Russian Colonialism 101 guidebook, too. From never-ending russian energy blackmails to russian wars for indigenous oil fields (like re-colonisation of Ichkeria in 1994-2009, Azerbaijan in 1917-1920 or repeated invasions of Iran between 1911 and 1946, to name a few). Every single one was a petro-war. Every single one used stolen fossil fuel as a weapon.

Ukraine is the first resistance in this lineage to hit the engine itself.

Order Russian Colonialism 101 guidebook

But here is what Western audiences are not being told.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network.

end the empire. upgrade.

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(estimated reading time: 9 min)

• Pattern recognition: I explain how I came to recognise russia as a 500‑year colonial empire and why misdiagnosing it leads to failed Western defences.

• Language as a colonial weapon: how russia forced Kyrgyzstan through three alphabet changes in fifteen years (Arabic → Latin → Cyrillic) to break cultural continuity and impose imperial control.

• The history your schoolbooks skipped: how the russian occupation eliminated Finnish‑language schools and newspapers, framing russification as “cultural progress” while preparing the ground for ethnic cleansing.

• Several hundred people held off an empire for years: one of the most daring resistances against russian imperialism you were never supposed to know about. And how it started with russians mass stealing indigenous kids.

• Learning about russian colonialism is not history: foreign democratic societies keep misreading russia because they ignore its colonial language patterns that signal expansion, domination, and genocidal intent.

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I do not share this often publicly.

But my current expertise on the headache called russia did not come together from years of research alone. Realising my mistakes, dangerous delusions, and fear-driven ignorance shaped it as much. I’d wish I could say there was one single ‘aha’ moment that helped me to recognise the 500-year-old pattern of russian imperial violence. But only after I lost my own home to russian colonialism was I jolted back to reality.

Even when the war started, back in 2014, I kept my head in the sand. I was listening. empathising. Going to the frontline and watching russian imperialism in action. My friends and colleagues — Ukrainians who’d fled the occupation — were warning me what they’d seen. “They will come for more.” I nodded in compassion. I wrote about it. And then, privately, I hoped the war would stop at some invisible line. That russia had taken what it came for and would give it a rest.

I was, of course, wrong. They came for more. They came for my house.

I just let fear dress itself up as “non-emotional analysis”, as “objectivity”. I fell for the oldest victim cliche of all time: blaming ourselves for ‘provoking’ the abuse. If only we were less ‘corrupt’, if only we were ‘more European’, if only we were less ‘nationalistic’.

So when the full-scale invasion happened in 2022, it didn’t surprise me intellectually. I’d studied the pattern too many times across too many centuries to be surprised by it. What surprised me was how long I’d let that fear run the show.

Because expansion isn’t a policy choice for empires — it’s a life cycle, a necessity. The empire expands, or it dies. It will keep expanding until someone makes it too expensive to continue. That’s the first thing I learned from studying centuries of russian imperial warfare. And somehow I still privately hoped for an invisible line.

I don’t make that mistake anymore. And I’d rather the rest of you in the free world didn’t have to make it at all.

Which is why the question I keep returning to — the one that drives everything I do — is a simple one. If you can’t name the threat correctly, how can you design any defence against it? Call it a regional dispute, and you look for a negotiated settlement. Call it colonial expansion, and you build the kind of resistance that makes expansion cost more than it’s worth. “Colonial war” — these words aren’t semantic. They open certain doors for working solutions and close others.

Grateful to for giving me the space to share this story for his Voices of the Fight series. What follows is that conversation — on imperial pattern recognition, on the Ukrainian defence innovation model the West is only now scrambling to understand, and on why the people closest to the fire have been right about all of it, every time.

Learn more:

JP Lindsley | Under Fire News

‘If You Can’t Name the Threat Correctly, How Can You Design Any Defense Against It?’

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4 months ago · 15 likes · 2 comments · JP Lindsley

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network.

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: 8 min)

• 14 million prisoners, including children: the Gulag as one of history's largest slavery systems.

• How to survive 30 years of russian slavery, not break and keep inspiring others.

• ‘Forced labour wasn’t kept alive because it worked — it was kept alive because the system needed coercion to function at all.’

• How the Gulag slave camps helped to dramatically expand russian colonisation of North Asia.

• "I was there as a slave among victims, a victim among slaves." From Nazi-occupied Warsaw to the brutality of the Soviet slave camps: an untranslated Yiddish testimony most of the world has never read.

Nadiia Surovtseva landed her first government job at 21, and it was a high-profile one: publishing managing editor at the Foreign Affairs Ministry of the Ukrainian People's Republic. In two years, she was already tapped to represent Ukraine at the Paris Peace Conference. By 24, she had become a doctor of philosophy - the first Ukrainian woman to get this degree from the Vienna University, a prominent participant in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and a co-chair of Europe’s union of progressive journalists.

Such a meteoric rise of women to power would still be jaw-dropping in most places in the West at the beginning of the 20th century. But not in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, where liberation from the extreme patriarchy of the russian colonial rule unleashed radical empowerment of women. From Ukraine and Sakartvelo to Azerbajan and Bashqortostan, women were making history by entering the parliaments and getting equal voting rights - decades before the most progressive Western democracies.

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Unfortunately, being a feminist, brilliant and successful woman is also one of the things russian imperialism hates the most. Under russian occupation, Surovtseva was kidnapped and sent to slavery camps in North Asia. Aged 31, a former high-profile diplomat and journalist, she was logging the trees and building the roads:

This is a passage from Surovtseva’s memoirs I have just finished — a very rare piece of literature since so few Ukrainians survived russian death camps. Definitely not after 30 years of slavery, as Surovtseva did.

Many people abroad heard of the Gulag, the vast imperial network of prisons in russia. But most still think of them as regular detention camps for dissidents, and not as one of the largest slavery labour systems in human history.

SLAVE CAMP BUILT NOT FOR PROFIT, BUT FOR PUNISHMENT.

The russian empire has a long and cordial relationship with slavery (even if it claims it has not), de facto abolishing its last vestiges only in the late 1970s. As with any of the colonial projects in history, the exploitation of unpaid labour has been a priority economic vehicle for russian colonialism. And 14 million prisoners - including children - who went through the Gulag system are part of the russian slavery story.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network.

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On my travels to book shows and lectures, I always pick up a bunch of interesting books and meet fascinating people. Recently, I had a thought: what if I start sharing all of it with my subscriber family here? This is how the rc101 dispatch format became a thing. Let me know what you think, and whether it is of any value to you — via the chat link below.

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Have you tried walking through a crowd of 200,000+ people? Instead of taking the speaker’s back door, I decided to do exactly that to get to my stage at the Leipzig Book Fair 2026. At the very last moment, I was not entirely sure I was in the right place — I was constantly surrounded by tens of thousands of fabulously costumed people.

I took another turn, and suddenly I entered a parallel universe. No costumes. My stage was much smaller than anything in the Manga Comic Con part of the fair, but every seat was taken, people were standing. I had just 30 minutes. Total focus on russian colonialism, the German translation of the Russian Colonialism 101 guidebook, and what imperial occupation means in practice. You could cut the air with a knife — nobody was on their phones.

Both crowds I was navigating were rational. One was choosing comprehensible worlds. One was choosing to see the incomprehensible one clearly. In this dispatch, I will feature Ukrainian reads I picked up at the fair to help you navigate the reality that is rapidly closing in on us.

Before I published the Russian Colonialism 101 guidebook, I had never been to a book fair outside Ukraine. Since 2022, I’ve travelled to lots of them across Europe and beyond, and every year they look dramatically more different from what I knew — not just from Ukrainian fairs (where there is an explosion of public interest in literature, especially reflective on history), but from what they used to be. More and more of these look like comic cons. Cosplay, manga sections, and crowds dressed up in elaborate costumes. The book as an object is still there. But the centre of gravity has shifted.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network.

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(estimated reading time: 8 min)

• Ending russia: why betting on russia collapsing on its own never works, historically speaking.

• Changing russia: “russia is not a country that can be democratized. It was not built that way.”

• Learn: russia spends millions annually to hide its largest crime ever committed. You can push back and learn about it, online and for free.

• Recognise pattern: what is ‘russian gaze,’ what does it have to do with russian imperialism and why almost every russian is affected by it.

• Culture: advice for tyrants from one of the most celebrated Ukrainian poets of the past.

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This week makes the betting for the imminent collapse of the russian colonial empire easy. Ukrainian deep strikes have just taken out 40% of the russian energy export facilities, disrupting the empire’s main source of revenue and an attempt to cash in on the rising oil prices. Ukrainian armed forces continue deleting 30,000+ russian invaders a month, at a rate faster than the kremlin is able to replace them with new hired goons (yes, more than 65% of the russian army are still contracted fighters killing Ukrainian for money). And putin is reportedly started bullying russian oligarchs into funding his genocidal war.

All of it is happening almost exclusively thanks to the rising pressure that the Ukrainian resistance is putting on the empire. Nothing else. And how exactly are we helping Ukraine to sustain this pressure? By lifting russian oil sanctions. By considering taking back the money already booked for Ukrainian air defences. By failing to unblock billions in EU aid to Ukraine.

After studying dozens of resistance campaigns to russian imperial invasions and key moments that almost ended the empire in its five-century history, I can state with absolute certainty that we are facing the largest infliction point leading to the collapse of russian imperialism. It is a unique window of opportunity, but not a guaranteed one, and it is closing fast.

In my recent interview with the largest Czech newsroom Seznam Zpravy, I remind that, historically speaking, russia is strongest in very rapid invasions (days/weeks), but long wars of attrition (over four years) weaken its empire, and the current war could be just such a turning point. But without sustained international pressure and a clear naming of the true nature of this war, the russian imperial system may survive for decades to come. Here’s a passage from the interview, translated to English:

I would be cautious about being overly optimistic. The russian empire has survived for 500 years, the longest of all colonial empires after the Arab one. It has vast natural resources (stolen from the colonised lands) and can function for a long time this way. If there is no coordinated international pressure, such a system may survive for many more decades. Moreover, russia is learning and adapting. It may not be as innovative as Ukraine, but on the battlefield we see it adapting quickly, especially in modern warfare and robotics operations. Therefore, I do not think that we can just wait for the empire to collapse on its own. Without active and sustained pressure, this will not happen.

Do you think that russia is capable of fundamental change at all?

Every empire will perish one day. The question is whether we will just wait for it to happen naturally, which may take decades or generations, or whether we have a chance to speed up this process.

Moreover, the situation today is different from the past. russia does not act alone; it has the support of China, Iran, North Korea and, indirectly, some democratic countries that continue to trade with it. Thanks to this international network, the imperial system can survive longer, even at the cost of enormous human suffering inside the empire.

So the question is not whether the russian empire will fall one day, but how many other countries and peoples will be destroyed in the meantime if we just passively wait.

When you say that every empire will fall one day, including russia, how realistic do you imagine that could happen?

First of all, we can only talk about this at all thanks to the Ukrainian resistance. Without him, there would be no debate about the fall of the russian empire. Ukrainian resistance has historically been the strongest and most successful counterpressure the russian empire has ever faced.

I have studied dozens of russian invasions and imperial campaigns, something like this russia has never experienced in history. In addition to courage and determination, technological innovation and modern asymmetric warfare also play a big role, fundamentally changing the balance of power in favour of Ukraine. This is the first and key condition.

The second is the decolonisation of russia itself, i.e. the possibility for the nations now controlled by moscow to decide for themselves whether they want to remain part of Russia or be independent. It is about returning the voice, rights and political subjectivity of people from whom they have historically been taken away.

In my book, I write openly: the only long-term peace plan that works is partitioned, disarmed and decolonised russia. It does not mean “erasing russia”, but dismantling the imperial power structure. All other empires in the past have fallen. So it is not a utopia to imagine, but a historical trend.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network.

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THIS WEEK’S READING LIST:

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(estimated reading time: 6 min)

• Cognitive defences: an internationally celebrated russian documentary is a masterclass on soft imperial propaganda designed exclusively for the West. Let me help you to recognise it.

• Did you know: “Great russian culture” started from a barbaric colonial loot.

• Justice: “For too long, russia contaminated Ukraine with its ideas, corruption, greed, habits to fear and lie. It is time for Ukraine to teach russia how to be human.”

• Confirmed pattern: how does history warn us that we should not expect russia to stick to its own agreements.

• Culture: one text of the Ukrainian classic literature that explains the world of today with harrowing accuracy.

Here are two real stories.

In the first one, after playing the American anthem in public and taping the letter X on a window in a solidarity symbol that nobody recognises, a school teacher packs and moves out of his country in an act of his ultimate resistance to the regime.

In the second one, a prominent journalist also moves out of his country after it invades its neighbour. But instead, he enlists in this neighbour’s armed forces and resists the regime with actual arms.

Guess which one gets an international press tour and is celebrated with an Oscar?

‘I bet the Kremlin is very unhappy about this. How can it be propaganda, then?’ reads a comment from a foreigner under one of my social media posts where I call a russian documentary, which has just won the Oscar, a masterclass in soft imperial propaganda. (I won’t mention the title, so no reach or engagement from my page benefits it.)

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Like most Ukrainians, I would rather not spend my life discussing anything russians create - unless it is armed resistance, Petr Ruzavin-style. There’s so much they tried to erase that deserves my time amplifying it, instead. But this case is different. Not because of the documentary per se, but because of the chasm it exposes between those who know the russian empire well and the rest. This chasm exists there because of a certain Western cognitive weakness. And russian imperial propaganda has been exploiting it for generations. Recognising it can immunise you from one of the largest corpora of russian imperial propaganda. Not stepping on any social media minefields would be a bonus :)

WHICH TYPE OF IMPERIAL PROPAGANDA?

Let's spend a minute on the doc. The film documents the russian imperial indoctrination of kids and portrays putin's rule as fascist and totalitarian. All true. But on the back of these facts, it also smuggles false context and manipulative distortions. It alludes that there's a silent protest in russia? That's false. It insists that the resistance inside russia is futile because the system is too repressive — a speculation that has never been stress-tested in the last ten years since the start of the invasion of Ukraine.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network.

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

On my travels to book shows and lectures, I always pick up a bunch of interesting books and meet fascinating people. Recently, I had a thought: what if I start sharing all of it with my subscriber family here? This is how the rc101 dispatch format became a thing. Let me know what you think, and whether it is of any value to you — via the chat link below.

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

(estimated reading time: 7 min)

• The documented operational method of russian colonialism — and eight Ukrainian artists in Prague who refuse to let it run unopposed.

• "You can't just survive; you must maintain your authenticity"

• Flying robots rebuilt into guardian angels — and what that tells us about the Ukrainian resistance.

• ‘I explore the phenomenon of the European Dream as a means of escape from the past of Soviet colonialism and current Russian imperialism.’

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Luckily, I am not one of those Ukrainians who have been hunted by russian flying robots, like those ‘human safaris’ in Kherson, Nikopol or Izuim. But once I understood a swarm of drones was hanging above me, I froze. It took some time for my brain to process that I was looking at an art installation, not a threat.

Olga Krykun's Guardian Angel Butterfly hangs in the exhibition hall at UMPRUM, a leading Czech arts academy in Prague, where I recently gave a guest lecture on russian colonialism. It is made from drone components — the same class of machines that have recently altered the war in Ukraine and modern warfare at large.

The exhibition text contains one sentence: behind every drone stands a human. An hour before the war, they were neighbours, siblings, friends. Ukrainians take what the empire sends against them and rebuild it into something that guards. However, that is not a poetic metaphor. It is the operational logic of Ukrainian anti-colonial resistance, coded into Ukrainian resistance art.

Technology, no matter how revolutionary, does not alone define a new era of modern warfare. Intent does. The same unmanned arms systems the russian empire deploys to erase Ukrainian civilian lives are what Ukrainian democracy uses to defend it — identical tech, opposite culture and mindset directing it. The robot is neutral. The system operating it is not.

Krykun’s installation and my guest lecture opened ‘An Hour from Here,’ one of the most important Ukrainian art events in Prague since 2022, featuring a new generation of local diaspora artists and curated by a Ukrainian-Czech artist . They bridge the past and present of the Ukrainian anti-colonial resistance in a city that has served as a refuge for Ukrainian thought and culture many times in the last several centuries. I want to feature several artists from the show for you in this dispatch - their resistance art is an effective explainer of the imperial nature of russian invasion of Ukraine.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network.

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.

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"Acceptance is learning how to live, even when grief never leaves."

For our fifth season, ⁠Ukrainian Spaces⁠ returns to its beginnings, revisiting six Ukrainians from the 2022 inaugural season to see how war, time, and resistance have reshaped their lives. Across six episodes—fear, belonging, creation, resilience, love, and acceptance—our guests reflect on the past and write letters to their former selves. This season affirms that Ukraine’s story is best told by Ukrainians themselves.

For our season five finale, the Acceptance episode, Val and Maksym reunite with Marichka Buchelnikova, a Ukrainian producer, journalist, civil society advocate, and co-founder of Ukraine Explainers. We reflect on extreme resistance burnout many Ukrainians face, accepting our human limits in the face of existential threat, and the quiet work of learning how to live alongside genocide without normalising it.

Since her first appearance on Ukrainian Spaces in 2022, Marichka has had to make a series of difficult life choices and completely rethink her relationships with work, activism, and self-preservation. She speaks candidly about exhaustion, about saying less with more impact, and about accepting that some changes brought by war are irreversible.

In this episode, Marichka helps us understand acceptance not as resignation, but as a form of resistance: the ability to grieve, to care, to love, and to keep choosing life in a violent reality that cannot be undone.

⁠Ukrainian Spaces⁠ is more than a podcast; it’s a movement. It’s about reclaiming the Ukrainian story, breaking free from outdated Ukrainian stereotypes, and understanding the complex roots of Ukraine’s present and future. Together, we can unravel the threads of Ukrainian history and witness the unwavering spirit of a nation fighting for its right to exist.

SUPPORT: Ukrainian Spaces is a 100% independent, volunteer, and listener-supported initiative. Please ensure we can amplify more Ukrainian voices and decolonise more Ukraine conversations - become our Patreon sponsor or bring a friend if you already are (a free trial is available.)

This season, Ukrainian Spaces returns in partnership with Ukrainska Pravda – one of Ukraine’s most trusted voices for truth and freedom. Stand with independent Ukrainian journalism. You can also make a donation through their website or join their Patreon community. Every contribution keeps the story alive.

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network.

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ANTI-COLONIAL MUST-READS FROM MARICHKA:

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(estimated reading time: 6 min)

• Identity: Throughout the centuries, some of the most powerful Ukrainian voices found their way into Ukrainian identity through their queerness.

• Ending the war: “It might be unbearable to hear this, but late-imperial wars, like the current one in Ukraine, do not leave us any safe exits from a catastrophic reality. Confronting it is the only option.”

• Academic blindness to russian colonialism: Why has russian colonialism been ignored by Western academia for this long? Not a coincidence.

• History: De facto slavery existed in the russia-occupied Ukrainian countryside until the late 1970s.

• Post-colonial future: why have Ukrainians earned the right to decide the fate and future of russian colonialism and the russian society at large?

Russian Colonialism 101 is the first newsletter to shed light on Russian colonialism and is part of the Volya Hub network.

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.

In the last four years, I have met so many foreigners who have chosen to become Ukrainian. Some moved to Ukraine during her darkest hour, despite never having any family ties here. Some risked everything to defend Ukrainian freedom with arms. Another handed over their old passport to take Ukrainian citizenship. Their paths were not defined by bloodlines. But by consciously nurturing love for the Ukrainian land, language, and culture. By embodying the freedom-centred values and collective responsibility for each other at the core of Ukrainianness.

A striking number of queer people are among them. And I stopped thinking of that as a coincidence a long time ago.

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Queer belonging. Ukrainian belonging.

My own path to Ukrainianness was through my queerness. As I wrote in one of my 2022 essays, growing up in Ukraine in the 1990s, I was more ashamed of coming across as Ukrainian than gay. It took me half of my life to understand that these two experiences of marginalisation were the same line. Both acts of self-determination that the patriarchal russian empire cannot tolerate.

But this is also not new. Throughout the centuries, some of the most powerful Ukrainian voices found their way into Ukrainian identity through this same anti-colonial intersection.

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