not ‘putin’s war’. it is russia’s.

russian rulers come and go, russian colonialism stays the same.

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

• What happened to Qırım-Crimea a century ago can tell you almost everything you need to know about how russian colonialism works in practice.

• What the russian invasion of independent Ukraine in 1918 teaches us about the russian invasion of independent Ukraine today.

• What does the phenomenon of the russian victimhood complex tell us about russian colonialism?

• How exactly was Navalny’s funeral a manifestation of the russian imperial culture?

• How language is an integral weapon in russian colonial violence.

• How German colonial occupation of the newly independent Ukraine in 1918 helped russia recolonise the country later.

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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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Just a fraction of the faces of the Qırımlı intellectual elite that was executed by russian colonial authorities in 1938. This is what these people looked like after weeks of torture in russian prison cells. These pictures come from declassified Ukrainian archives from the Soviet period. However, most of the surviving documentary evidence of the repressions against Crimean Tatars during russian colonial rule, as well as Ukrainians, remains locked up and hidden in russian archives.