russia erased the history of my ukrainian family.

I often mention that there's little academic research on russian colonialism. There's even less media coverage available. This issue has been intentionally marginalised and ignored for centuries. Luckily, all of this is slowly changing — albeit at the price of hundreds of thousands of lives Ukraine has been paying.

But while I am always excited to share with you new research or articles I've found, there's nothing more powerful than personal stories that illustrate everyday manifestations of russian colonialism.

We can discuss and debate definitions, wording, and intellectual focus surrounding this topic, but we can't forget that colonisation is, first and foremost, trauma. Systemic attempts to meddle, rewrite, assimilate or erase your identity are traumatic af — both on the personal level and societal. That's why it is so important for folks affected by it to keep sharing their intimate decolonisation experiences.

Not all have the time or desire to engage in loaded intellectual debates about what colonialism is or how it operates. But many more are ready to empathise with a person reclaiming their true selves. At least in my own experience.

So, for this edition, I wanted to share several powerful, very personal decolonisation stories, as well as a short essay about how russian colonialism erased the history of several generations of my Ukrainian family.

Thanks, once again, for supporting my work and making sure I have the resources and capacity to expand global awareness about the crimes of russian colonialism.

Djuakuju.

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From VMIU, a collective of wartime Ukrainian artists: Felix Kurtanich (ЛисПодільський), born in 1996, died while performing a combat mission to defend the Independence of Ukraine near the town of Rubizhne, Donetsk. He was the author of an ironic advertisement for the sale of a garage that hit the lens of Reuters. Illustration by Pjaschanka (Nika Liubchych). Follow @vmiu.ua and @pjaschanka on Insta

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

• Three intimate accounts of how identity erasure by russian colonialism keeps manifesting in our everyday lives.

• A Ukrainian activist explains, simply and clearly, why Western countries fail to see russia as a colonial power.

• How russia created a colonial myth of 'Donbas' by severing human-plant connection in eastern Ukraine.

• russian colonialism has been using mass deportations as one of its favourite ethnic cleansing tools in Ukraine for decades.

• russian colonialism has never been a bystander in Africa.

Like it?

Then Slava Ukraïni and let’s go.

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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.

“Because I believe we need to clearly name and call out colonial power structures when we see them. As you mentioned, the right language matters because it shapes our understanding of the world. I want to dig deep into the history of russian colonialism.”

by Livia Huber, a paying supporter of Russian Colonialism 101.

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