The Soviet Union’s demise in 1991 took everyone by surprise, including the man most directly responsible for it. In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev had launched perestroika (“reconstruction”), a reform program aimed at radically restructuring Soviet society. A crucial aspect of this initiative, glasnost, promised that the party-state’s work would from then on be “transparent.” In other words, Communist officials could be criticized openly. Among the many unexpected consequences of these reforms was the emergence of new civil-political organizations that broke the Communist Party’s monopoly on public space.
In the Soviet Union’s satellites in Eastern Europe, perestroika emboldened domestic opposition movements that helped launch the series of “gentle” revolutions, such as Solidarity in Poland and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, that brought down Communist regimes in 1989. But the reforms, as the historian Mark Kramer has shown, also encouraged resistance within the Soviet Union itself, including the popular fronts in the Baltics and the nationalist movement in Georgia that called for independence.
Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s second-largest republic, lacked a unified national opposition. Yet on December 1, 1991, more than 90 percent of Ukrainians voted in support of independence. Boris Yeltsin, who had been elected president of Russia in June, had assumed that even if the USSR dissolved, Ukraine would remain attached to Russia. When a Ukrainian journalist criticized his reluctance to let go of the republic, the Kremlin press secretary snapped: “You don’t want to live with Russia in a Union? This is a Communist legacy for you? Then go, but return Crimea and Donbas to us!”
To justify his war of aggression against Ukraine, now in its ninth month, Vladimir Putin has deployed the same rhetoric Yeltsin and his associates used then to argue that Ukraine was an invention of the Soviet Union, unimaginable outside of Russia. Like all powerful propaganda, the claim rests on a grain of truth: post-Soviet Ukraine was in many respects a product of decades of Soviet rule. From the Soviets, Ukraine inherited a state apparatus and institutional structures spanning territories that prior to being incorporated into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) after World War II had been under different administrations, including at various points those of Poland–Lithuania, Austria, and tsarist Russia. The Soviets brought into being both an expansive state—as much Soviet as it was Ukrainian—and a Ukrainian identity that reflected the newly urban, multiethnic, and bilingual character of Soviet Ukraine’s population. That identity was no longer defined in opposition to Russia, as it had been in the age of Romantic nationalism. Russia was seen as a friendly older sibling, further along down the path to Communism.
For two hundred years Ukrainians have responded to their shifting circumstances by creating narratives about their national past. Over the course of the twentieth century they declared their independence five times: in 1918 in Lviv and Kyiv, in Transcarpathia in 1939, again in Lviv in 1941, and in Kyiv in 1991. Each time, they needed not only to recreate a Ukrainian state but also to redefine a Ukrainian nation. What that nation should look like was by no means self-evident. Nineteenth-century Ukrainian nationalists, for instance, had disagreed about what made Ukrainians distinctive and whether Poles or Russians posed a greater threat to Ukrainian identity. Among Galician Ruthenians alone, there were no fewer than five different orientations: Polonophile, Ukrainophile, Russophile, Old Ruthenian, and Little Russian. During World War II some Ukrainians put their faith in Nazi Germany, while others reckoned their chances of achieving some form of statehood would be higher under Soviet rule. New divisions surfaced after 1991 between Eastern Ukrainians, who remained attached to post-Soviet Russia, and Western Ukrainians, who looked to the West rather than to Moscow. The Russo-Ukrainian war is the latest bloody stage both in the Soviet empire’s unfinished collapse and in this long history of Ukrainian nationalism.
One of these is known to have crashed in Zagreb, Croatia, 550 km from Ukraine, on March 10, presumably after having suffered a catastrophic navigation failure.
Unknown weapons, but within the Tu-141's range, struck the Saki airbase in UA's Russian-occupied Crimea on Aug 9. On Oct. 9, an explosion struck the Crimea bridge between UA's Crimea and Russia - at a distance even further than the Saki attack, but still within Tu-141's range.
If we assume that the same drones were used to attack Russian air bases on Dec. 5 and Dec. 6, then we know that at least four have been used. How many did the Soviets destroy. How may were used in tests? How many are left? Nobody knows.
Ukraine, however, is a highly developed, industrial country. It can produce rockets, aircraft, and advanced avionics using its own resources. Its people are innovative and ingenious. It has already produced an indigenous sea attack drone. Expect more surprises.
Conspiracies about U.S. involvement continue to swirl including the claim that the U.S. is helping modernize Soviet-era Strizh drones into kamikaze drones or guided cruise missiles
While the exact nature of Ukraine's technological modernization, which enables these strikes, is unclear, Kyiv is striking fixed targets. Hence U.S. intelligence support is not necessary and Blinken's statement that the U.S. had no role is realistic
• • •
Activity in Russian-occupied Areas (Russian objective: consolidate administrative control of occupied and annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)
Russian occupation authorities have increased security measures in occupied territories and intensified searches for partisans. The Ukrainian General Staff stated on December 5 that Russian forces strengthened the local police regime, reinforced the local administrative regime, and introduced a curfew in Skadovsk Raion, Kherson Oblast.[67] Russian forces reportedly entirely prohibit residents from moving between settlements and allow movement within settlements only during the day.[68] The Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Administration reported that Russian officials in Novoaidar, Luhansk Oblast shut off internet access to prevent Ukrainian partisans from reporting Russian forces’ positions to Ukrainian soldiers.[69] Crimean Occupation Administration Head Sergey Aksyonov announced that Crimea will operate under a high (yellow) level of terrorist threat awareness with unspecified enhanced security protocols from December 7 through December 22 despite the continuation of the Crimean winter tourist season.[70] The Ukraine Resistance Center reported on December 6 that a presumed partisan planted explosives at the entrance of a Russian collaborator’s residence in Melitopol which sent the man to the hospital.[71] Zaporizhia Oblast Occupation Administration Deputy Vladimir Rogov claimed that Russian forces discovered a cache of weapons, ammunition, and Ukrainian uniforms in occupied Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast.[72] Ukrainian sources reported Russian looting disguised as searches in garage cooperatives in Berdyansk, Zaporizhia Oblast, detention and coercion of Ukrainians resistant to living in the “Russian world” in Melitopol, Zaporizhia Oblast, and inspections of school curriculums for Ukrainian symbols in occupied Mariupol, Donetsk Oblast.[73]
Ukrainian sources continue to report Russian torture and executions of Ukrainian civilians suspected of supporting Ukrainian forces. A Twitter-based open-source intelligence aggregator amplified reporting that Russian forces executed five Ukrainian civilians following torture.[74] A local Ukrainian Telegram channel stated on December 6 that the Kherson Oblast Prosecutor’s Office identified another building where Russian forces detained and interrogated pro-Ukrainian civilians using physical and psychological techniques along with a list of 112 individuals likely held in the building in the de-occupied area of Kherson Oblast.[75]
Russian occupation authorities apparently are requiring Ukrainian civilians to quarter Russian soldiers. The Ukraine Resistance Center noted on December 5 that Russian forces are struggling to find places to shelter troops in occupied areas of Ukraine and have begun “asking” civilians to provide housing.[76] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that mobilized Russian soldiers have begun quartering in private homes in Starobilsk, Luhansk Oblast.[77] The Ukraine Resistance Center identified instances in Kherson and Zaporizhia Oblast where Russian forces commandeered schools and hospitals to meet soldiers’ housing and medical needs.[78]
Russian occupation authorities throughout occupied Ukraine have marked January 1, 2023, as the end date for circulation of the hryvnia.[79] Authorities will require residents to make payments in rubles from that point forward.[80]
www.understandingwar.org/...
Tim Snyder discusses….. poetry.
I have just finished teaching my open class at Yale, “The Making of Modern Ukraine.” It has been work to write the twenty new lectures, but it has been very gratifying to know that these lectures have been viewed millions of times around the world, including in Ukraine itself. (The link above is video; this is the podcast version).
In the penultimate lecture, on culture, I read my own translation of a poem by Julia Musakovska, which I first heard myself this summer (and which I recited myself in Ukrainian in front of a camera at one point.) Now my English translation, like other things from that class, is making its own little career on the internet. So I thought I would set it down here, and then offer some comments. Julia’s poem is found in her the collection Zalizo/Zelazo (Iron), which was published this summer by the Borderland Foundation in Poland. The poem itself dates from March. Here goes:
Such problematic, such frightful poems
Full of anger
So politically incorrect
No beauty in these poems
No aesthetic at all
The metaphors withered and fell to pieces
Before they could bloom
The metaphors buried
In children’s playgrounds
Under hastily raised crosses
Dead
In unnatural poses
By the gates of houses
Covered in dust
They prepared meals over an open fire
They did try to survive
It was of dehydration that they perished
Under the rubble
Shot in a car
Under a white flag
Made from a sheet
With colorful backpacks over their shoulder
They lie on the asphalt
Face down
Next to the cats and dogs
I'm sorry to say so, but such verses
Are all we have for you today
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen
Spectators
Of the theater of war
In the lecture, I wanted to make the point that the poem answers itself, in a couple of ways.
First, this poem is only one example of a flood of Ukrainian creativity during this war. Looking at the horrors of the trenches around Bakhmut, people invoke the First World War. But another resemblance to that era is the unspoken assumption that war itself must be described, and that art is there to describe it, that nothing is beyond art. To be sure, different people have responded in different ways, and many creative people are now in the armed forces — where some of them continue their creative work. But in general, as far as I can make out, the attitude seems to be that the war calls for more creation and documentation, not less.
Second, there is nothing problematic or awkward about the poem itself. It is elegant and powerful. It reminds us how metaphors work. The awkwardness and the frightfulness resides not in the poem, but in us. The poem helps us own this. What are we supposed to do, we the spectators of the theater of war? When we feel awkward about the suffering of others, we sometimes find ways to make it all about ourselves. Hence all of the feckless talk about “escalation” and so on. Our fears then displace others’ experiences.
snyder.substack.com/...