Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
In mobilising forces for the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin has relied on the formation of units in impoverished Russian regions, including in the national republics, and this has had an unexpected result. Battalions formed along ethnic or compatriot lines are not eager to fight for Moscow, and (...)
After a short summer break, welcome to Issue #6 of Conflict & Democracy. In the UK we’re heavily focused on energy security and the inflation crisis - see article links below. In this issue, following the assassination of Darya Dugina, I explore the relationship of Putin’s project to that of (...)
Darya Dugina was killed in a car bomb explosion last Saturday night (20th August) on the outskirts of Moscow. She was returning from the Tradition festival, where she had spoken on the themes of the Russian Idea, Empire, and culture wars.
Earlier in the day she had given what was to be her (...)
Russian liberals often claim Vladimir Putin has his base in the “vatniki,” the uneducated lower classes. But his rise didn’t owe to the “brainless masses” — it’s the result of the social Darwinism that gripped Russia in its shock transition to capitalism.
Who is to blame for the war on Ukraine? (...)
FAS–War starts at home: domestic violence over anti-war stance
Alas, we couldn’t help but notice that headlines like this are increasing in the news: In Novosibirsk a mother tried to turn her daughter into the police and subsequently assaulted her or My father wrote a denunciation about me or A (...)
In every security manual for partisan rallies, we write about the need to hide your face and learn the locations of city surveillance cameras beforehand. But how can the police identify people instantly from CCTV footage - and is it even legal?
The sandbox for the introduction of facial (...)
What’s going on in the Russian Orthodox Church today? How does it justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine? What’s Patriarch Kirill’s role in this justification? How can the church engage people in social action? Andrey Shishkov on the Russian Orthodox Church and its politics during the ongoing war (...)
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied by a clampdown on independent media and has led an estimated 200 000 people to flee the country.
Among those to have left Russia in recent months are almost all independent journalists and activists, whose opposition to the war (...)
Could the Russian regime lean on the development of digital technologies? Sociologist David Khumaryan discusses the wartime political course and explains why the lack of resources will prevent “Stalin-style” digitalization
For the model of development of digital and information technologies, the (...)
Russian environmentalists have reacted angrily to jail sentences of between three and five-and-a-half years imposed on four nature reserve workers in Kamchatka, in the Russian Far East.
The four protest their innocence of embezzling funds from the Kronotsky nature reserve, in a case where the (...)
Ilya Matveev is a Russian socialist, political economist and editorial collective member of Posle, a new Russian anti-war website. Green Left’s Federico Fuentes spoke to Matveev about the background and motivations behind Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
Few predicted (...)
The shrinking population of today’s Russia is a sure sign of the failure of its economic and political project. It is telling that neither the new week-long waiting period before an abortion, nor ‘traditional values’ propaganda, nor even ‘maternity capital’ (welfare payments to families to be used (...)
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — Ilya Matveev is a Russian socialist, political economist and member of the editorial collective of Posle, a new Russian anti-war website. Below, Matveev discusses the background to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the impact of sanctions on Russia (...)
“The Free Buryatia Foundation is the first ethnic anti-war movement in Russia, which was organized by the activists from Buryatia. The overwhelming majority of them are Buryats.
From the very beginning of the war, our region has been among the leaders in terms of losses. It is important for us (...)
For months, Belarusian activists have been damaging railroads to hinder Russia’s army. Now they could face the death penalty.
In May 2022, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko signed a law making any attempt to commit a terrorist attack punishable by death — and terrorism is exactly the (...)
The private military company (PMC) Wagner has once again made international headlines with the arrival of around 1,000 of its employees on battlefields in Ukraine. For its supposed owner Evgeny Prigozhin, this is a return to a familiar environment: his companies began their disinformation (...)
Leonid Vasyukevich, MP for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) in the far-eastern territory of Primorye, read a declaration in the regional parliament on May 27, which ended: “We demand the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukraine.”
Four days later, Yevgeny Lyashenko, (...)
The debate around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the previous contributions in FocaalBlog, has shifted from the ‘either NATO or Russia’ dichotomy to a more nuanced exchange along the lines of ‘it is NATO, but…’ versus ‘it is Russia, but…’. In a welcome development, discussants started (...)
“Where have you been for the last eight years?” is the question the Russian propaganda never tires of asking. Andrei Movchan, a journalist and left-wing activist from Ukraine, talks about his struggle against the far-right, migration, and calls on the Russian left to speak out against the war. (...)
The “Russian world” is one of the key elements of Putin’s official ideology, which served to justify the military invasion in Ukraine. Political theorist Ilya Budraitskis analyzes the genealogy of the “Russian world”.
Addressing the nation on the eve of the war, Vladimir Putin called Ukraine “an (...)
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