On Feb. 21, three days before Russia launched its long-telegraphed invasion of the whole of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin said in a televised address that Ukraine as a modern entity traced its origin back to Russia’s 1917 revolution, and specifically the actions of Lenin. This was not, exactly, a critique of Lenin, as in the same statement Putin both condemned Ukraine for removing Lenin monuments and promised a greater decommunistification. No one goes to war over a statue who wasn’t already planning to go to war.

What Putin’s speech suggests is not that post-Soviet Russia was going to war for the legacy of communism, but because what Putin found praiseworthy in the lost USSR was its commitment to the territorial integrity of the Russian empire, won through blood in the Civil War and again in World War II. Russia’s wars of the 1990s and especially the 2000s have been, with the notable exception of a client-support mission in Syria, largely wars of restoring territorial integrity, of quelling independence movements, and of constraining the autonomy of constituent parts.

In “The Postcolonial Moment in Russia’s War Against Ukraine,” Maria Mälksoo calls on the field of international relations to take seriously Russian wars as Imperial Wars. And, in so doing, it provides a framework to understand Ukraine’s war for survival as a postcolonial war.

“Ukraine is also among the most flagrantly neglected cases of Soviet colonialism due to the allegedly insufficient applicability of the label “postcolonial” to the former Soviet/Russian imperial space,” writes Mälksoo. One reason for this, Mälksoo continues, could include the limitation of colonial studies focused on European-imposed racial hierarchies of overseas colonies. Another is that the independent nations of Eastern Europe, who declared independence from the Russian Empire in 1917 only to lose and regain sovereignty between 1945 and 1991, are seen as distinct from national populations held subject within Russia.

If studies of Ukraine in the past have failed to place it in Eastern Europe, or have felt that Ukraine’s history is a subset of Russia’s history, a post-colonial understanding of the present war instead offers a way to understand the war as driven by both Russian imperialism against Ukrainian national independence. This is a framework that Mälksoo deliberately sets against the limitations of “spheres of influence” or “realism,” neither of which can adequately explain why Russia picked a war, the domestic concerns driving it, or why Ukraine has fought against it so intensely.

Through this lens, the war is not just about the relative power of two countries, but about Putin’s Russia seeking an answer to the collapse of Soviet empire in 1991 by rebuilding that empire, leaning on the what Mälksoo identifies as “heroic myths of its Second World War/Great Patriotic War-experience as the saviour of Europe.”

While the war is fought in Ukraine, the ideological terrain of the conflict is Russian identity as an imperial power, the part of the Tsarist legacy that Lenin kept and Putin in turn has worked to retain.

Concludes Mälksoo, “The least the onlookers can do is to learn to empathize better with the perspective of the murdered, and not of the murderers – politically, analytically and disciplinarily.”

Daniel Ofman uncovered the struggle of translating Ukrainian literature in light of the ongoing war. The war has disrupted existing supply chains, making paper and printing materials more expensive. It has also made the work of printing more difficult, as for years much of the material printed in Ukrainian was printed in Russia. While the war leaves Ukrainian printers threatened by missiles and bombs, it’s also spurred interest in more works in and out of translation. ““I’m contacted every day by an author or a publication asking for a new translation, asking to consult about translators, it’s been really incessant, it’s also been extremely encouraging,” Boris Dralyuk, an LA-based Ukrainian translator, told Ofman.

Tara Villalba spoke about the great displacement that comes from lives seen as secondary to the development of nuclear weapons. The history of nuclear weapon development in Washington state is one informed by colonial power and racist structures at every turn. This includes the expropriation of native land for the Hanford reactor to the way the Black workers that built Hanford were forced to live in substandard housing while paying higher rents out of equal wages. “Those of us who were born after these devastating weapons were made didn’t get to choose a world unharmed by nuclear weapons,” wrote Villalba.

Kelsey D. Atherton reported on the Archbishop of Santa Fe’s effort to bend his diocese towards the work of nuclear disarmament. The boundaries of the diocese expand to encompass Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, as well as the Kirtland Munitions Storage Complex, making it both the heart of nuclear modernization efforts in the United States and home to up to 2,000 warheads. The heartfelt call, which came from both profound faith in the immorality of the weapons and the fallibility of humans, was paired with an understanding that the same skills that assemble nukes are needed to dismantle them.

New meaning to “library partition.”

This is just to say… the former president had WHAT at his resort???

Collective punishment, or being mean to no end.

When it comes to the future, there’s no higher yield investment than thermonuclear warheads.

An extraordinary rendition of mindfulness.

Do I hear an Umberto Eco in here?

Occam’s razor suggests years of lead, not civil war. Speaking of razors, let’s take a moment to pause this podcast and thank our sponsor.