I’m truly honoured to have been elected to the Steering Committee of the EPSA @epsaphilsci.bsky.social . Thank you for the trust and support! I look forward to working with colleagues to strengthen our community – and I’m grateful to those who have served before us for their work 💜 #philsci

New episode of Yurt Jurt podcast about decolonial thought in North and Central Asia just dropped! Here I talk with Prof Madina Tlostanova about decolonial future, her new book and the term “postsoviet”. available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcast & other major platforms!

The deadline for a number of prizes awarded by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies has been extended until 10 September 2025; see here for more information & eligibility: awsshome.org/awards/ I especially encourage current and recent PhDs in the field to apply for the Graduate Essay Prize!

Zuzana Uhde‘s work is always so worth reading. Also recommending her critical conceptualisation of ‘distorted emancipation’, whereby racially and socioeconomically privileged women get ahead through the outsourcing of care labour on othered women, while the gender division of labour stays unchanged

Souhlas. Not in our name

Just today, I was asked by @amnesty.de journal about the conditions of protest in Germany and whether we are seeing a new quality of police violence at protests. You can guess my answer from this video. 2yrs ago we were discussing illegal pain compliance holds, now it's punches straight to the face

⚡️⚡️ Germans say Ukraine should cede occupied territories for peace, poll shows

There have been 80 documented attacks on maternity units since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and this is a read for the “it’s just a war in Ukraine not genocide” crowd. Imposing measures intended to prevent births, Article II of the genocide convention www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

Her photos and videos documented the plight of our patients and the medical work of our colleagues across the #GazaStrip. Mariam was another eyewitness to the ongoing genocide in #Gaza. Read our latest update: ow.ly/g5Ea50WLC3O

What a haunting testimony

Double tap strikes on civilians and civilian infrastructure - including health infrastructure, such as hospitals, and first responders - employed under Putin, Assad and Netanyahu‘s regimes…

Interestingly, the word shocked begins with the same letter as Staatsräson. But that is probably just a mere coincidence

…

Meanwhile OSINT maps tracing Russian sabotage activities across and beyond Europe are barely keeping up with the cases

No, far right leader Alice Weidel, neither Russia nor Germany have any right to treat Europe’s East as a ‘buffer zone’ or ‘zone of interest’

Agree, someone should trace and analyse how a once somewhat interesting feminist magazine turned into a platform for Russian propaganda and tool for genocide denial. I used to read Emma in my early 20s on visits to Berlin. When I recently found some old copies in storage, I threw them all in the bin

“Classifying famine means that the most extreme category is triggered when three critical thresholds – extreme food deprivation, acute malnutrition and starvation-related deaths – have been breached“ This was foreseen and warned about in a manufactured famine and it all should have been prevented

A plea for the restoration of the Aral Sea, once the world’s 4th-largest inland lake before Russian colonizers diverted the rivers that nourished a crucial ecosystem to irrigate extractivist production in cotton fields. Restoration is challenging as it would require colonizers to repair the damage

@kseniyaoksamytna.bsky.social raises crucial issues here with the recent shift from a long disregard of Ukraine to sudden post-2022 focus, manifested in a wave of publications on a ‘hot topic’ that however show little knowledge of Ukraine and its history and thus the detrimental aspects of attention

Given the haunting anniversary of the Soviet-Nazi Pact, let’s bring back our insightful @associationruta.bsky.social webinar with Kseniya Oksamytna, Terrell Starr & Mart Kuldkepp about today’s reincarnations of molotovs and ribbentrops and the key lessons (to be) learned youtu.be/vtLiT79imU0?...

When you browse through the "peace with Russia" crowd in Germany, you constantly bump into the ghosts of East Germany. This article was shared around a lot last year. It was written by Jörg Arnold, an East German regime judge and Stasi who destroyed the lives of regime critical public defenders.

“By entering the territory of Mutant Radio, you agree that Putin is a war criminal, Russia is an occupier, and you respect the territorial integrity of Georgia, Ukraine and any other country that fell victim to Russian occupation,”

Re-remembering Romani resisters against Soviet occupation: while working on a construction site, Bartoloměj Horváth saw a Soviet tank and ran against it with a shovel, smashing into the periscope. The occupiers shot him in the stomach and he died from the injuries two weeks later, at the age of 21

A few images capturing the Czechoslovak perspective on the Russian-led Soviet occupation in 1968 “Beware of Russian murderers, they steal watches and radio transmitters”

Like every year around this time, I’m thinking of all the people who self-immolated in protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. I’ve been collecting their names… and the list is long and remarkably international, and I would like to find a way to more properly honour their memory 🧵

🎥 pirates against occupation

And then he smuggled his photo documentation of the Soviet invasion of Prague into exile, to protect and share the testimony from Soviet censorship and propaganda cover ups… thanks to his escape, we got so much evidence of Czechoslovak resistance to Soviet imperial violence preserved for generations

It truly is! Soon there’ll be a text from us with Selbi Durdiyeva, revisiting Pelikán‘s letter and Davises‘ disengagement with it coming out in American Communist History (!), analyzing the double standards & selective anti-imperialism persistent on the US/Western Left & their current implications

Let us make something very clear: Czechoslovak people weren’t nonviolent in response to a violent Soviet occupation. Our ancestors were betrayed by so-called allies and abandoned without help and effective means of defense. STOP projecting your own stereotyping oppressive-pacifist fantasies onto us

unfortunately the western left's tendency to align with their own romanticized image of the soviet union and russian imperialism over the lives of eastern europeans (including other leftists) is nothing new.

Periodically rereading Zosia Brom’s text for cathartic reasons. So tragically spot on freedomnews.org.uk/2022/03/04/f...

never trust a tankie and never allow yourself to become one

🧵

Czechoslovak dissident in exile Jiří Pelikán in an open letter to Angela Davis, 1972

Imagine…

A new paper of interest by Zuzana Uhde. The European care border regime: Theorising extraction, exploitation and East–West inequalities in cross-border care work in central Europe, adding nuances to a critique of ethno-racialised hierarchies maintained in the EU journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Going into print: our chapter on necropolitics, as manifested in the sacrificability of an East-European labour force in the West amid Covid-19 and in the East via outsourcing; the violent trajectory of Russian anti-LGBTQ+ politics; & the negotiation of EU borders on the eastern border of Poland...

Sickening. Shameful. And in the end, useless. Those were the words that came to mind when we watched the Alaska Summit unfold.

The abduction of Ukrainian children for forced Russification fits the pattern of forcible transfer under the Article II of the UN Genocide Convention. This should also prompt a more robust reckoning with the legacy of forced Germanification of Polish children under German occupation and what it was…

And of course Siemens already once was a major beneficiary of the subjugation and annihilation of Ukrainians and fellow East-Europeans, during the German Nazi occupation of Europe’s East. The company supplied the Nazi war effort and profited from genocide and abuse of East-Europeans as forced labour

David Chichkan, 39, artist, anarchist, anti-authoritarian activist, gravely wounded defending Ukraine on August 8, died on August 9, 2025. Pictures below from moving tributes to him on Instagram, where you can also see footage of him appearing in Oleksiy Radynski’s 2016 documentary film ‘Landslide’

Nobody advocating for Ukraine to surrender its territory to Russia has any business ever calling themselves antifascist.

Why does it come as no surprise bsky.app/profile/mali...

So far, we know that the Americans sent neo-Nazis, Christian Zionists and anti-Muslim Christian Nationalists to Gaza - and it’s those men that have been opening fire on Palestinian civilians along with the IDF.

“studies imply that estimated life expectancy [of Palestinians in Gaza] has fallen by more than 35 years... In % terms this drop is bigger than the one recorded during China’s Great Leap Forward; in absolute terms it is similar to the one in the Rwanda genocide“ www.economist.com/interactive/...

Postcards from Berlin Helena Uambembe, How to Make a Mud Cake

This is a point beyond crisis

AfD’s Höcke is continuously recycling and mainstreaming old Aryan Nazi slogans. In 2017, he explicitly said that Germans should be more proud of their Nazi “past.” In 2024, he was voted in to lead the state of Thuringia

Not only this child trafficking amounts to a forcible transfer of children of one national, ethnic, racial or religious group to another under Article II of the Genocide Convention, but the selection and forced Russification of Ukrainian children by Russian occupiers perpetuates racial eugenics