It’s a great moment to remember that in the leadup to this popular uprising, the first major gut-punch was delivered by Budapest Pride. Poetic justice. 🇭🇺🏳️‍🌈

Tonight, MAGA and the Israeli far-right lost an ally in Budapest.

💥🇭🇺🗳️ BREAKING: Péter Magyar says Viktor Orbán called to concede and congratulate him. Magyar will be Hungary’s next prime minister and, as it stands, is set to secure a 2/3 supermajority – enough to fully dismantle Orbán’s system. A 16-year chapter is over.

To hell with Orbán and may the zebras roam free. How great that the (not only) American far right lost the poster boy for one model of authoritarianism. So here for the domino effect 🔥

Just starting, and it will be a vital conversation. As I said before it’s always so insightful and meaningful to hear Rita Adel, who comes from a Palestinian-Ukrainian family. She spoke at our RUTA conference in Ukraine last year and it was one of the most powerful panels in a completely packed room

Left Renewal group is inviting us this Sunday, 12 April 2026 at. 15:00 UTC "Antisemitism, Racism and Empire" With Tereza Hendl, Yudit Namer and Anna C. Zielinska Join us, but maybe read this before if you can ! leftrenewal.org/articles-en/... @terezahendl.bsky.social leftrenewal.org/wi/

Over 13,000 chemical attacks

The vision of fascist-again Germany is bad enough. The prospects of fascist-again Germany actively collaborating again with now fascist Russia is next level disaster

The inimitable @deborahfeldman.bsky.social on Germany today: “Of course we’re headed for disaster. What I can tell you for certain is that we’ll have a chancellor from the far-right party relatively soon, and that we’ll have fascism again.” @blnreview.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a...

‘They knew there were children and women': Israeli attack kills three generations of Lebanese family Hussein Saleh lost eight members of his family in a strike on southern Lebanon, including his pregnant wife and young daughter www.thenationalnews.com/news/mena/20...

Resharing our important RUTA conversation on International Romani Day. Have a listen to Magda Matache and Madeline Potter’s insights, and if you can, ask your libraries to order their books — The Roma: A Traveling History and The Permanence of Anti-Racism: Unuttered Sentences — for their collections

tinyurl.com/romani-day-p... Prague is celebrating International Romani Day with art, music, literature, community events, and powerful public gestures across the city.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), by Hieronymus Bosch, 1480-1505, 📸 by @alexbrandon

Module 2 of Famine in Modern History takes a closer look at the Holodomor and the paradox of people starving in an age of unparalleled food abundance. The free online course “Famine as Genocide: The Holodomor in Ukraine” can be accessed here coursera.org/learn/holodomor

Imagine if Varoufakis did lead a lot of the left right into a fascist swamp. What a legacy.

This. Beyond time for American attempts at regime change: at home this time

Trump Jr & Brad Pascale have arrived in Bosnia to meet w/ Milorad Dodik’s Russian-backed secessionist regime. Dodik, a long time Serb militant & Bosnian Genocide denier, secured US sanctions relief in Oct after hiring Blagojevich & Mike Flynn as lobbyists. www.klix.ba/vijesti/bih/...

The fact that the Hungarian opposition waited until the moment J.D Vance arrived in Hungary to leak a recording of this conversation between Orbán and Putin, is soooo delicious.

On the US MAGA - Hungary - Russia trail www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/0...

The president of the United States is now threatening to commit genocide.

Angela Merkel & Donald Trump as seen by Moldovan artist Ștefan Eșanu

Yrs ago I met Slezekin as a grad student, told him I'm from Sarajevo, he said "I was just near there, at Pale" (former HQ of Radovan Karadzic).. I asked why, he said it's important to see for yourself (but not Sarajevo). When I told him my family was shelled for 4 yrs from Pale, he just walked away.

Important exhibition. Recommending at least 2hrs to sit with the testimonies, plus more time see the ex-Stasi prison. Hoping to bring parts of the exhibition to one of our @associationruta.bsky.social conferences in Ukraine, especially after our panel with Robin Yassin-Kassab on the Prisons Museum

A telling exchange. "Beyond easily demonstrable untruths about Ukraine, what’s unfortunate about Slezkine’s historical analysis is its failure to ponder cause and effect, even at a superficial level." www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

A free online course that will be of interest to our RUTA communities

An important announcement. A registration link for non-presenting audience members and friends of RUTA will be coming soon

A conversation not to miss. It is always so immensely insightful and meaningful to hear Rita Adel, who comes from a Palestinian-Ukrainian family. She spoke at our RUTA conference in Ukraine last year and it was one of the most powerful panels in a completely packed room

Free Sakartvelo

Hungarian Foreign Minister is just an errand boy for Russians

Programming our next conference of the RUTA Association for Central, South-Eastern, & Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasus, Central, & Northern Asian Studies in Global Conversation. Once again I’m in awe of the incredibly re‑imaginative proposals we receive, because we welcome them. It gives one hope!

The recording of Olga Burlyuk’s public lecture will be of interest to many in our RUTA communities and beyond

Powerful talk by Olga Burlyuk on the legacy of a dire lack of expertise on Ukraine, its history, language, and scholarship, in Western Europe and beyond, its structural roots and severe implications And this historical-epistemic fact: “Truths doesn’t lie in the middle. Truth lies where it lies” 🔥

For Your Freedom and Ours

Wonderful news. This book is a crucial read that tells on what it takes to overthrow a dictatorship and honours the efforts of those who try, even when success isn’t linear or instant and can take generations. There might soon be a symposium published about the book and several revolutionary Springs

Fortunately the attackers were white and far right, otherwise they'd have to be international coverage, questions about radicalisation, community leaders, acceptance of norms etc...

The US was a racial dictatorship until 1965 and a not small measure of US politics since then has been an attempt, or resistance against the attempt, to return us to being one

“because people interpret silence to mean quiet acceptance or approval of the status quo, they use it to inform their own decisions about whether to speak out” - and protest can change that

Diving into the digest of the latest study on the migration shift out of Germany. Thinking of how a local colleague once said to me that few people want to come to Germany by choice “and so we rely on wars and conflicts and channel people to low-wage industries” www.infomigrants.net/en/post/6511...

The only responsibility I feel right now, along with many others in Germany, is to keep bookmarking moments like this, so that people here don't turn around and tell the rest of the world "we had no idea what was happening". They know. Everyone knows. At best - at best - they don't want to see it.

It warrants repeating that German officers and Rheinmetall helped develop Russia’s war simulation centers and provided training to Russian troops months before the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea euromaidanpress.com/2025/10/12/s...

Latest on sexist Aryan views

Only took 2026+ years!

Maybe Progenocide International would be a more fitting name for this politics

Hundreds of thousands of people expected at London march against the far right – live

For all interested in critiques of the Western left in the academic realm, we got a paper with Selbi Durdiyeva on the history of selective anti-imperialism and what we conceptualise as the epistemic cleansing of dissenting knowledges in pursuit of utopian chimeras www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

For @unherd.com I wrote about how segments of the Western anti-imperialist left continue to partake in regime-sponsored trips to places like Iran, Syria, and now Cuba, often at the expense of dissidents and diaspora voices, all in pursuit of a political/ideological utopia that simply does not exist

My partner is from Sednaya, the town. So, already having a terrible prison named after one’s hometown is quite painful on its own, even before one gets to the testimonies of what was done to people inside that prison under Assad’s regime. This exhibition wasn’t easy, but we went together

A reminder about today’s event with RUTA Board Member Martin-Oleksandr Kisly, founder of the Crimean Studies Center at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, & Nara Narimanova, who will challenge the colonial erasure of Crimean Tatars in written history from the perspective of the colonizer

That’s what we’re dealing with. A year ago with @associationruta.bsky.social we held a debate on the return of molotovs-ribbentrops and sure enough, here we are but it would feel better not to be so vindicated. Meanwhile, the AfD is steadily re-nazifying Germany and it’s having much success with it

Opening tomorrow at an ex Stasi prison