Yes, Russia Is Still an Empire, But This Won't Last Long

Thank you for joining us.

We're thrilled to have Oleksiy Radynski

and Asia Bazdyrieva in conversation today

to present some of their ongoing work

on settler colonialism, imperialism

and Russia's war against Ukraine.

I'm Laurie Hart, Director of the

European and Russian Studies

and professor of anthropology

and global studies.

As is our custom, I begin with

a recognition of our own

unremediated debts in settler colonial

history. As a land grant institution,

UCLA recognizes Tovaangar,

the Los Angeles basin and South

Channel Islands, as the ancestral

and unceded territory of

the Gabrielino/Tongva peoples

who are its traditional land caretakers.

We pay our respects to the ancestors,

elders and descendants, past, present

and emerging of Los Angeles's indigenous

peoples on whose land we reside.

I want to thank

next independent curator Asha Bukojemsky

and Marathon Screenings

for bringing the artists here to L.A.

Their visit is made possible

by the amazing Kyiv to L.A.

initiative, a joint exhibition

and residency project that supports

Ukrainian arts at a time when Ukrainian

sovereignty and culture are under attack.

With a generous grant

from Nora McNeely Hurley

and Manitou Fund, Kyiv to L.A.

has invited six Ukrainian artists

and art historians to L.A.

for a residency that includes

a public program of talks,

screenings, listening sessions

and presentations, including this one.

The project is in collaboration

with several L.A.

based organizations and institutions.

You can find them

listed on her website.

Additional programing is also hosted

by e-flux in New York,

so be sure to check out the Kyiv to L.A.

website.

You can find a link

on our Center website page.

I also want to let you all know

before we go further that there'll be

a screening and Q&A with the director

of one of Oleksiy's films, Infinity

According to Florian, this Sunday,

April 23rd, from 3 to 5 p.m.

at UCLA's James Bridges

Theater on the campus.

So I hope some of you can join us then.

And finally, I want to thank

our UCLA co-sponsors,

the Department of Slavic, East European

and Eurasian Languages and Cultures,

and the UCLA School of Theater,

Film and Television.

And thanks, as always, to Lenka Unge,

our Program Director at CERS

and Liana Grancea, our Executive Director.

Okay! With that, let me introduce our speakers.

We'll hear from each of them in turn, and

then I'll follow up with some questions

before turning to the Q&A

from the audience.

We encourage you to think

of your questions, and I hope

we have lots of time

for discussion for those.

So Asia. Asia Bazdyrieva

is an art historian

whose work focuses on

hybrid European-Soviet

modernity and its ideological

and material implications

in spaces, bodies and lands,

exploring modernist utopias to grassroots

expressions that challenge dominant

historical narratives. She expands

the domains of visual culture

and environmental humanities.

She studied analytical chemistry

at the National University

of Kyiv and art history

at the City University of New York

as a Fulbright grantee in 2017.

In 2018, she was a postgraduate

researcher in The New Normal design

think-tank at the Strelka Institute

of Media Architecture

and Design in Moscow.

She's currently based in Kyiv.

She co-authored Geocinema,

a collaborative project

exploring infrastructures of earth

sensing as a form of cinema,

which has been nominated for the

Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research

in 2020 and theGolden Key Prize

at the Kassel Dokfest in 2021.

She is currently an associate

member of Critical Media

Lab Basel and a resident of transmediale.

Oleksyi Radynski

is a filmmaker

based in Kyiv, Ukraine.

He was raised on the ruins

of a Documentary Film Studio in Kyiv,

so obviously

fated for his subsequent career.

After studying film theory

at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy,

he took part in several film education

experiments, including Home

Workspace Program in Beirut

and Labor in a Single Shot

by Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann.

His award-winning films

have been screened

at International Film Festival

in Rotterdam,

Oberhausen International Short

Film Festival, e-flux in New York,

the Institute of Contemporary Arts in

London, as well as in Krakow,

Leipzig, Tel Aviv, Sheffield, Berlin

and other places.

As an essayist, he's contributed

to numerous publications,

including Proxy Politics: Power

and Subversion in a Networked Age,

Art and Theory of Post-1989

Central and Eastern Europe:

A Critical Anthology, and e-flux journal.

So with that, we will begin with Asia.

So Asia, the podium is yours.

I will be briefly talking about

the production of territory

and recertification today

as an introduction into our conversation

about imperialism and Russian imperialism,

and not only. But I

want to begin as well

with a round of acknowledgments

because as we speak now,

the war in Ukraine is still ongoing

and many people have been killed already.

And so I wanted to begin with this quote

by my brilliant colleague

and his name is Darya Tsymbalyuk,

who wrote that imperialism,

including Russian imperialism, operates

through erasure, and by erasure,

we can understand it in many ways because

of course there is a level of immediate

violence and physical erasure.

But if we also think about kind of

the long-term erasure of culture,

there are so many people

whose job was not being at war, right?

Filmmakers, writers, artists,

and many of our colleagues

were killed already, and

our communities are displaced.

So everything that was contributing

to our culture

and history

has been systematically erased.

And it's not only this was,

but for centuries

with prohibition of language, with the

killing of intelligentsia and so on.

So I want to acknowledge also the work

of all those people in Ukraine

who in many forms resist this erasure

by continuing doing their work

as scholars, writers,

artists, filmmakers, but then also

actively in frontlines.

And so that's my

round of acknowledgments.

And today

I will mostly be talking about things

that I wrote in my recent article,

which some of you might have read,

but for those who didn't,

I will reiterate some of the main

thesis of the text, and I will begin

by talking about two particular scenes

from a film by a Ukrainian filmmaker.

His name is Valentyn Vasyanovych,

and the film is called Atlantis,

and it was released in 2019.

So it is already few years

since the war started,

even though it was not Cold War and

so it was few years after the beginning

and a few years before the big invasion.

And now we are talking

on different platforms about the war.

But for many years it was not really

even noticed outside of Ukraine.

So in this film, we

see a speculative scenario

and when you watch it, you realize that

it's not that much speculative.

So the plot is set in the Eastern

Ukraine, in Donbas.

This is also the region

where I'm from.

And plot is set in 2025, I think.

So it's the nearest future.

And according to that scenario,

Ukraine has won the war and

is now building the wall with Russia.

But at the same time, you

can imagine that the land

is completely devastated

through battles,

but then also poisoned.

And I mean, even before the war,

Donbas was a very kind of

ecologically difficult place

because there are so many industries,

but now water is poisoned

and the soil, the are landmines everywhere.

And so it's contaminated in many ways

and it's not possible to live there.

And so we have this future scenarios

where Ukraine has won,

but what to do with that land

which is contaminated?

And the main protagonist of this

story, it's a Ukrainian veteran

and he suffers a

post-traumatic stress disorder

after these events.

So the two scenes that I

want to discuss, and I think

these two scenes embody the perfect

illustration of the processes

that I will be talking about today,

and we will be talking about together.

So the first scene,

you see a crowd of people.

So these are workers of the steel plant

and they're invited for a big gathering.

And as you can see,

there will be like some

beverages, alcoholic beverages,

and banquet, but we cannot

see faces of these people.

They are just a black mass.

And instead we see a face of the owner

of the steel plant, and he

is standing on the podium

and his massive head is projected

and dominating over the crowd.

And so he addresses the workers.

And we understand that the steel plant

will be closed permanently soon.

But instead, he uses this

Silicon Valley vocabulary.

He says, you know,

the tribute to the past must be paid,

but let's harness new technology.

Let's face new bright future.

Let's build new Ukraine,

competitive Ukraine and so on.

And what is interesting

in this particular scene is that the guy,

and he speaks with very

distinct British accent,

and some of you

might know that Donbas,

so the name of this region, which is

a kind of a combination of words.

So this name of the region

really comes when this region

was designated for extractive

practices.

And in the 19th century,

so this was kind of a place for many

different nomadic people for century,

but when the coal was discovered

in the 19th century,

and it was discovered accidentally

because this was the site where

salt was extracted,

so it was discovered accidentally.

And then British investments

come right away.

And this is how the industrial development

of the region begins.

And people were kind of sent

to that region.

And also in the Soviet Union,

they know precisely

to cater to those industrial facilities.

So they were kind of

whenever people were sent there

or they would choose to go there,

but they were already kind of included

into this geological

and broader material kind of

understanding of this place.

So over the course of years

in Donbas, you know that

after British investors

Soviet rule came,

but the industries continued,

the Soviet Union collapsed,

and then oligarchs came.

But there was constantly

this kind of still the same format

of interacting with this land.

And when he speaks, and he says

that tribute to the past must be paid,

So of course he means,

this kind of film director,

when he makes the scene,

he means this history of like how British

came and started their business there.

But then also we see in this film,

when this owner speaks,

we also see scenes from

Dziga Vertov's film.

And Dziga Vertov was a Soviet

avantgarde filmmaker.

And his work was kind of

celebrating this, you know,

arrival of industry. And this film,

this particular film

was called Enthusiasm,

and it was made in 1931 or 1932.

I don't remember.

And the other name of this film

is Symphony of Donbas.

So in the scene,

there is this kind of overview

of the past of this region.

So this is one important scene

and then the other one

that I want to talk about is the scene

where a protagonist is invited

in the car for a private conversation.

And the woman who invites him,

I mean, she is in Donbas with a mission.

She's part of environmental

monitoring mission.

And based on her accent, I can assume

that she might be German or

German speaking.

And so she tells him,

and she tells this only to him

because earlier he

accidentally saved her life.

So she wants to be grateful. And she says,

you know, this land is

completely unsuitable for life

and we can find you a job in Europe.

And so we can take you out of here.

Yeah, so we can take you out of here.

And he says, well, you know,

actually I fought for this land.

My entire family was killed here.

This is where I belong.

This is where my memory is.

And he also says,

I actually did some research

and it's not entirely not

possible to live here

and there are solutions

how to fix water problems.

And then she says, yeah,

but it's not economically beneficial

so do not invest in that.

And so the reason why

I bring these two scenes is that it

kind of encapsulates the scenario,

right? When we have one

force, one imperialism

that actually kills,

the Russian imperialism, and then

we have another type of politics,

maybe not dramatically different type,

but another set of actions where,

you know, coming to the land

and taking from that land

whenever whatever is possible

to make into a resource,

exploiting it to the very last

and then leaving behind.

And so even when there are humans

and they say we have this subjective life

and he is an embodiment of subjectivity.

So they say, no,

actually we were only interested

in this place as a resource.

And you as someone who

supports this process of

extraction.

So I was thinking about

these kind of two,

kind of dual colonial situations here

and also right

this kind of subjectivity that resists

and is still being ignored since forever.

I was thinking about what kind of

theoretical frameworks we can choose

for this scenario also, because

again, for example, in Global North

there is a lot of conversations

about colonialism, right?

And many of these conversations start with

either using the category of race

or by addressing like more complex

kind of capitalist

regimes that are outcomes

of the specific modernity,

that was also kind of, again,

racially exclusive and so on.

So these categories are not immediately

applied to the context in question

because again, the Soviet

Union has its own or

had its own version of modernity

that also had many forms of exclusion

and stratification

and that were not necessarily linked

to the question of race,

for example, or a class,

because in Soviet Union

everyone was working class officially.

And so I was thinking about that.

And this is kind of the outcome

of that thinking here in this article.

All of this was published last year.

And so I was thinking that if race, class

and postcolonial theory at large

is not entirely helping me

in this thinking process.

And I was then thinking

that I might want to focus on

what exactly,

how exactly this place became

a site of material transaction.

So I wanted to focus on something,

on material processes

of material exchange

to kind of see where it leads me.

And this is how I started thinking

about this kind of becoming the resource.

And resourcefication

is a complex of social processes

through which the making of resources

is constitutive of and is constituted

within arrangements of substances,

technologies, discourses

and the practices deployed by different

kinds of actors.

So it's a very interesting

kind of framework that was useful for me

and to start to understand

what enables this resourcification in Ukraine.

And there are many ways to approach it.

And so the one that I did as

a starting point was to look to

what kind of socio-technical

imaginary enables this making of resource

and socio-technical imaginary is a term

from science and technology.

So this is part of what I do in my Ph.D. currently.

And so I was looking

at this image of breadbasket

and I think, I mean, some of you

probably at some point in your life

you've heard that kind of this reiterated,

this imaginary that Ukraine is

just this land that can produce

grain endlessly and give it.

And so this is a breadbasket

and the granary of Europe.

And there's this imagination

that is just there and there's

so much sun and so much water.

And the land is so black and so fertile.

It can give us

these minerals and bring everything

unconditionally and kind of

in the never ending perspective.

So I will not go into the detail

because this is something

that you can read in the article

where I was tracing how this

imaginary came to being.

And of course it's like hundreds of years

of geological prospecting, different

kind of modernity expanding

and figuring out where they can take from

and then reiterate

that in German romanticism.

So it was kind of years where

this image becomes bigger and bigger,

and then the Soviet Union

and already back then

grain was weaponized and any form

of subjectivity was kind of also

kept away by weaponization of grain

and then Second World War.

And Timothy Snyder wrote a lot

about German responsibility

and German expansion of their Lebensraum

and thinking of Ukraine as a

breadbasket in Hitler's ideology

and kind of designing the sub-race, where

Ukrainians will be treated as Afrikaner.

So this is the kind of the lineage

that you can follow.

And so my main argument,

to still kind of a working argument,

that through this imaginary, this presumed

inclusion of territories,

their soils, deposits, populations,

into kind of material transactions

between various powers

contributed to the emergence of regimes

of material power that prevail today

through constant reinvention.

And I think maybe Oleksiy

we'll be talking about that as well,

because in his analysis of Nord Stream,

he precisely looks at this kind

of relationship between Germany and Russia

and this whole Nord Stream situation,

that kind of continuous

and doesn't stop.

And even now, and I know that I should

be finishing them, so I will not go into

the article, but we can do

it through Q&A as well.

I'll just give you one example

apart from Nord Stream,

because for example, this rhetoric

about how something in Ukraine can be

put into use, and kind of seeing Ukraine

through the lens of use.

So Russia is actively destroying, right?

And the rhetoric that is coming

from European Union, which

wants to be so green

and so eco and whatnot.

But then eventually this green

is always at the cost of this

imaginary place in Ukraine,

which is near the desert.

And there were interesting

cases like with Chernobyl,

which for many years was only seen

as this core site and wasteland.

And then when the solar power

project between Germany

and Ukraine was established,

the rhetoric was really interesting.

And this is what I also do

in my work, kind of following

how places are being talked about,

how they're imagined.

And the conversation was like,

now this land can be useful again

and so on.

And it's interesting to see that again

now that Ukraine is so

damaged and so destroyed,

the rhetoric of European Union

is extremely cheerful.

It's like, now since the bad

infrastructures are destroyed,

we can actually put many

solar panels and windmills

and what not to get green energy

for Europe, you know. And so this kind

of conversations. And this image on

the side, sometimes they monitor the

the forecasting of solar energy.

And this kind of schizophrenic

in a way, because in Europe,

everyone is so afraid

of climate change, right?

And the heat waves and so on.

But when you read about how they package

Ukraine, they are like

more southern Ukraine,

we can actually harvest more sun

for our green ecological countries

that now will be sovereign

of Russian gas and so on.

So this is amazing.

So this is kind of

the continuous reproduction

of regimes of power.

And so I will end

with this kind of summary

that this framework of resourcification

for me is very productive

kind of to understand these processes

and how they used to justify

slow violence,

environmental damage and this kind of

constant reduction of the inhuman.

And to give you an example, again,

like when pandemic starts

and humans are not allowed to travel,

but some Ukrainians are allowed.

So there is a special category for them,

which is not really human.

So then they can come as

a labor force and harvest

whatever needs to be

harvested for European-Americans.

So this kind of seeing something

as a resource because it needs to cater to

someone else's needs happens all

the time and again with the grain.

And I was also kind of

following this whole grain situation.

Ukraine is at war,

people are dying of horror

and grief, devastation,

but then the kind of pressure

of like you need to produce

grain and here's security corridor

for grain because, you know, you have to.

And so this kind of attitude

is just continuous.

So yeah, thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

We will just move directly to Oleksiy's talk.

One more question.

I know people are going to be coming in late.

Everybody could be sitting a little

bit closer so we can create some space.

Sure, absolutely.

Thank you so much, Asia.

Thank you, Asia, for the wonderful talk.

Can you hear me?

Thanks a lot to Asha Bukojemsky

for bringing us here.

Is it good?

Thank you, Laurie and UCLA,

for having us here. I have to

say I'm not really an academic,

but as an ex-academic,

I'm extremely honored to be speaking

in this room.

My plan was just to kind of revisit

one of the essays

that I wrote a year ago,

last year, and then maybe

just make a couple of points

about the Russian invasion of

Ukraine in my interpretation.

So a year ago,

I actually wrote a fairly short text

that was titled "The Case

Against the Russian Federation".

And when it was published,

it's been circulated relatively widely,

which was a bit surprising for me because

this text was actually meant to be simply an

outline of things that seemed

very obvious to me at the time of writing.

It almost looked like a bunch of truisms.

But to my surprise, after

the text was published,

I started to receive messages and reports

saying that this is the kind of work,

almost as if it's an eye opener

for a lot of the Western audience.

And some were saying that

my text actually forced them for the first time

to think of the Russian Federation

as a colonial entity at all.

I also felt that describing Ukraine

as a colony of Russia was something

absolutely new and astonishing

for a lot of people.

And in fact, I didn't know

how to react to this kind of feedback,

because on the one hand, it's always nice

to be able to get the message across.

But on the other hand, it also turned out

that the standard for us in

Ukraine that was taken for granted

for a very long time,

seemed like a total novelty

outside of Ukraine.

And it gradually became clear to me

that this wave of reaction

was actually kind of a sign

of a deep-rooted

Western misunderstanding

of the Russian Federation at all,

or knowledge thereof.

And I found it actually very disturbing

that we still have to be spending

so much effort to make the case

that the Russian Federation

is a settler colonial racist regime

that exploits and exterminates

its non-white populations en masse.

And if that's not crystal

clear to the global public by now,

at least in the intellectual

and academic circles,

then some really uneasy questions arise.

And first of all, the question is

what's really the use of this

gigantic machine of study

and analysis of Russia in the West?

If this machine has been turning

a blind eye to this kind of Russia's

descent into fascism for a very long time,

until the moment when Russian fascism went

into full genocidal mode and therefore

was not really possible to ignore anymore.

And what if this machine of analysis

is actually kind of complicit

with the Russian colonial regime,

at least in the sense of endorsing

and promoting this extremely

dangerous and problematic

myth of the great Russian culture

as something

completely separate from the kind

of not so great Russian politics.

And so

after a year of war now, it

is getting finally really difficult

to surprise anyone with the suggestion

that Russian Federation

is a brutal colonialist regime.

But still the implications of this

suggestion are really unclear to many.

So for instance, last year

I've been doing a talk to a German audience

on Russian colonialism

with regards to the non-white

peoples, mostly Turkic and Urgo-Finnic

peoples that are currently oppressed

and exterminated

as the subjects of the Russian Federation.

And after my talk,

some members of the audience were asking

confused questions, like

what kind of non-white people

in the Russian Federation

are we talking about?

Since places like Kazakhstan

and the rest of Central Asia

is independent from Russia

for a very long time.

Yeah.

And so it's been really astonishing

to see this kind of lack of basic

knowledge among the

Western public about

the inner structure and the

workings of the Russian Federation

that is still comprised of nominal

national autonomies, yeah?

And most of them are

non-white. To name just a few,

the Karelians, the Tatars, the Chuvashs,

the Bashkirs, the Udmurts,

the Chechens, the Dagestani...

I could go on for a long time.

And of course only a year ago

the discourse of equalization of Russia

was fairly marginal idea

that actually existed almost exclusively

in the former Russian colonies,

like Ukraine or Belarus,

and now it's finally attracting

global attention.

So there are seminars and conferences

on that matter that are organized at all levels,

starting from the small, leftist

reading groups to the panels

organized by the European Parliament and

even the State Department here in the US.

The colonial understanding

of the Russian Federation

is still facing a lot of obstacles.

One of them, it seems

is that the Western colonial discourse itself,

seems to be strangely Western-centric,

and it's partially blind to other forms

of colonialism that kind of differ

from this Western, European,

racialised colonialism as it's been

studied and written with.

And also sometimes the accusation

of Russia as a colonial empire is often

misunderstood as some acceleration

of Western colonial powers.

But this is totally misleading.

In fact, Russia itself is a Western,

white colonial power

that's in a perpetual state of war with

its supporters, whether white or non-white.

Russia's war in Ukraine

is actually one of many.

And in this context,

I would just like to make several

clarifying statements with regards to this

ongoing war.

So my point one is, unsurprisingly,

this is an imperial war.

So what we are witnessing right now

is actually a third

and potentially final act

of the dissolution of the Russian Empire.

The first act started in 1917

with the February revolution

culminated in Lenin's decision to accept

the independence of some of Russia's

former provinces,

Ukraine, as well.

The second act of its demise

followed in 1991

with the crumbling of the Russian Empire,

which was reconstructed by Stalin

within the borders of the Soviet Union.

And the third act

actually started immediately

after the Soviet collapse,

when the colonized nations did not have

their own socialist republics,

did not get independence in 1991, yet

intensified their colonial effort.

Most notably, I mean, of course,

the independence movements

in Tatarstan.

So in fact, since the

emergence of Russian Federation

as a sovereign state in 1991,

it's been mired in really brutal

internal conflict, a de facto civil war

that has been taking a variety of forms

over time and basically

to prevent this internal strife

from consuming its own colonized territories,

the Russian government has been exporting

this violence outside its own borders,

to the territories of its former

colonies, first to Georgia and Ukraine.

And so, in fact, we see the collapse

of the Russian Federation

not really

just as a possible

outcome of the invasion of Ukraine.

And this collapse is, in fact,

already happening right now.

It's a protracted reality that we live in.

So this allegedly irrational invasion of Ukraine

is actually just one of the symptoms

of this ongoing cataclysm.

So the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine

because it thought this would

prevent its collapse, its demise,

but in fact, the invasion only accelerated

this campaign of its demise.

It's become a kind of

self-fulfilling prophecy.

So my second point is

that this is a climate war,

and as we know, the Russian Federation colonizes

and exploits its fossil fuel rich lands

just as it colonizes and exploits its peoples.

In fact, these lands ended up in

the Russian possession as a result of this

brutal extermination of local populations

and this multiple genocide

were carried out with such brutality

that even the basic facts about these

massacres have been erased

from public knowledge,

and they're barely registered

in a global history of Eurasia even.

And so, in fact, the Russian

oil and gas that's

so eagerly consumed in the West

actually originate from the

unceded lands of Siberia in the Arctic

where indigenous peoples

are subjected to ongoing extermination.

In that sense, Ukraine has plenty

in common with, for instance,

the Russian occupied

peninsula of Yamal,

which feeds the Russian fossil

fuel industry with natural gas,

and then, of course,

Yamal and Ukraine

are just links in the fossil

fuel supply chains

that stretch from Russia to the West

and the infamous Nord Stream

pipeline is just the most notorious

example of those chains.

But now we

have global fossil fuel consumption

in decline.

The Russian Federation has emerged

as one of the biggest losers

of this ongoing climate crisis,

which it very much helped to bring about.

And of course, this invasion of Ukraine

is a desperate attempt

to survive this ultimate failure

of Russia as the declining raw

material abundance of the West.

And so the third and final point is that

this is a capitalist war.

Russia is an empire that colonizes

and uses lands for resources, but it's

also a resource colony

of the West itself, which requires

these resources from Russia.

And the inconvenient truth

about this invasion

is that it's initially been largely funded

actually by the Western

and most notably German public

money in the form of this

fossil fuel revenues that have been paid

to Russia over the decades

and helped create

this militaristic machine regime.

But on the deeper level, which

means the regime is, in fact,

nothing but the product of

Western politics itself.

It's actually an outcome

of one of the most refined

and uncompromised

Westernization processes

in Russian history

that took place in the 1990s.

And of course, certainly this

Westernization, at that time, took form

of probably the most extreme and

fundamentalist market reforms in history.

So in the post-Soviet Russia

and other post-Soviet republics,

the conditions in the 1990s

seemed like you could install

some of the most free market

regimes ever seen.

And this was the moment of capitalism

that was completely devoid

of checks and balances

that actually make Western

capitalist models

relatively viable.

Here, in our part of the world,

the market fundamentalists

saw a chance to get even more capitalist.

This would never be possible in the US.

And so you have the workers'

rights movement fundamentally

defeated and disoriented,

The unions were non-existent

and the ideology of equity and greed

found a very fertile ground

in the population after decades

of sort of socialist collectivism.

And so the evolution of this pure

market model was very clear

in the example of Russia.

We know that it leads to.

It leads to monopolistic capitalism,

then to right wing authoritarianism,

and then to outright militarized fascism.

But the origins of this regime

actually align with the strategy

that the unionists of the Cold War

decided to apply to the losers.

So in fact,

when we talk about the support

of Ukraine in the West,

it's not really a matter of solidarity

or charity.

It's a matter of trying to fix the West's

constructed mistakes of recent past.

And of course it might be confusing

to someone that the white settler

empire of the United States found itself

supporting a liberating

anti-colonial struggle

against another white empire,

it is the Russian Federation.

And of course, in case of Russia, the West

does not oppose some kind of exotic

orientalist power. It is just

opposing its own ugly double,

which simply took this racist,

extractivist colonialism to extremes.

And so the demise of the Russian

Federation is actually going to prefigure

also the demise of further constructivist

empires, the liberation of their supporters.

Well, first of all,

thank you for these incredible,

interesting, provocative talks.

The first question that I want to ask

is if there's anything

you would like to emphasize

or react to in the talk of

your colleague,

either one of you.

You've both summarized

really beautifully

some of the work that you've done,

particularly on resource extraction

and this kind of pinch, double colonialism

that Ukraine has experienced

and the importance of resources

is clearly paramount in this.

And I wonder if you could

talk a little bit more about the,

we could begin talking about

the notion of the granary,

which is such a powerful image

in Ukraine's history.

So Asia, would you like to

talk a little bit more about

the history of the image of the granary.

Yes. Thank you.

Well, it's in the text

and it's a very brief

overview.

And so this image came

about through this hybrid

processes of both Western European

and Russian empire,

kind of prospecting and searching

for suitable lands to find resources.

For this article,

so what I found that the first mentions

of these kind of very fertile lands

were already 500 years ago

and they were explained as kind of,

there was the search for lands, for grain because

of the different kind of social appeal.

But then also the political situation

in Western Europe,

the traditional sources of grain

were no longer available.

So there was a need

to find different sources of grain.

And the first records,

at least in the recent

about this kind of land, that were still

from the Western European point of view

seen as wild and barbaric,

kind of introduced that kind of,

I don't remember the exact word,

very fertile, it was favorable climate.

And so this is how it begins.

And then different mentions and different

texts pop up around this time

about this bountiful landscapes.

And then I guess

it just kind of starts accelerating.

But I think for me

it was interesting to approach it also

kind of through my personal,

like at one point,

most of my life I lived in Ukraine

and then suddenly I was not in Ukraine.

And then I just caught myself

whenever I talked to some people

then I would be like,

and there's so much sun and you

go through extremely rich lands.

And at some point I was like,

wait a minute.

I grew up in Donbass

and it's a really difficult place to be,

you know, and it's completely exploited.

And people were also exploited

and it's quite difficult.

And then I was like,

why am I saying this?

And so I spent a lot of time,

so my family now lives

a bit further away from Donbas,

but still in central Ukraine,

and this kind of exploitation and maybe

even heavily industrialist,

you see it everywhere.

Why? Why do I say it? And then I just

started paying attention to why.

And for example, the first

book that was published,

the first history book that

was published when Ukraine became

independent [. . .]

And so I went to school in the nineties.

And so this was kind of

the first wave of Ukrainisation

and kind of separating

from Soviet Union.

So this was the book that I read.

I think he passed away

just a year or two ago,

and he was part of

Ukrainian diaspora in Canada,

and a historian.

And I love this book.

I left Ukraine now,

but I have this book with me

and it's just really amazing.

But when you open it, and it's a big book,

and you start reading it and it starts

like, even in ancient Greek documents,

Herodotus went traveling da da da,

and then the sun and amazing landscapes

and so much of everything.

And then if you read it,

it was interested in

this imagination, how it constructs

and why I am repeating it myself.

And then you read, for example...

So this was the first book

that was part of the construction

of national narrative, right?

So this image was internalized so deeply.

So we kind also, and this is something

that Ukrainian people do, they try to

be, and this is I think it can be

a bigger conversation about like

these other places that need to get,

you know, the West interested in them.

But Ukraine does it through

this kind of self-resourcification quite

often and it's such a part

of the narrative that we have so much,

you know, and again, I think

there's also an interesting overlap.

So, you know, this Mother Nature

and then Ukrainian women and what not.

So this kind of giving aspect of it.

And I was looking also into the

current people in politics.

Oftentimes, I mean, in Ukraine,

politics and business are inseparable,

like in many places.

And then kind of the packages,

the proposals that come

out of Ukraine, that you can

invest. Even now, Ukraine is at war.

And now I live in Germany,

and everywhere is like: invest,

invest in Ukraine, because

there are so many opportunities.

And so this is heavily internalized.

And this is something

that I also suggest

in the text, that this

kind of, and it's a longer

discussion again, how these processes of

kind of colonial construction of knowledge

eventually make subjective life

difficult, in terms of

like some ideas are internalized

or even if like for politicians

who are now kind of making deals

with the EU about the energy, it's kind of

still they reiterate these tropes.

And something that I

touched upon in the talk

as well, that the subjective life,

I mean, the things that

actually come from people,

because oligarchs, of course,

are interested in these deals,

and this whole scenario between

Russia, Ukraine and Europe,

and it's been sustained like this

forever, because it was beneficial

for those in power, right?

But the subjective life and Maidan,

it was not a nationalist movement.

It was a movement

against the abuse of power

and also the kind of type of

governing through oligarchy, right?

So it's kind of this request

for a different type of governance.

So yes, this is very meandering answer.

Thank you.

That actually segues into a question to Oleksiy.

In your writing,

you have this wonderful

phrase, it's a little bit

about oppression in every Ukrainian

and every Russian, and you

discuss the relationship

between colony and metropole

and the kind of

consciousness that that entails,

including the internalization

of certain kinds of myths.

And I'm wondering, you write

about the formation of

a new consciousness in Ukraine

and what kinds of ideas

you have about the ways

in which that repetition of myths

can be escaped in the circumstances

that you've outlined.

Thanks for bringing us both.

I just want to clarify first

before I answer

about the position from which I am speaking.

So, of course, I am speaking

as a Ukrainian citizen, righ?

But also in my rant against the Russian Federation,

I'm also speaking as a Russian.

So not only kind of ethnically partly

Russian, but also as a saboteur of

the Russian Imperial project,

that I've witnessed in the Soviet

Union myself, a product of

kind of late Soviet

national politics, yeah?

So I was brought partly, as all of us

in Ukraine, into this colonial context

of Russian culture, brought

up in the Russian culture,

which I think, gives us, the

saboteurs of this empire,

an advantage in understanding the workings

of basic Russian culture.

I would even claim that

maybe we would be able to understand

Russian culture as saboteurs a little

bit better than people in the metropole,

because we see them from

basically a different angle.

Of course, a lot of

these historical myths

that I was dealing with

when I was writing this essay last year,

of course, I know it's a very shaky ground.

And this idea of Ukraine

somehow being

proto-state in the medieval times

has nothing to do with historical reality.

So there's absolutely no continuity

between whatever medieval entities

existed on the territory of Ukraine.

In fact, they were Scandinavian colonies, basically.

But because the Russian

imperialists,

starting in the 19th century,

kind of invented this idea

that Kyiv is their projected

Russian myth, or the Russian state even.

And since then, this idea

has evolved into this

really kind of genocidal approach

taken on by

Putinism.

So I hope that some of these

imperial myths could be kind of turned

against themselves.

And there is a kind of

sinister logic that's hard

to deny in this

key Russian imperialist fear

of Ukraine as an independent state.

Assuming that Russians and Ukrainians

are basically the same, you know,

that Ukrainians don't exist,

Ukrainians are just Russians.

And Ukrainians are allowed to do

all of these things

that they're allowed to do in Ukraine

that are not allowed in Russia.

Then according to

this imperialist logic,

then all of this can be possible

in Russia as well.

And that kind of completely

destroys the foundation of

Russian autocratic model, yeah?

May I add something to that?

I just want to say,

I mean, also the title of the

talk came from Olekiy.

And I think it is important

to understand that there is also

kind of a loss of humor in

approaching Russia like that,

and kind of like trolling it.

And I think it's also important about

the kind of the overall experience

in Ukraine, because there is lots of

humor in this type of resistance.

And I think it's also fundamental.

This is what constitutes

difference. Kind of this

absence of fixation,

you know, on some

I don't know, like whether it's religious

or some kind of other ideological thing.

As much as we see in Russia,

this kind of like

fixation on some tradition

or the idea of where this land begins

and at what time. And Ukraine has kind

of constantly playfully reinvented

and we kind of constantly

laugh at our own.

And even, for example,

there is a huge, you know,

it's always a huge conversation about

Bandera and nationalism, whatever.

But then Jewish people in the Ukraine

start calling themselves [. . .].

And there is this constant

subversion of any possible anything.

And there was a really nice article

that I constantly refer to.

It was written after Maidan by a Russian

post-colonial scholar Ilya Gerasimov,

who wrote Ukraine's First Post-Colonial Revolution

and Counterrevolution, where he analyzes

this kind of like absence of fixation

on any fundamental truth,

but this kind of creative force,

and then the kind of the reason

why there was Maidan is like human rights,

abuse of power and so on, and not fixation

on any form of, like identity for all.

And I think this is really powerful.

At least to me and everything that

Sasha says makes sense,

but I also see this kind of like vibe

of just like kind of also

pissing Russians off, you know,

constantly provoking

how they're thinking about themselves

and just how seriously they take

their imperial... because, you know,

they hold on to this imperial

image of themselves so strongly,

but what is behind this is not clear.

Thank you, that's great.

I like the story, also Oleksiy,

in your essay

about your coming to consciousness,

so to speak in quotes, of being Ukrainian

by passing by book stalls

and realizing that

the Ukrainians were grouped along with,

you know, various other beatniks,

hippies, leftists,

you know, other Jews, other

so-called despised groups,

and feeling suddenly that despite

having grown up Russian speaking,

that Ukrainian identity

emerges out of identification

with the opposition.

Before

we turn to questions from the audience,

I'm sure there's questions,

so I don't want to take up much more time.

I just wanted to point out

that both of you are in the arts

and have other

kinds of activities and interests.

Asia, you've worked

a lot on the Digital Silk Road

and it would be great

to hear some comments

and your thoughts about

the sort of, as you described it,

you know, a kind of

moment in history where we're switching

global governance structures

and what is emerging out of that

and perhaps

what this war has to do with that as well.

And then also, I wanted to ask Oleksiy

about filmmaking

and about, you have a kind of dual life

as someone who has been very active

writing essays and communicating

through these really wonderful

online forums that attempt

to inform us about the position

of Ukraine, the history of Ukraine

and what's going on in terms of it's

of settler colonialism

and the Russian Federation.

But you also make films.

And I wondered if you could talk

a little bit about the mediums

in which you communicate some of the

ideas that you're now

working with.

So maybe first Asia and then Oleksiy.

Thank you.

Just a few words

about the research in China.

And actually there's also a film

that came out of that research.

So this kind of research, that

became part of academic writing

and then there's also film that is also

circulating in artistic spaces.

That was research and some of you

probably know about the Belt and Road,

this gigantic infrastructural project

that is led by China,

and it is an international project.

And the promise of the project

is global connectivity,

like to connect all

economic spaces through one.

The imagination is of one road,

but it's only kind of,

it's not necessarily the physical road,

but it's also kind of...

This is an example of

socio-technical imaginary.

This platform

that connects everything.

And under that platform

there's a different type of negotiations

with different types

of actors, state, non-state and whatnot.

So that's the infrastructural project.

And they have the sub project,

which is called Digital Broken Road.

And the promise

of that project is to build

an international platform

and everyone participates in that, like

every possible state. Lithuania

said no because of Russia.

And I have a big respect for them.

But like most of the people

have to collaborate. Also, something

that we mentioned before.

Again, like the situation in the East, is

just completely unrestricted capitalism, right?

And this is why people want

to collaborate with China.

You can do whatever and extract

whatever everywhere,

you know, through that collaboration.

So the platform that is being proposed,

and this largely overlaps with this

research, it is kind of my overall topic.

Is this kind of promise, right?

What is the promise? And the promise is

to build a platform that would aggregate

all Earth observation data

from various partnerships

and this data, the premises will be analyzed,

and then the Earth will be

understood in better detail,

and then we will save the Earth

from the climate.

So that's the pitch.

And again, it's so different

from the many conversations,

that are happening in Europe,

about how to make things greener.

But under that umbrella,

all sorts of transactions are happening.

So that was the research,

we were looking at how this

platform is and what it is not.

But you asked about the insights.

I think it's always interesting to see

like what kind of promise, because always

this promise

also lands in some fertile ground, right?

And in this case, like climate

rhetoric is an enabler for many processes,

and it's a continuation also of things.

Even when the UN was established, right?

And this is also the time

when the first satellite

footage is being employed

and the image of the blue planet

and suddenly everyone is concerned,

but mostly given with the first satellite.

Even with the first satellite, it wasn't

making images of the Earth, right?

It was collecting signals

that were analyzed in order to understand

like what's in the Earth's crust.

So this kind of like looking up

was in fact always looking down.

And so this exploitation.

And I think China, and using Oleksiy's

rhetoric, it's kind of like this just

unrestrained embodiment of these promises,

that were design also even

in the Western imagination

because the main promise of modernity

is like connectivity of everything,

access to anywhere at any time.

But now, under the

rhetoric of saving the planet.

But it's a massive extractivist

project, completely unrestricted.

The film is about that.

We kind of the communicated

that research through esthetic means.

You know, it's a big question,

but actually I don't really see

filmmaking

writing as something

completely different. It is actually,

of course, different mediums.

But writing is an important part

of filmmaking process

because I also write my own films,

script my own film,

the commentaries.

And like working in one medium

is like working in a different medium.

I would actually very much

like and hope in the near future

to actually make a decolonial film

about the Russian Federation.

But not just that, because like

I tried to outline in this talk,

it really doesn't make sense

to speak of the Russian Federation as

extractive colonial power without

speaking about Germany, for example.

It is basically a German product.

So the question on current projects,

I can just maybe self-promote

again the screening on Sunday.

James Bridges Theater.

A documentary we completed last year

in collaboration with

the great Ukrainian conceptual

artist and architect Florian Yuriev.

So it's at 3 pm on Sunday.

And Oleksiy will be speaking

about the film afterwards.

Thank you both so much.

And I just want to congratulate you on

doing this sort of

ethnographic research that you

do at conferences with

people who are in power.

You've done a lot with Nord Stream

and you're doing a lot on the

data extraction industry,

as we might call it.

And I think it's really fantastic

the way that you've been tracking

the powers that we are often

not paying attention to.

Thank you.

So let's open it up for questions

from the audience.

Yeah, there's a question in back.

It's interesting that you chose it

as your example, because in that movie

we tend to see the flipside

of your image or your

imaginary about the bread basket.

The extraction that

happens in that movie,

the corpses that are

pouring out of that herd.

And that's the flip side, seems

to be the flip side of the Ukrainian

imaginary, is that above all of that

super fertile lands of milk

and honey, of sheep running around with

wheels that have to carry their tails.

Is that underneath all of that, the burial

mounds, you know,

the various invasions of Ukraine

that have happened over the centuries.

So the fertility is varied, in some ways,

because of the death that has occurred there.

And I wonder whether you address

that in any of the work.

Were you referring to [. . .] movie?

Yeah, because for a moment

I thought about another

movie, which is called 11th or the 11th year.

It's kind of a movie about

the construction of DniproGas.

And there's actually kind of skeletons

and then flooding of the area.

So I thought you were

talking about that.

Let me think

if I addressed it. I think

in the initial version of this text,

which I published in 2020 in Ukrainian

and I think this is where I used

some stills from both films.

And there are some scenes

that kind of show how, you know,

masses of bodies kind of merge with land.

I did not articulate that the way you did.

But yeah, I think in my case,

because I talk about this kind

of bodies as lands,

of the old forms become indistinguishable,

right? People as resource

and kind of becoming that land

and being that land and seen as that land.

But yeah, I haven't articulated it

as you did, but thanks for your comment.

Microphone?

Asia, I want to ask a follow up

question to Roman's question.

In your work, do you make a distinction

between agrarian and industrial?

Or these two distinctions are blurred for you?

Do you look at it

conceptually as different?

And where would [. . .]

come in as a filmmaker?

Is he extractionist filmmaker,

colonialist filmmaker,

or is he still the anti-colonial filmmaker

whom he claimed to be

as much as the entire network of the left

front of the arts and their work?

Is he seen as anti-colonial?

Well, he was a part of the left

front of the arts,

of the network, which operated under

the anti-colonial premise.

Yeah, I see what you mean.

We see the complexity

of this whole Soviet legacy.

Because again, and I think it's also a pity,

and we had this conversation

many time in Ukraine

before the big invasion,

because, for example, this war

and this act of aggression,

it kind of draws this line

where we kind of like,

and sometimes it produces

this polarization, that we kind of

have to be anti-Soviet entirely

without specifying that.

Also, you know, lots of people

in Ukraine were socialists

and there is a huge, you know, so

this kind of being against Russian empire

and kind of building a

socialist country, but then

the infrastructures for,

you know, exclusion

and depletion within the Soviet Union,

that was not appropriately addressed.

And it's like such a complex thing

that needs to be disentangled.

And so the question was if I

make a distinction between agrarian

and industrialization.

I mean, not yet, also because I also see it

like a long-term project, you know?

And I was like, I was starting with

a bit of a background,

because the very reason

why I wrote this in 2020

was also because I worked a lot

in a Western context, and also

with the Belt and Road,

this research was traveling everywhere.

It was for me really problematic

because I'm very familiar with theory

about the environment, Anthropocene

and everything that is being produced

in the West.

And it's always like

humans do this and that,

and then somehow the whole

Ukrainian situation was really or

like other Eastern European

situation, would not be really fitting

because of these complexities.

So I was trying to figure out like

step by step what kind of framework I can use.

And I didn't go that far as to maybe

I can start thinking about it now

and give you an answer by the end of it.

But this was my kind of starting point.

That is to see how something is made

into resource.

And I think with the growing population

and industrialization.

And both of these processes can be seen as,

you know, the making of resources.

And I mean, it's a good question to think

about what kind of distinction there is.

Yeah, maybe Oleksiy can help me out.

I am not sure I can help you out,

but I can add something else.

Because when I was a student

of academia, I wrote massive theses.

I can even trying to speak

about a decolonial perspective.

So of course, a Polish Jew

who joined the

Soviet Union industry and

spent some time in Moscow

until he was kicked out from Moscow,

and he ended up in Kyiv,

where he made his three

most important films,

after which basically

Stalinism arrived.

And he didn't do much, yeah?

He did a couple of propaganda films.

He was definitely kind of quoting this

colonial/decolonial dialectics.

And one thing that we

should really kind of

be reclaiming now is the

idea that of all things

he was not a Russian filmmaker,

he was a Soviet filmmaker.

But it's a bigger problem

of reclaiming the whole notion of

what is misnamed in the

West as Russian avantgarde,

because there was never

such thing as Russian avantgarde.

It was Soviet avantgarde.

The idea to attach a national label

to avantgarde at the time

is completely ridiculous.

Later on it was appropriated by

basically, you know, Russia.

Yeah, it's a bit different

matter but I think it's present.

This whole topic of cyber colonialism,

and this is something I'm

part of a working group,

where we try to understand

what is colonialism,

especially in the Russian context.

And just thinking about it,

which sometimes really

can be uncomfortable,

because like one person

or like one group of people

in the Soviet context

could be both colonized

and be the colonizer, right?

For example, when white

people from Ukraine

are sent somewhere in Siberia.

And then like local population

is being like Sovietized as well,

or they are displaced or killed,

and then kind of the same

population becomes

someone who is forced

to leave Siberia,

but then they're also becoming

someone who settle on

someone else's land. And I think

this is also the complexity.

And there is an amazing book which

is called Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics.

This book was translated into 2017, so

now it's in English and it was in German.

So she looks at two figures.

[. . .] is one of them,

and the other one is [. . .]

and you might know her.

and she lives here in Los Angeles

and made her surrealist films here.

And so she was born in Kyiv

and then her family left.

But what was interesting

is that, um, so her

father was a psychiatrist and [. . .]

was also a doctor.

And around the same time,

kind of the studies of this Russian

psychiatrist, I think his name was

[. . .] or something, right?

So the kind of the studies

about how moving image impacts the psyche.

And so it's interesting that both

were reading that.

She through her father,

he through his professional

situation as a doctor,

being someone who was

trained as a doctor.

And for me it was interesting

also of to see this trajectory.

So we see both of them

kind of being captivated with this idea of

like what the moving image can do,

but they just land in a completely

different context, right?

He's within this like apparatus

of like using moving

image to construct a new man

in a new country, whatever.

And she and she wrote about it explicitly

and like,

you know, submerging

about this kind of surrealist scene

and then thinking,

and she uses her quote,

submit not to power,

but to powerlessness.

And like using this image

to produce this ethics through which,

you know, because in the

avantgarde, it was very clear

like a person that is affected by image,

it is very clear to what results

they have to come, you know,

what kind of thinking they have to achieve.

And it was like, yes, this is the space,

like how moving image affects us.

But then you can arrive to

whatever conclusions yourself.

And this is kind of a different space.

So I think this is for me

more interesting about this.

He just was part of that context

and kind of he figured he might be guided

through it, consciously or not.

But I think it was this kind of like fascination

with what the moving image can do.

I have kind of an annoying question.

I like both of your talks very much.

And I like the formulation

that Russia is

a colonial power that is

actually a colonized power, right?

So it's actually a colony

in Germany that's

behaving like an imperialist power.

I'm wondering which

part is more offensive

to the Russians,

be thinking of themselves

as a colonialist power,

an imperialist power, or thinking

of themselves as a colony

and subject to imperialism?

If you are asking me as

a Russian, I can try to...

Not really Russian.

I said it was kind of an

annoying question because

it's about, you know, what Russia

would find more offensive in this.

I'm not really Russian,

but I think that

eventually

they don't really care what

they would find more offensive.

Sorry, but they just know that a part

of this argument is very much used by

kind of mildly pro-war Russians,

because there is the claim that, okay,

we've been a victim. Victimization.

This is also very strong.

And every time I say

that Russia is a colony of the West,

I have to be kind of

very precise and clear about this.

But it does not mean that there,

I mean, of course,

it is a victim, you know,

but it doesn't mean that

any kind of victimization on

that side is appropriate.

Moreover, I mean,

things are even worse

and more complicated in the way

because, of course,

the kind of self-consciousness

of Russia as a

colonial empire is not

entirely nonexistent here.

It exists in Russian history

and historiography.

But it's always like they

never admit, the Russian

historians never admit that

they colonized someone else.

They always say they

colonized themselves, yeah?

Like Russia is a country

that colonizes itself.

And there is a long tradition.

And there's a big discussion about this

by Alexander Etkind,

who is a great scholar,

but he's kind of

reproducing this logic

in his book, Internal Colonization, yeah?

That Russia kind of colonizes itself.

You don't agree.

There is so much criticism about like

made up facts, so I just wanted to add

that yes, there's lots of self-victimization

going on in Russia.

And I think this whole resentment

was built on [. . .] ideologies.

Like West is too much etc.

And I also wrote about it on e-flux

just last month, about this

kind of problem with decolonial

discourse in the Global South.

Because again, like everywhere in Germany,

you're like, I'm going to entering this

decolonial critique.

The West is the source of all evils

and Global South needs to rebound

and it perfectly aligns with what Russia is like.

The reason why they're so offended

because West is this and that.

But this should be really

approached critically.

Like Russia was an empire and there

was lots of power and resources

to build whatever kind of

subjective lives they wanted, right?

But what I wanted to add, because

I am now in this working group,

with amazing people,

where trying to articulate

what is this form of Russian fascism

that is emerging or emerged already.

And so we have prominent

scholars from Russia

who are also publishing on

main platforms, and both

of them have written texts

about where they articulate

or make this attempt to articulate

what this Russian fascism is.

And we had two of them,

and we had an in-person discussion.

And it's really interesting

because the arguments

that they're making are exactly about that.

Like it's the West and Western capitalism

and nothing else

this past 20 years,

as if Russian imperialism

have not existed before, as if Russian

imperialism, settler colonialism

not existed like even before America.

You know, this kind of,

as if Russian chauvinism

is not a problem.

As if it's not like to read

what people say in

Russia. And it's not

even the past 20 years.

It has been there since

a very long time.

And I think, again, important

from where we make these comments,

because, I mean, you can

say that, you know,

but like when you read it from

two prominent Russian scholars

that read this whole article

about how West is source of all evils,

without acknowledging that

huge reason for this war is also,

or the reason why this whole situation was

such a fertile, you know,

because of these longer imperialist beliefs.

And I think to conclude,

to bring up our friend and scholar,

she wrote recently,

and I think this is a really productive

framework to think through because she

talks about this word through two vectors,

one of which is intra imperial.

And this is where we actually can talk

about, you know, Russia

or Germany or America or United States.

And so this kind of level operates

through deterrence,

you know, kind of this like negotiations.

This kind of like a game.

And then the other lecture is,

one is intra imperial, and the other one is

kind of colonial.

And this is what Russia does to Ukraine.

And this vector operates through terror.

So actual killing, physical killing, genocide,

torturing, murder and rape,

looting, erasure and so on.

And the trick is that in order

to be successful in this deterrence

and renegotiations between big powers,

terror must be done successfully, too.

And I think this is also

really interesting

entry point to analyze this relationship.

So there is one level and it

includes imperialism, shovinishm,

and many layers and layers,

and it's actually something that enables

the successful, you know, while people

are actually cheering violence,

you know, seeing Ukrainians dying.

And then the other one is this like

bigger one and this is where we can,

on this level we can talk about

kind of the past and capitalism

and what not, but we can not talk

about it without the other one.

And when Russian scholars talk about that

without that level, this is like

this is not acceptable.

It's very well said.

Are there other questions?

We have time for one more.

I have one more question.

Oleksiy, you spoke about Russia's

others and indigenous population.

One thing that I constantly think about is

that there many indigenous groups

were drafted to the war and they commit

war crimes on the territory of Ukraine.

So how do you see the future of this

discourse and could we rebuild from here

some sort of solidarities and carry

out more de-colonial work too?

Of course, and I think

this work is being done.

But first of all,

I just wanted to qualify.

I've been

repeatedly referencing

to the ongoing extermination

of indigenous peoples and

of Russian Federation.

At this moment,

one of the biggest mechanisms

of this extermination

is also war in Ukraine, because

people with non-white backgrounds,

and basically indigenous

backgrounds, are drafted to the army

in disproportionate numbers. Much

more than basically ethnic Russians.

And this is, of course,

also not the Russian invasion,

and indigenous groups in every settler

kind of country are more

exposed to this kind of violence.

I can observe and I can say that

these people are

basically the victims of Russian

imperialism. I feel, and not just me,

nothing but solidarity with them.

Maybe you have heard the racist

remarks about the Chechens.

And I thought it was a joke,

when I heard that.

It is fake news,

that basically, the Pope,

in one of his attempts to whitewash

basically the Russians said

in one of his statements that, yeah,

there are so many atrocities

being committed in Ukraine,

but it is mostly Chechens and...

We know that the Catholic Church

is a racist institution, but I mean,

Pope Francis was supposed to be

a little more brainy, but he is not.

Because there is also

this kind of reversal racism.

But Russians cannot

be that bad, they are white.

And basically, on a more practical level,

there is kind of direct

collaboration, solidarity

movements between Ukraine.

There are event,

within the armed forces

of Ukraine, there are

several kinds of battalions,

basically armed groups

that are incorporated.

One of them is Bashkir battalion.

So a Turkic ethnic group.

Ukrainian Parliament has recognized

the independence of Ichkeria.

There are kind of talks that

there could be some kind of

recognition for Tatarstan,

These are mostly symbolic gestures,

but I think we should actually make sure

we kind of slowly come to terms

that the entity called

the Russian Federation

will not exist at some point.

Maybe soon. It can be hard to imagine.

But also it was very hard for people

to imagine that the Soviet Union

would not exist anymore.

Yeah, up until 1991,

many people in the U.S.,

including the White House,

was really, really

unable to imagine the

collapse of the Soviet Union

until it actually happened, yeah?

And so I think we should just

be kind of ready to welcome all these

peoples and whatever

form of organization

they will choose to have in future.

Yeah.

Well, I want to thank our speakers

for the really fantastic talks

and the audience for your questions.

I want to point out that

in one of Asia's

writings, she does

tell us that

Ukraine is not the bread basket.

It doesn't have richer soil.

And thank you all for participating.

And please come to the film

on Sunday if you can.

Thank you!