Hi everyone, it’s been a while. I published the last issue of Eastern Radar back in February, five days before boarding a plane to Kyiv and ten days before waking up in Kharkiv to the sound of Russian missiles hitting the city’s outskirts.
A lot has changed, obviously. On a personal note, after three years living in Kyiv, I had been since February 2021 covering Eastern Europe from the Paris newsroom of French daily “La Croix”. But I’ll very soon be settling back to Ukraine as a freelance correspondent. I will not be doing anything else, which means Eastern Radar — which sought to provide readers with underreported stories from all over the former Soviet Union — won’t be coming back.
This newsletter will instead focus exclusively on Ukraine, but the goal will remain the same: to tell and show you stories you probably haven’t seen before. It’ll be a bit more personal too, as I’ll try and start each newsletter with either my own thoughts or stories I’ve come across during my reporting. The rest will be similar to Eastern Radar, in a more streamlined form — see for yourself in this first issue. I’ll do my best to publish it weekly, and of course I’ll be more than happy to receive your questions, comments or feedback. Hope you enjoy it, hope you stay safe.
Something to read
🏠 (The Guardian) No jobs, no homes: Ukrainians forced back to frontline towns (It was already obvious the last time I went to Donbass, back in May. I remember this man, waiting in line to get water inside the Pokrovsk hospital, recalling almost gleefully how some of his neighbors had been forced to come back to the city after running out of money while he had decided to stay put. Claims that many people had started to come back were already common.)
🌽 (Latifundist / in Ukrainian) How Latifundist leased grain trucks in the occupied Kherson region (Latifundist is a major Ukrainian news website writing about agriculture. In this investigation, they called Russian logistical companies and claimed they could lease trucks in order to understand how grain was being moved in the occupied territories of Ukraine. It’s a fascinating look at the way Russian business is taking advantage of the situation, and includes transcripts of phone conversations).
🚜 (Ukrainska Pravda / in Ukrainian) How war is changing the country (this piece interviews a whole bunch of prominent Ukrainian sociologists and political analysts about how they think the war will change the country. There’s a lot in there, from things already repeated many times — the war uniting the Ukrainian people, for example — to insights I hadn’t read before, such as the possibility of new dividing lines appearing between those who left the country and those who stayed.)
Something to look at
Anastasia Vlasova is a Ukrainian photojournalist who currently covers Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Something to watch
🚴♂️ Kharkiv local and astronomy buff Pavlo Pakhomenko published on his YouTube channel a lovely video of a bicycle ride he took with a dozen other people (including American filmmaker Lucas Brunelle) in the streets of wartime Kharkiv. It’s a fascinating look at what the city actually looks like in a situation where media tend focus its coverage on footage of destruction, which can give the distorted view that the entire city has been destroyed. Walking through the center of Kharkiv is actually a much more surreal experience, with most buildings remaining intact and, once in a while, a single building razed seemingly out of nowhere. Sometimes it’s an entire street that was destroyed, while the street next to it remained intact. The more you go north, the more destruction becomes the rule rather than the exception. Pakhomenko’s video includes English subtitles).
🏰 Several years ago, I started to mark on a map of Ukraine the location of abandoned castles. Dozens of them, from Lviv to Kharkiv, from Odessa to Kherson, with incredibly varied stories and architectures that reflected the diversity of the territories that today make up the country of Ukraine. It was a nerdy interesting I didn’t think many people shared, and I’m happy to say I was wrong: Ukrainian TV channel 1+1 released a series of 20-minute documentary shorts on the stories behind some of these castles, with 8 episodes freely available on YouTube with English subtitles - the latest looks at what’s left of the palace of Yuzef Mykolay Pototsky, a late XIXth century Polish landowner with a fondness for hunting, planes and exotic animals. It’s a lively look at Ukraine and its rich history in a way you almost certainly hadn’t come across before. Sadly, despite the historical focus, the present is never far: the third episode, shot back in 2021, looks at the Falz-Fein palace, a crumbling castle now located in the Russian-occupied part of the Kherson region.
Something else worth checking out
🔒 (Europe-Asia Studies) When Lenin Becomes Lennon: Decommunisation and the Politics of Memory in Ukraine. “This article examines the politics of renaming streets as a symbolic form of decommunisation in Ukraine. The evidence suggests that two mutually necessary factors—the interaction among subnational veto players and the efforts of toponymic commissions—explain the opposition to the renaming of streets. Regions with a high number of subnational veto players and low engagement by toponymic commissions have shown a higher degree of resistance to the renaming of streets.”
Will do! Thank you :)
Thank you for sharing these resources! I look forward to looking into the English ones, unfortunately I don't know Ukrainian yet :(