The Long War #44
Demography, convicts-turned-soldiers & Russian propaganda in natural reserves
KYIV—Hi everyone and welcome to this belated 44th issue of 'The Long War'. I tend to use this first part of the newsletter to give my impressions about the current mood in Ukraine or to lay down some thoughts I can't really put in the usual journalistic pieces. But while I do have a lot of thoughts, they're all a bit too unstructured right now, while talking about the current mood in Ukraine would essentially be retreading things I wrote about in previous issues. The mood isn't good and isn't going to get better. Kyiv and other large cities are bracing for winter and the power cuts that will inevitably come with it. I’ve noticed more policemen checking young men’s documents in my neighborhood. Drones have targeted the capital several times just this past week, the sound of air defense (staccato of machine guns, rather than the loud explosion of anti-air missiles) waking up people in the middle of the night. In Kherson, Russian kamikaze UAVs hunt and regularly hit civilians (“there’s no logic, you can’t grasp Russia with the mind”, one local told me when I asked why she thought the Russian military was doing this—a dark, bitter use of the famous quote by Fyodor Tyutchev).
Back in June, I wrote in this newsletter about Karlivka, a small Donbas village I visited three times before and after the invasion that had found itself on the frontline that month. Karlivka was destroyed and captured by Russian forces in late August.
Something to read
OPORA (in Ukrainian) | Demography and migration of Ukrainians | September 18
Ukrainian NGO 'OPORA' released last month this valuable compilation of data about the topic that will, more than almost anything, weigh on Ukraine's future: demography. It looks at population data, border crossings, estimates on the number of Ukrainians living abroad, number of passports issued abroad (almost 900,000 since the beginning of the invasion), birth and death rates as well as data about internally displaced people. One reason it is so valuable to put all these figures in one place is that most of those data points are incredibly unreliable when taken individually (Ukraine's population figure has been famously unclear since long before the Russian invasion), so you pretty much have to compare them to get a real sense of the situation.
This does bring up one major issue with this compilation of data however: OPORA chose to entirely omit United Nations data about Ukrainians in Russia and Belarus—the argument being that those figures are unreliable because they come directly from the Russian and Belarusian states. That may be true, but it's still a significant blind spot.
One thing I'll add is that OPORA has been looking at this topic for some time now, and has in particular focused on the impact of Russian drone and missile attacks on immigration. It published a fascinating report earlier this year that featured the graph below, showing how the first major Russian missile attacks in November 2022 triggered mass flight abroad.
NGL Media (in Ukrainian) | People behind bars | July 30
Lviv-based outlet NGL media analyzed court decisions allowing (or refusing) prisoners to serve in the military. At the time of the story's publication, 3,611 convicts had already been accepted into the ranks of the Ukrainian military since Volodymyr Zelensky signed the law in May—meaning that, two months later, that figure is probably closer or even above 4,000. It is a significant number, about 15% of the country’s convict population. NGL Media points out, however, that more than half of the sign-ups happened in the two weeks following the law’s adoption, with only a hundred people joining in the last week of July.
I recently got the opportunity to talk to a few of these ex-convicts at a training center in Donbas. It was certainly was different than other interviews I’ve done with soldiers: they were younger (the oldest was 43, the others were in their 20s), more cynical but also more eager, having voluntarily joined a unit deployed exclusively for counter-attacks and assault missions, the kind of unit that likely suffer some of the highest casualty rates in the entire military. It also speaks to the current issues with mobilization that NCOs and commanders praised the ex-convicts, saying they were generally a lot more motivated and competent than mobilized troops. "They aren't afraid to fight" one sergeant (who joined up in early 2022) simply said. One of the former prisoners I talked to (a 43 years-old former construction worker, sentenced to five years in jail for theft) also had what is undoubtedly the most interesting call-sign I've come across in the military: 'Koshchei', a villain of Slavic folklore more commonly called “Koshchei the Immortal”.
Vgoru (in Ukrainian) | ‘Askania-Nova' through Russian, rose-colored glasses | September 20
A different look at the Russian occupation of the Kherson region, as Russian film crews and media come to the Askania-Nova natural reserve and attempt to portray it as a peaceful, prosperous area that Russians should definitely visit. There’s a very intentional colonialist flavor to the whole thing, with references to both the Russian empire’s first foray into those lands (where the ‘Novorossiya’ terms come from) and Soviet times: Vgoru’s piece points out how one of the films uses the song “Alouette” by French composer Paul Mauriat, a song well-known in the post-Soviet countries because it was used in the introduction of a popular Soviet wildlife documentary series.
Chytomo (in Ukrainian) | Struggle for Freedom, markers of the nation and Polish swamps of Polissya: new Ukrainian non-fiction | September 6
Five books of non-fiction recommended by Ukrainian literature website Chytomo—I thought it would be interesting for people outside of Ukraine to get a glimpse of the country’s recent literary production. The five books highlighted here are ‘Discourse of Modernism in Ukrainian Literature’, ‘The Strength of Resistance. Ukrainians in Soviet camps’ (“25 biographical portraits of former prisoners of Gulag camps and Soviet prisons that inspire, move and make it clear that the power of resistance to the perennial enemy is in Ukrainians' blood”), ‘How to Understand Ukrainians’ (“Maryna Starodubska offers readers a look at ourselves, Ukrainians, and our national culture”), ‘What shall we call this war?’ (“We are at the epicenter of a narrative war—says the preface to the publication—It is also a war for the right to name events and determine their importance.”), and ‘The Lost World of Polissyia. Nature and people of the great marshes’.
ICYMI
Stories from legacy Western media published these past few days
The Wall Street Journal / Ukraine Loses an Eastern Stronghold as Russia Grinds Forward
The Associated Press / The fall of Vuhledar is a microcosm of Ukraine’s wartime predicament
War on the Rocks / (Podcast) The Meaning of Creeping Ukrainian Losses in the East
The Guardian / ‘Everything is dead’: Ukraine rushes to stem ecocide after river poisoning
Financial Times / Ukrainian energy minister censured over response to power grid attacks
The Guardian / ‘I want space for jokes’: how film-maker Iryna Tsilyk captures surreal life in Ukraine
The Washington Post / It was Ukraine’s ‘safe’ city. Then his whole family died.
Christian Science Monitor / How a front-line husband-and-wife reporting team gets the news out in Ukraine