The Atlantic: Ukraine’s Quiet Depopulation Crisis

Ukraine nevertheless stands apart. It is still a nation at war, yet in a survey last year, 55 percent of residents named mass emigration as the greatest threat to their country—the UN estimates that Ukraine could lose nearly a fifth of its population by 2050. And whereas politicians in Eastern Europe typically invoke demographic decline as a justification for conservative policies such as restricting abortion rights and providing financial bonuses for large families, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has vowed to reverse brain drain by improving his country’s economy and rule of law. In December, he announced a program to draw young Ukrainians back from abroad with promises of preferential loans to start their own businesses upon their return. [...]

Why young Ukrainians leave places like this is no mystery. The country is Europe’s second-poorest, beset by corruption and low living standards, and it shares a border with the European Union. Furthermore, a war with Russia-backed separatists still wages in the east, and has displaced 2 million people, many internally. (Ukraine’s depopulation problem is also tied to high mortality rates: According to Ella Libanova, the director of the Ptoukha Institute for Demography and Social Studies at the National Academy of Sciences, 30 percent of 20-year-old Ukrainian men won’t make it to their 60th birthday, thanks in large part to alcohol abuse and road accidents.)

So Ukraine’s limited ability to stem emigration is not entirely an issue of political will. Rather, it is a consequence of the country’s place in the global economy: as a reservoir of migrant labor. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, the majority of first-time EU residence permits were given to Ukrainians, the lion’s share of whom moved to neighboring Poland. Remittances from overseas made up more than 11 percent of Ukraine’s GDP. That Ukrainians are heading to Poland and elsewhere in Central Europe also highlights the absurdity of these countries’ negative rhetoric toward prospective immigrants: “One of the paradoxes of [Central European] anti-migrant rhetoric toward the south … is that it’s only possible because those countries have benefited heavily from migration from the east,” Alexander Clarkson, a European-studies lecturer at King’s College London, told me.

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WorldAffairs: Ukraine Explained

One question at the heart of the impeachment case against Donald Trump is whether the president threatened to withhold US military assistance from Ukraine. In this episode, we explore why the US has been supporting Ukraine in Europe’s only active war and why Ukraine needs help defending itself against Russian aggression. John E. Herbst, Atlantic Council and former US Ambassador to Ukraine, Oxana Shevel, Tufts University, and Simon Ostrovsky, Filmmaker and Journalist at the PBS NewsHour, speak with Ray Suarez.

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Foreign Policy: It’s Time for Ukraine to Let the Donbass Go

The Donbass has consistently supported Ukraine’s most retrograde, anti-reformist, anti-European, pro-Russian, and pro-Soviet political forces. It was the Donbass that made Viktor Yanukovych, whose political career was dedicated to bringing Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, president in 2010. It was out of the Donbass that came his corrupt Party of Regions. And it was the Donbass that opposed popular pro-democracy uprisings in 2004 and 2014.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s occupation of the eastern Donbass in the summer of 2014 effectively disenfranchised its voters. That was bad for the voters, but it enabled pro-democratic forces in unoccupied Ukraine to win the presidency and control of the country’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, in 2014. Most of the reforms that have been adopted in the past five years—along with Ukraine’s steady march toward Europe—would have been impossible had the Donbass remained a part of Ukraine. [...]

The Donbass and its residents have been the war’s greatest losers. Thousands have died in the fighting; houses and infrastructure have been destroyed. The region’s economy, once an integral part of Ukraine’s, went into a tailspin, unemployment went through the roof, inflation soared—and the new regime and its thugs took advantage to enrich themselves. The separatist government helped promote the decay by dismantling viable factories and selling them to Russia. Small wonder that, for many Donbass residents, the best source of employment is the separatist armed forces. [...]

Thanks to Putin’s occupation of the eastern Donbass, his leverage over Ukraine also decreased. As long as a pro-Russian, anti-Western region was part of Ukraine, he could—and did—insist on being able to intervene on its behalf—ostensibly to protect the rights of Russian speakers, but in reality to interfere in the internal affairs of democratic neighbors. If the eastern Donbass is brought back into Ukraine’s fold, Putin’s leverage will increase once more. He’d be given an inroad back into the country’s politics as a whole.

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Politico: What Putin Got From the Trump-Zelensky Phone Call

Five years on, it’s still a hot war, with Russia constantly pushing forward the line of occupation. Some 1.5 million people have been displaced. The shifting mass of regular and irregular Russian troops in eastern Ukraine — soldiers and mercenaries; “separatist” proxies and militias; a lot of guys with pseudonyms using advanced Russian weaponry that Russia claims must have been bought at the local corner shop (note: it is supplied from Russia) — constantly test and adapt new capabilities, especially electronic warfare capabilities, on the battlefield. [...]

The dirty, confusing, irregular conflict in Ukraine is part of a broader political war waged by the Kremlin. In countless ways, this is the inevitable evolution of Russia’s aggression against its neighbors after Putin paid so little price for invading Georgia in 2008. I worked as an adviser to the Georgian government in the years after that war, and we watched as almost everyone normalized Putin’s behavior, emboldening him to press forward. Now, Russia’s army sniper school has been transferred to the Ukrainian front, training the next generation of elite Russian marksmen by having them pick off Ukrainian soldiers. Soldiers like Baklanova. [...]

Since the annexation of Crimea, there has been a lot of speculation about Putin’s long-term goals for Ukraine and the region, be it rebuilding a kind of Russian empire or disrupting what he views as another empire moving toward his borders. But in the near term, Putin knows that pushing for a pro-Kremlin alignment in Ukrainian politics — especially with the war still on — is a waste of effort. Far better to hope for what has succeeded elsewhere along the Russian rim, and in Europe, and in the United States: the sense that it would be nice to get along better with Russia, because it’s exhausting to live under a constant existential threat.

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EURACTIV: Ukraine president on course for unprecedented majority after election win

A pre-election survey by the Washington-based National Democratic Institute said 45% of voters expected Zelenskiy to negotiate a peace in the Donbass within 12 months — the biggest single priority among voters.

But 57% would not accept peace at the cost of allowing Crimea to become a recognised part of Russia — something Moscow is likely to insist on — and 62% would not accept peace if Donbass did not return to Kyiv’s full control.

More than half of respondents also expected Ukraine to be a member of the European Union by 2030. [...]

Another new pro-Western party, Voice, fronted by rock star Sviatoslav Vakarchuk, also passed the 5% threshold to enter parliament. Voice is the only party to which Zelenskiy has offered coalition talks.

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openDemocracy: The people’s rebellion, or why a showman became president of Ukraine

This, then, is a rebellious popular vote against corrupt politics-as-usual by people who are largely non-political. In this sense, there’s a certain resonance with the Gilets Jaunes movement – and like their French counterparts, Zelensky voters do not have any political unity or ideological coherence. Their basic common denominator is negation. The demands and expectations of Zelensky voters are heterogeneous and even contradictory, ranging from putting an end to the war and oligarchy to increasing wages, lowering prices and household gas tariffs. But in the best traditions of 1968, they are demanding the “impossible” – just social conditions that are equal for all. And 73% means a clear refusal of any kind of negotiations or possible compromise with the current ruling class so that it could remain in power. [...]

While Zelensky voters may vary widely in their claims about what they voted for, they found common ground in what they voted against. First of all, they voted against the war. And this is not a blind denial of the reality of warfare and occupation – this vote was against the war as a political and economic system of relations between the state and the society that has emerged in Ukraine during the recent years. Russian military intervention and occupation has poisoned the atmosphere inside Ukraine, creating the conditions for political reaction in the form of bans on certain social media platforms, attacks on anti-corruption NGOs, the beating and killing of activists, racist pogroms and so on. [...]

Zelensky isn’t a right-winger or even a conservative, but rather a libertarian in a very broad sense, while right-wing populism is exactly what Ukraine has experienced under Poroshenko’s rule at its purest. Throughout most of his presidency, Poroshenko has addressed the Ukrainian public predominantly in a discourse of narrow-minded ethnic nationalism borrowed from Ukraine’s far-right Svoboda party. He ended up campaigning for president with the medieval slogan “Army! Language! Faith!” – in reference to laws protecting the Ukrainan language, military reforms and the creation of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In recent years, various extreme right and neo-Nazi organisations have been legitimised in the public sphere as “activists” and “freedom fighters”, receiving the informal backing of the security services and law enforcement. They have remained unpunished for their committed hate crimes.

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Foreign Policy: In Ukraine’s Election, Pro-Russian Candidates Can’t Win

In the other 93 percent of Ukraine, however, things have not gone in the Kremlin’s favor. For Ukrainian politicians focused on consolidating their country’s independence and national identity—and that includes Poroshenko and most of the country’s political class—the status quo is tolerable. They would prefer to get Crimea and the Donbass back, yet Russia’s ongoing occupation has its benefits too. In seizing those areas, Russia chopped off the two regions with the least-developed sense of Ukrainian identity. And with them gone, no pro-Russian candidate could win a Ukrainian election. Long gone are the days when candidates such as former President Viktor Yanukovych, who was openly sympathetic to Russia, could win a majority of votes. [...]

It is less clear what Russia is getting from the status quo. The Kremlin has proved willing to bear the costs of occupation, paying for soldiers’ salaries, tolerating the collapse in Russia-Ukraine trade, and putting up with Western sanctions that will persist until Moscow agrees to return the Donbass to Ukrainian control. Why? There are several potential explanations. [...]

Yet Russia’s neighbors do not seem to have gotten the message. Just last year, Armenia tossed out its pro-Russian government, installing a younger crowd that wants better ties with Europe. Fearing blowback, the new Armenian government has insisted that its revolution is not anti-Russia. But the country is tacking closer to the West all the same. [...]

European Union membership for Ukraine is no more likely in the short term. But here, too, the Donbass is not the most important factor. More significant is the EU’s own expansion fatigue. Ukraine, with 44 million people, would be the most populous country to join the EU since Spain joined the then-European Communities in 1986. Integrating countries such as Romania and Bulgaria caused plenty of difficulty. Ukraine is significantly bigger, and it would be significantly harder to integrate. Existing member states aren’t eager to take on that challenge now.

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Politico: Europe’s Russia sanctions are not working

The motives behind the Kremlin’s operation are not mysterious. Moscow is seeking to reinforce its position in the Azov Sea and limit Kiev’s access to Ukraine’s eastern ports. In doing so, the Kremlin appears to be pursuing a similar strategy to what it did in Georgia, where its creeping annexation also took the form of constantly changing “borders” between Georgia and South Ossetia.

Intervening violently in Ukraine also shifts the Russian public’s focus away from domestic politics and back to the war in the east, at a time when Putin’s popularity has dropped to its lowest point since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, following a controversial pension reform. Today, some 58 percent of Russians say they support Putin, down from a 75 percent high last year, according to a recent Levada Centre survey published in October. [...]

Starting in 2016, the EU added another strand to its Russia strategy: selective engagement on issues of common interest. This two-pronged strategy had the double merit of securing political unity — to Moscow’s surprise — among EU member countries, while also arguably preventing the conflict from escalating further. [...]

This political unity will not be a response to violations of the Minsk agreement. It’s become crystal clear over the past few years, in fact, that the Minsk agreement will not be fully implemented. Neither Moscow nor Kiev is likely to budge first in fulfilling their side of the deal. They don’t see the point.

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Spiegel: The Forgotten War in Eastern Ukraine

But Sunday's election does in fact deserve attention, because this time they were less a provocation than the product of political negligence. It goes back to Aug. 31, the day of the assassination of Alexander Zakharchenko, the head of state and prime minister of the Donetsk People's Republic. When he and a handful of supporters entered a cafe that evening just around the corner from the government's headquarters, an explosive device went off above the entrance. [...]

After the explosion, Moscow -- which always seems to view offense and the best form of defense -- immediately accused Kiev of murder. The elimination of Zakharchenko, the Russian Foreign Ministry said, meant that Ukraine was transforming the hostilities in the Donass region into a "bloody war." The head of Russian parliament, the Duma, said he viewed the ongoing peace negotiations as having ended in failure and that the assassination "resets the meaning of the Minsk agreements to zero." The same day, security forces in Donetsk reported they had arrested "Ukrainian saboteurs" responsible for the murder and that they would soon reveal the men behind the slaying. But that never happened. And soon, there was no longer any talk of the alleged saboteurs either. There is now broad consensus that Zakharchenko was either killed by Russian forces or by people from within his own camp. [...]

A special commission is now examining "illegal" expropriations said to have been initiated by the minister. Among other things, he is said to have confiscated the property of a large Donetsk merchant market with armed fighters last year, embezzling 850 million rubles in the process. Even the markets and companies "nationalized" by Zakharchenko are now being returned to their rightful owners -- possibly even the Ukrainian supermarket chain that suddenly belonged to his wife. Specialists with Moscow's domestic intelligence service, the FSB, are investigating further cases of corruption, and armed separatist units have been placed under Russian control.[...]

It's difficult to answer the question with a clear "no." The leadership in Ukraine still has no idea how to resolve the conflict. It is trying to gradually win back land in the east and now has moved almost as many banned heavy weapons to the front as the separatists. Politically, the country is paralyzed until next year's presidential election. And none of the candidates have a plan for the future. If one considers that large cities such as Odessa or Kharkiv continue to be predominantly pro-Russian, an ominous conclusion becomes unavoidable: Yet another major political shift in Ukraine cannot be ruled out. That is what Putin is counting on. And that is why he won't be budging anytime soon in Donbass.

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Foreign Affairs: Sanctions on Russia Are Working

This was also a landmark in sanctions history. No economy as big as Russia’s has been subject to major sanctions in recent times. Only the restrictions imposed by the League of Nations on Italy, and by the United States on Japan, before World War II bear comparison. But unlike Italy and Japan back then, Russia is a key supplier of oil and gas to the rest of the world. An embargo on its major exports—a traditional sanctions tool—is all but unthinkable. Designing effective sanctions against such a hard target was a new challenge. 

How have the sanctions fared? Russia has not returned Crimea or withdrawn from Ukraine. Nor has its economy collapsed. But sanctions were never intended to achieve those things. Rather, they were designed for three goals: first, to deter Russia from escalating military aggression; second, to reaffirm international norms and condemn their violation; and third, to encourage Russia to reach a political settlement—specifically, to fully implement the Minsk agreements, which oblige it to observe a cease-fire, withdraw military equipment, and allow Ukraine to restore control over its borders—by increasing the costs of not doing so. [...]

Sanctions have failed only in their most ambitious goal, to nudge Russia toward fulfillment of the Minsk agreements. Russia’s routine violations of the agreements and its other actions, such as its recognition of identity documents issued by the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics within Ukraine, make reaching this goal less likely than ever. Russia is prepared to incur large costs to maintain its influence in Ukraine. [...]

If a critical mass of oligarchs feels its core interests are harmed by Western responses to the Kremlin’s behavior, it may begin to view Putin in a different light. The interests of political power and wealth in Russia will become less aligned than at any time since Putin asserted dominance over oligarchs in his first term, from 2000 to 2004. This will not lead to change today or tomorrow. But as the “2024 question” looms—will Putin leave office as the constitution mandates, and if so, who will succeed him?—tensions between power and money could create an important new force for change, not only on Russia’s actions but also on its governance.

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Politico: Fears of World War III are overblown

NATO allies also worry about Trump’s comment this week that it is problematic for the U.S. to come to the defense of smaller NATO allies such as Montenegro. But let’s not forget that at the height of the Cold War it was never 100 percent certain what the U.S. would do in case of an attack on West Germany. Former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt would not have asked for U.S. medium-range missiles in Europe in the 1970s had he had full confidence in NATO’s largest member. Nor is NATO enlargement off the table completely. Macedonia has just crossed a major hurdle in its push for membership. [...]

NATO is still very much exerting pressure on Russia. It’s considered more of an annoyance than an immediate threat in Moscow, but also keeps the country in permanent “war mode” vis-à-vis the U.S. Because Moscow is focused on Washington, this means Europeans usually get a pass. [...]

Should Ukraine’s leaders decide to repeat Mikheil Saakashvili’s mistake in 2008 and launch a major offensive to retake Donbas — however unlikely — the Russian response could indeed be devastating and lead to Ukraine’s loss of sovereignty, as Putin recently stated. But does this mean Russia will move on Ukraine unprovoked? Most certainly not.  

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Bloomberg: Putin Wants to Win, But Not at All Costs

This week, the daily newspaper Vedomosti discovered the casualties figures on the Russian government procurement website. In October, Sogaz, an insurance company owned by a group of investors close to Putin, won the tender to insure Russian military personnel against death and injury. Everyone in active service -- conscripts, professional contract soldiers, officers -- is insured. In 2016, that meant 1,191,095 people.  

Along with the requirements and probability tables, the Defense Ministry, which organized the tender published the number of insurance claims made in 2012 through 2016. Of these claims, 3,198 were related to deaths. The deaths didn't necessarily occur the same year as the claims were made, but the count should be close enough to the actual number of casualties. [...]

When Putin came to Assad's rescue, many Russians -- including some Putin supporters -- feared he might get bogged down there, as the Soviets did in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The Soviet Union lost more than 15,000 people in the 10-year war -- enough for the deaths to register on most Russians' radars. Nobel prizewinner Svetlana Aleksievich described the grief and the anger in her 1989 novel, Zinc Boys. In terms of military casualties, however, Putin's Syrian campaign has cost his regime remarkably little, and now that the fighting is almost over, any damage to his domestic standing is highly unlikely. [...]

As Putin increased and rearmed the Russian military, he has also embraced the concept of hybrid war, shifting much of the burden onto the shoulders of irregulars. In part thanks to that shift, Russia's military losses in 2014, the worst of the last five years, only reached 68.8 per 100,000 -- significantly less than the 88.1 service members per 100,000 the U.S. lost in 2010, the last year for which data are publicly available from the Defense Casualty Analysis System. 

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Al Jazeera: Is Vladimir Putin tired?

There is suddenly too much entropy in the Russian political universe. At least some people are acting as if there are no adults in the house. Political campaigns seem to start without the Kremlin's blessing, state TV channels contradict each other in their coverage of important stories, and infighting between Kremlin factions gets into the open. A major player in that infighting has been Igor Sechin, the head of the oil giant Rosneft, who helped engineer the arrest of Economy Minister Alexey Ulyukayev, but who is currently ignoring court summons for the same the case. [...]

Of course, the Russian leader is very much still around, his busy schedule reflected in daily news broadcasts on state TV. But as political expert Gleb Pavlovsky writes: the "the president is disappearing". Currently a critic of Putin's political regime, Pavlovsky was one of its chief architects in the 2000s - definitely a man whose opinion matters on such occasions. In the article, he goes on to describe the Russian leader as a "not-so-young gentleman dogged by power fatigue and accumulated weaknesses". [...]

If the Kremlin allows Navalny to register as a candidate, Putin is still very likely to win, but for him, that means stepping into unchartered territory. Will this let a revolutionary genie out of the bottle, as it happened with Mikhail Gorbachev's limited reforms leading to the colossal release of political energy which destroyed the entire communist system? Will it be interpreted as a sign of weakness by the hardline part of the establishment? And is this allegedly tired man up for the challenge of running a real campaign against a real rival? Can he run in an election that does not use the surrogate opposition leaders who helped the Kremlin maintain a semblance of pluralism in the last three elections? [...]

The second season began with the chaotic revolution in Ukraine, which allowed the political leadership, or - as many Russians say - the "collective Putin", to rebrand the regime by embracing irredentist nationalism and aggressive conservatism, a plagiarised version of the Christian fundamentalism of the US Bible Belt. That transformation culminated in the annexation of Crimea, which sent Putin's approval ratings soaring to almost 90 percent.  

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BBC4 Profile: Yevgeny Prigozhin

At the Lord Mayors banquet a couple of weeks ago the Prime Minister Theresa May didn't mince her words when she waded into the alleged Russian interference in western countries accusing them of sowing disinformation she declared "We know what you are doing and you will not succeed."

This week on Profile we look at the man accused of funding the St Petersburg troll factory which has produced so much pro-Russian material online. Yevgeny Prigozhin has moved from jail to restaurateur and close friend of President Putin, but precious little is known about his personal life.

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Al Jazeera: The death of the Russian far right

Today, most of the leaders of the ultranationalist groups that used to organise the march are either in jail or in self-imposed exile. Their supporters consider them to be politically persecuted and complain about increasing state repression. [...]

"Controlled nationalism is about using nationalists in some [political] games. In some cases, [the authorities] would support nationalists in order to keep the regime alive, to fight the threat of a colour revolution," says Anton Shekhovstov, visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Austria. [...]

That same year, the Russian authorities decided to finally do away with the November 7 official holiday celebrating the October Revolution. They moved the allocated day off to November 4 - the day Moscow was liberated from the Poles in 1612, an official holiday in tsarist Russia until 1917. [...]

In August 2011, DPNI was banned by the Russian government (the SS had been banned a year earlier). Nevertheless, the government allowed the Russian march to take place. On November 4, more than 10,000 nationalists, joined by opposition politicians like Alexei Navalny, marched in Lyublino with banners reading "Stop feeding Caucasus". Over the years, the central government has been perceived as being quite generous in its budget allocation to the Chechen Republic in the North Caucasus and has been criticised by both nationalists and liberals for it. [...]

The result was a "schism" in the nationalist movement with one camp supporting the annexation of Crimea and the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, and the other opposing both and supporting the Ukrainian central government. [...]

Human rights groups have been divided over whether or not to consider the detention and imprisonment of ultranationalists to be political prosecution. Human rights organisation "Memorial" considers that in the case of Belov, there are "signs of political motivation".

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Politico: Thanks Trump, for making Ukraine great again

Miraculously, however, Ukraine has survived — and even thrived — during the first year of your presidency. Amazing, isn’t it? Your government has remained committed to supporting Kiev in its war against Moscow and has reiterated the U.S.’s opposition to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. While you were busy bashing the “Fake News” media, both houses of Congress extended sanctions against Russia this past summer. They even tacked on additional penalties to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 presidential election, despite your vociferous denials of their involvement. It wasn’t some “400-pound man” doing the hacking, Mr. President; it was your bro Vlad’s Kremlin-paid trolls. 

You’ve shown yourself to be a better friend to Ukraine than even your Putin-hating predecessor Obama. You delighted Kiev this year by appointing a special representative for Ukraine, responsible for supporting the country’s transition to the West, and for ensuring the success of the Minsk peace accords. Your choice of Kurt Volker, a veteran diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to NATO, impressed even your harshest critics. He has been firm in labeling the conflict in the east as a “Russian-led war against Ukraine” and has repeatedly called for your government to provide Kiev with lethal defensive weapons and for Russia to withdraw its troops from the Donbas. [...]

As for you, Mr. President, I’m guessing that you personally don’t care much about Ukraine. You may have hobnobbed with more than one “Miss Ukraine” in the past, but otherwise, your knowledge of the country is “skin deep.” You probably hold a grudge against the Ukrainian government for supporting “crooked Hillary” during the campaign, and helping the FBI indict your former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, for tax fraud.

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Politico: Preventing disaster in Donbas

The situation is a ticking time bomb. Because the divided communities are geographically very close, an incident on one side of the line of contact will have an impact on people living on the other side — and beyond.

For example, earlier this year shelling hit a building at the Donetsk Filter Station, where 7,000 kilograms of chlorine gas is stored. Had it exploded, the damage would have been catastrophic. [...]

Despite the Minsk agreements that were meant to stabilize the situation, heavy weapons and ammunition continue to move into the region, and mines are being laid. Since the beginning of the year, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine has confirmed 347 civilian casualties: 64 killed, and 283 injured — an increase of more than 30 percent compared to the same period last year. [...]

If chemicals released by a misaimed shell were to leak into rivers or groundwater, hundreds of thousands of people would be affected. The flooding of coal mines has the potential to contaminate the water supply and devastate agriculture — even in neighboring Russia. [...]

In recent weeks, water treatment plants and pumping stations have been hit repeatedly near the line of contact. Over 1 million people in communities on both sides of the line are dependent on the South Donbas Water Pipeline — including almost half a million downstream in Mariupol. Their water supply is at risk, and temperatures remain high.

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openDemocracy: Eastern Ukraine: “We need new ways of organising”

The Eastern Human Rights Group (EHRG) — a lawyers collective that gives support to individuals, workplace collectives and community groups — is working with other activists to set up territorially-based workers’ organisations that will embrace employed, unemployed and precariously employed people in the region. [...]

Lisyansky reckons this could be the beginning of the end for Ukraine’s old post-Soviet trade unions — not only the old “official” unions, which originated in quasi-state Soviet structures, but also the post-Soviet “independent” unions set up to compete with them. Indeed, membership is falling: a worker who has been ignored at his time of need in his old workplace is unlikely to sign up in his new one. [...]

The EHRG has pursued claims for back pay by workers who were effectively abandoned by their unions at some of the largest workplaces, including the Severodonetsk Azot chemical plant, whose 5,000 workers are owed six months’ wages; Lysychanskugol coal company, with 5,000 employees at four pits; Toretskugol coal company, with 2,500 employees at four pits; and the Donetsk railway network. Workers have protested with strikes — and, at Lysychanskugol, with an underground sit-in and lobby of the energy ministry — and cases have been taken up by the EHRG and some union officials. [...]

The EHRG has participated in a widespread protest against pension reforms being undertaken by the Ukrainian government at the behest of the IMF. The reform will strengthen the link between the level of contributions and what people receive, and effectively raise the statutory retirement age, by increasing the term over which a person must contribute from 15 to 25 years. Lisyansky said: “Yes, I spoke out and will keep speaking out against this reform, which I think breaches people’s rights.” Both “official” and independent unions had protested, but this had had “little effect” on the political process, he said.

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openDemocracy: Disconnected society: how the war in the Donbas has affected Ukraine

The stigmatisation of people from the Donbas often happens precisely on the everyday level, with everyday people, in everyday life. People take the example set by politicians, who have never said publicly: “We are all residents of one country and we are all needed here, every person who has a Ukrainian passport is worth the attention and care of our state, whichever part of the world they might be in.” [...]

But it wouldn’t be quite accurate to call this protest “pro-Ukrainian”. For the people on Lenin Square, the most important motivating factor wasn’t the Ukrainian national idea (although that was also present), but resisting the spontaneous violence that had begun to spread not only through the city’s streets, but its institutions too, thus alienating the city’s residents. It was precisely opposition to violence that became an important element for people trying to assert humanist ideals and democratic principles in April 2014. All of this helped reinvigorate Donetsk’s local community for a time, its importance and faith in the idea that city residents could defend their city.  [...]

The subject of internally displaced people is one of the most divisive in the western and Ukrainian press. At the beginning of the conflict, displaced people encountered constant discrimination. In conditions of war, the power of stereotypes has only grown stronger. Despite the fact that many articles on tolerance appeared in the Ukrainian press, people displaced from the Donbas were still represented negatively in mass consciousness — poor, uneducated, politically naive and so on. On a personal level, I have encountered similar claims: “You’re an exception. But there are others, the majority. After all, it was your region that chose [Viktor] Yanukovych, and now we’re going through all of this.” [...]

The emergence of a negative image of the Donbas is connected to the fact that no one outside the region knew much about it, its character, its life, or the people who lived there. People only remember the fact that the Donbas was the heart of Soviet industrialisation, and that people from across the Soviet Union (including some with a criminal past) traveled there to build and restore it after the Second World War. The myth about the down-at-heel Donbas was fed further by gang wars in the early 1990s, as well as the background of its political elite — the majority of them (for example, Rinat Akhmetov or Viktor Yanukovych) had criminal backgrounds. The fact that the region remained conservative and nostalgic for the Soviet past didn’t help either.

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Political Critique: Meet the Women at the Centre of Ukraine’s Resurgent HIV epidemic

On International Women’s Day in early March, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) published a report stating there is an “urgent need” to increase HIV treatment and prevention for women and girls around the world. “Girls and women are still bearing the brunt of the AIDS epidemic,” Michel Sidibé, the Executive Director of UNAIDS, laments in the report’s introduction, pointing to stigma, discrimination and violence as factors that make women more vulnerable to HIV than men. [...]

Prior to 2014, Ukraine was putting up a strong fight against one of the worst HIV epidemics in Europe. Thanks to concerted efforts from government, civil society and international donors to provide treatment and prevention programmes to at-risk populations, by 2012 Ukraine had actually reported a decline in new HIV cases for the first time. It looked as though the country was about to turn a corner. [...]

The trends over the last year are worrying. According to the most recent statistics from Ukraine’s Public Health Center, part of Ukraine’s Ministry of Health, the number of new officially registered people with HIV/AIDS rose by almost eight percent in 2016; most (62%) of new infections came from sexual intercourse, while 22% from intravenous drug use. While deaths from HIV-related causes have been on a decline worldwide, the mortality rate from HIV-related causes increased in Ukraine by seven percent in 2016 – the majority (52%) caused by tuberculosis.

These official Ukrainian government statistics don’t include Crimea or the parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts not controlled by Ukraine (the so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic”). This means these figures could actually be an underestimate, especially since Donetsk, says UNAIDS Ukraine country director Jacek Tymszko, has long been an epicentre of Ukraine’s HIV epidemic. More than half of all officially registered Ukrainians living with HIV live in Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk oblasts as well as in Kyiv.

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