Ukraine War Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

A Year After Cuts to USAID, an Urgent Reminder from the Ukraine-Poland Border

Documentary photographer Nancy Richards Farese captures the effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine and the US’s shutdown of foreign aid

March 9, 2026 • by Nancy Richards Farese

In Przemyśl, a small city on the Ukrainian–Polish border, the train station has become something of a moral center. Late one November evening, fluorescent lights glare against steel rails as the night train from Kyiv pulls in late—again. The delay is familiar now. Russian forces bombed the rail line earlier ...

A Year After Cuts to USAID, an Urgent Reminder from the Ukraine-Poland Border

Europe & Central Asia

Thinking in Dark Times: Life, Death, and Social Solidarity

Living through war can transform how we engage with philosophy

September 30, 2024 • by Aaron James Wendland and Volodymyr Yermolenko

This lecture was delivered as part of a benefit conference for the Ukrainian academy that Aaron James Wendland organized in March 2023 at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. The benefit conference was designed to provide financial support for academic and civic ...

Thinking in Dark Times: Life, Death, and Social Solidarity

Europe & Central Asia

Might the U.S. Military Support Nuclear Disarmament?

Its senior leadership is uniquely positioned in the present moment to pursue a revolutionary possibility

October 24, 2022 • by Robert Edwards

It is often difficult in the moment to recognize when one is at a crossroads. In the 1991 Gulf War, I was a lowly tactical intelligence officer in a parachute infantry regiment of the 82nd Airborne, rolling through the Iraqi desert beneath an air campaign that left smoldering charcoal where ...

Might the U.S. Military Support Nuclear Disarmament?

Europe & Central Asia

Different People

After fleeing war-ravaged Kharkiv, many have found refuge and hospitality in Poltava. How does it feel to be an internally displaced person in one’s own city of birth?

September 12, 2022 • by Andrei Krasniashchikh

The displaced can be recognized by their backpacks and the plastic bags they’re carrying, filled with humanitarian aid. Also, by their rapid pace. The displaced move fast: from explosion to explosion. ...

Europe & Central Asia

Part 1: A Just War?

Revelations of the War in Ukraine: An anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning

September 7, 2022 • by James Carroll

In nations bracketing the North Atlantic a great sigh of relief could almost be heard: how great to be free once more to demonize Moscow....

Europe & Central Asia

On Collective Responsibility and “Good” Russians

Preaching to Ukrainians that there are “good Russians out there who are also victims of Putin” is the same as saying “all lives matter”

April 11, 2022 • by Mariia Shynkarenko

Despite what I regard as obvious parallels with Nazi Germany, I still find it very hard to break the wall with my international colleagues who urge us Ukrainians to remain open to dialogue and even sympathy with ordinary Russians—the good Russians—who they say are “also victims of Putin’s regime.” ...

On Collective Responsibility and “Good” Russians

Europe & Central Asia

Nobody Knows What Russians Want, Not Even Russians Themselves

Can a kleptocracy have national interests?

April 6, 2022 • by Nikolay Koposov

Russia has no national interests, not even in Ukraine. Russians are denied subjectivity, the means of making rational and responsible decisions. Instead, they have state-sanctioned propaganda, rigged elections, pretend patriotism and a profoundly inhuman leadership....

Nobody Knows What Russians Want, Not Even Russians Themselves

Europe & Central Asia

How Did it Happen That People in A Country With The Third-Largest River in Europe Have No Drinking Water?

A Socratic dialogue on war in Ukraine

April 1, 2022 • by Ihor Andriichuk

How did we end up here? How did we end up in a world where people in the country contributing ten percent to the world’s grain export are starving to death? How did it happen that people in a country with the third-largest river in Europe have no drinking water? ...

How Did it Happen That People in A Country With The Third-Largest River in Europe Have No Drinking Water?

Europe & Central Asia

What We Can Learn from the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis

Ways to improve the global protection regime

March 23, 2022 • by T. Alexander Aleinikoff

The international refugee regime lacks a global responsibility-sharing system; so the vast majority of the world’s refugees stay—for years and years—in the states to which they first flee. ...

What We Can Learn from the Ukrainian Refugee Crisis

Literature

Boris Pasternak in Spring

A translation of the poet’s very early work

March 18, 2022 • by Inessa Medzhibovskaya

Boris Pasternak, a Jew by birth, chose to remain in Soviet Russia when the rest of his family, his famous father, painter and portraitist Leonid Pasternak including, had left, never to return....

Europe & Central Asia

Voices for Ukraine

What we want

March 8, 2022 • by James Carroll

In truth, we are writers without words for once: except these: "thank you."...

Europe & Central Asia

Against All Hope, I Hope

Notes from a young Ukrainian abroad

March 8, 2022 • by Mariia Shynkarenko

Our military’s acts of bravery are already a legend. When a Russian warship approached the tiny island Zmiinyi on the Black Sea and ordered the soldiers there to surrender or perish, they responded: “Russian warship, go fuck yourself!”...