My Virtual Reading Room

Ukraine’s past and present intertwine as a war historian seeks refuge, from Reuters

... Naumenko, 39, had been warning those around her since the beginning of December that war was imminent. A war historian who spent 20 years interviewing survivors of past European conflicts, she thought she knew what was to come. She stocked up on food, urged friends with children to leave the eastern Ukrainian city, and sent all of her research to her boss in the U.S. for safekeeping in case something happened to her.

Most of the people she knew listened patiently, but dismissed the possibility of a full-scale Russian invasion. To placate her, some of them booked tickets out of Kharkiv and then quickly cancelled them. Naumenko’s boss insisted war was unthinkable — but seeing how worried she was, he paid her two months’ salary to put her mind at ease.

“Nobody believed me,” Naumenko said. “Even my parents laughed.” ...

Liberation Without Victory, from The Atlantic

In a wide-ranging conversation at his compound in Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tells The Atlantic what Ukraine needs to survive—and describes the price it has paid.

...Humor in Ukraine is now mainly of the darkest kind. At certain moments, Zelensky appeared stunned by the cruelty of it all. He tried to explain why he cannot feel—why most Ukrainians cannot feel—much sense of satisfaction in their underdog battlefield victories. Yes, they expelled the mighty Russian army from the northern part of the country. Yes, they killed, by their count, more than 19,000 Russian soldiers. Yes, they claim to have captured, destroyed, or damaged more than 600 tanks. Yes, they say they’ve sunk the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Yes, they changed the image of their country, and their understanding of themselves. But the price has been colossal.

Too many Ukrainians, Zelensky told us, died not in battle, but “in the act of torture.” Children got frostbite hiding in cellars; women were raped; elderly people died of starvation; pedestrians were shot down in the street. “How will these people be able to enjoy the victory?” he asked. “They will not be able to do to the Russian soldiers what [the Russians] did to their children or daughters … so they do not feel this victory.” Real victory, he said, will come only when the perpetrators are tried, convicted, and sentenced....


‘Russia Is Completely Depoliticized’ A sociologist from Moscow explains how the nation learned to deny reality., from the New York Magazine

...A professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, Yudin said in an interview this week that most people under Vladimir Putin’s rule passively support his “special military operation” in Ukraine because Russian society has become thoroughly “depoliticized.” It’s been difficult to gauge how Russia’s war is playing at home after the country abolished the last of its free press and outlawed speech critical of the war, but Yudin — who is also an expert on public-opinion research — says two decades of authoritarian rule have made the Kremlin’s line easy to accept. If the war lasts for longer than a few months though, the mood may change, and Putin may be tempted to escalate....

Twitter thread from Greg Yudin, explaining the Russian propaganda narrative

The Final Pandemic Betrayal, from The Atlantic

Millions of people are still mourning loved ones lost to COVID, their grief intensified, prolonged, and even denied by the politics of the pandemic.

The Shifting Sands of COVID and Our Uncertain Future Has a Name—Liminality, from The Conversation, Sept. 14, 2021

Understanding liminality and its origins can provide ways to better understand the foggy, ambiguous space we’re experiencing right now.