I really enjoyed reading perspectives from such different corners of the world and Ukrainian society. I used to be a Slavic major and I have followed the war in Ukraine very closely on Twitter; reading some of the accounts from 2022 reminded me of the shock and chaos that unfolded then, and it really did feel like a paradigm shift in which anything could happen. I enjoyed Allan Little’s overview of the conflict and his explanation of the historical context. I read Catherine Belton’s book Putin’s People, which explains how the KGB never really relinquished control of Russia and how many of the current Kremlin elite’s worldviews are informed by Soviet ideas of a greater Russia and a traditional Russian sphere of influence. It was interesting to see his experiences chatting to older Russians chime with this sense of a greater Russia.

 

I was very interested by Gia Kourlas’ piece in the NYT. What does it mean to profile one small segment of Ukrainian society in the midst of a war? I saw an article of a similar genre in the Times of London today profiling a casino in Beirut that is undeterred by the prospect of war with Israel. I think the effect of these pieces is that they can show how far war penetrates society. It leaves nothing untouched. Wars, like pandemics, touch more things than you could possibly think of by yourself.  I think there is also something very interesting about profiling dancers who are attuned to the effects of trauma on the body. This subject matter allows the journalist to show how the war has affected on a physical as well as situational level. I also like how the article draws upon the history of ballet dancing in Ukraine and is able to locate the dancers within the history of their country and culture. This all adds up to a profile of Ukraine as a country and society without ever having to say Ukrainians are x,y, or z.

 

I was fascinated by the topic of refugees and technology. The report by Preputnik, Nzuki, Yayboke, and Strouboulis did a great job of giving an overview of the implications of Ukrainians being so internet and smartphone-connected and how this is generally unprecedented in historical refugee populations. When I was reading the report, I kept thinking about how there must be a million human stories of technology being some kind of deus ex machina event in refugees’ lives. For example, being able to begin the asylum process online, receiving money from the UN on the DIIA app, or connecting with someone to take you and your family in abroad through social media. However, there must also be all kinds of horror stories of people being exploited in ways that were not previously possible. In this report and the article on HIAS by Zumhagen, technology was generally presented as a positive thing: for example, refugee preferences being taken into account in ways that were never before possible in granting them aid etc., but I think a job for journalists now and in the coming years will be telling the stories of the fewer people for whom technology was not helpful and may have actually made things much worse.