War in Ukraine: How Has Our Analysis Changed?

September: Two and a half years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it’s worth pausing to look back — at our initial reactions to the war, at the assessments we made of Russian aggression, and at whether any of it needs revising. The question is a critical one: have developments on the front lines, and the changes that have unfolded within Russian and Ukrainian societies, given us reason to adjust our positions? A useful starting point for this conversation is the joint statement issued by the Russian Socialist Movement (RSD) and the Social Movement (SR) at the outset of the invasion — the only joint statement ever produced by the Russian and Ukrainian left. It lays out a number of arguments that have continued to shape analysis of the war ever since, and it’s worth holding them up to scrutiny. A few key points stand out. The first is the claim that Russian imperialism is political and ideological in character rather than primarily economic — rooted in Russian chauvinism, the concept of the “Russian world,” and the notion of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians as a single people. It is this logic, the statement argued, that drives the denial of Ukrainian subjectivity and Ukraine’s right to self-determination. The second is the framing of the war as a national liberation struggle from the perspective of the Ukrainian people. In the remarkable wave of social solidarity that swept Ukraine in 2022, it seemed that the far right had been sidelined — that the foothold it had gained in post-Maidan Ukraine was slipping — and that tensions between the state, the ruling class, and civil society had been subsumed by a broader unity in the face of external aggression. A third element was the hypothesis that a Putin victory would not stop at Ukraine — that the Baltic states and Poland would follow — and that this made a military response necessary not only from Ukraine but from Europe as a whole, in the form of expanded defensive capacity. With all of that on the table: what held up? And what, if anything, do you think needs to be reconsidered?

Vlad: I should say upfront that I don’t represent any Ukrainian left-wing organization and don’t belong to any particular faction. What I’ll offer is my own perspective, informed by years of conversation with Ukrainian leftists — though it’s worth stressing from the outset that the Ukrainian left is anything but monolithic.

A significant portion of Ukrainian leftists are now abroad — I’m one of them — while others have stayed in Ukraine. This distinction isn’t everything, but it matters. But even among those who remained, there are real divisions, both ideological and tactical. The Social Movement, for instance, has been working to develop a grounded social-democratic framework for analyzing the situation, while also trying to maintain its public legitimacy through cooperation with trade unions, media outlets, and other institutions — though this kind of work becomes harder in Ukraine with each passing day. Then there are activist and student groups focused on humanitarian and human rights work, and a range of other left associations, some of them not formally organized as political movements at all — more like intellectual “circles” [kruzhki]. The leftists around the journal Commons («Спiльне»), for example, tend toward analysis [rather than activism]. There are also clandestine organizations — some orthodox Marxist, some anarchist — mostly leaning toward underground modes of organizing.

All of which is to say: the joint statement by the Social Movement and the Russian Socialist Movement may reflect how some parts of the left saw things, but it doesn’t speak for everyone. It’s also worth remembering the conditions under which it was written — a charged, emotionally heightened moment, shaped by the shock of invasion and a powerful impulse toward solidarity. But underlying it was also a drive to differentiate: the Social Movement wanted to show it wasn’t the naive Western left; the Russian Socialist Movement needed to make clear it condemned the war and stood with its victims.

The statement’s sharpest criticism was aimed at the mainstream Western left, for whom imperialism essentially means US imperialism — full stop. What the Russian Socialist Movement and the Social Movement wanted to do was force attention onto the imperialism unfolding right on their doorstep. The war caught many Ukrainian and Russian leftists off guard, and theorizing it in real time was no easy task — but this was imperialism operating next door, and it demanded an immediate response.

That urgency pushed us toward an uncomfortable conclusion: the frameworks Marxist theorists had spent decades refining didn’t map cleanly onto what was actually happening. The Russian invasion destabilized a great many explanatory models and threw a number of tactical assumptions into doubt — including assumptions about whether the Russian left could continue to function within legal bounds at all.

The situation demanded action, and in that sense, I think the joint statement was the right call.

But reality asked more of us than simply discarding frameworks that no longer fit. It demanded that we build something in their place — that we actually analyze what was happening. That was the minimum. And on that front, I’m afraid, very little progress has been made.

The Ukrainian left, the Social Movement included, largely never moved beyond the initial emotional response to the invasion. Those who consider themselves left intellectuals in Ukraine fairly quickly grasped that pouring energy into clashes with the Western left was a dead end. Some of that criticism is warranted — but it yields no theoretical insight and no political traction, and the global left is already fractured along geopolitical lines without anyone’s help.

So that current within the Ukrainian left intelligentsia redirected its energy toward building horizontal connections with those resisting foreign aggression in other parts of the world — Palestine, Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America. That effort has had mixed results. The declaration of solidarity with the Palestinian people stands as one genuine achievement. But when it comes to developing any kind of positive program beyond simple solidarity with the nationalism of small nations, it has largely run dry.

The initial affective state, unfortunately, has calcified across much of the Ukrainian left — and not just within the Social Movement. The underground organizations are no different, and none of them have moved very far from where they started: orthodox Marxists still treat class as the only question that matters, with the bourgeoisie as the all-purpose explanation and everything else safely bracketed off; social democrats continue to pin their hopes on civilized liberals in power, despite receiving nothing in return; anarchists carry on either fighting the state or quietly filling the gaps it leaves behind. Nobody is seriously grappling with how to bring these intuitive, deeply-held positions into dialogue with a reality that has shifted dramatically beneath their feet. And there is no infrastructure for the kind of productive, safe collective discussion that might make that possible — but I’ll say more about this later.

All of this, it should be said, is happening against the backdrop of a Ukrainian society that has changed enormously since the war began. I’ll pause there — I hope we can come back to this later.

Nikolai: I should also clarify that I’m not here to represent any Russian left-wing movement — for several reasons. I’m not a member of any organization, and more fundamentally, there is no longer any coherent democratic left politics in Russia. There is no democratic politics of any kind. When that changes, we can start thinking about our role. Russian leftists abroad seem to have ambitions to engage in left politics in the West, but that project is still very much in its infancy. Either way, it’s a question for the future — wherever I happen to be when that future arrives, whether in Russia, in the West, or somewhere in between.

For now, I can speak more usefully as part of the left research lab PS Lab, and think about what left academia and Marxism might contribute to left politics down the line. That’s the perspective I’ll be drawing on, because the most substantive things I have to say come from research rather than strategy. I’m not really in a position to adjudicate who was right and who was wrong about any of this.

On the question of predictions: some anticipated the war, others didn’t. We at the PS Lab didn’t expect a full-scale invasion, but we didn’t rule it out either. That was based specifically on our research into the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) and Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR). Studying the political process that had been unfolding since 2014, we could see that the integration of the unrecognized republics’ economies and political systems into Russia — a process that seemed to be less deliberate than chaotic and contingent — has gone so far that it was already impossible to imagine Putin handing the so-called LDNR back to Ukraine. From that, we concluded that if troops were deployed, the scope of the operation would extend well beyond Donbas. There was no road back. Our sociological research, grounded in an understanding of just how chaotic that process had been, suggested this dynamic could be one of the drivers of a full-scale war.

But that's the details. The broader problem was that many people didn’t anticipate an invasion because they assumed that however repressive and authoritarian the Russian regime has become, it was still, at its core, a technocratic one. We now know that assumption was wrong.

Political regimes have never been my primary focus, but I’ve become increasingly interested in analyzing the evolution of Putin’s regime through the lens of counterrevolution. There is a substantial body of literature — including work on postcolonial Asia — documenting how technocratic regimes, when confronted with the threat of revolution, whether real or merely imagined, underwent what might be called a counterrevolutionary conversion: they grew more cohesive, more militarized, more ideologically rigid. Something similar may have happened with Putin’s regime, and it may be precisely this transformation that made a full-scale invasion possible.

If that’s the case, then the role of contemporary revolutions has to become a central question. Put differently: if Putin’s regime evolved from a technocratic one into a counterrevolutionary one, then the post-Soviet revolutionary moments — Euromaidan, the Belarusian protests of 2020, the Russian protest movement that gathered pace after Bolotnaya — must have played some part in driving that transformation. The question is: how do we analyze that role?

One could argue, for instance, that these movements were powerful enough to push the regime toward counter-radicalization, but not powerful enough to fundamentally transform anything in the post-Soviet region. This leads to an uncomfortable implication: that it was the revolutions themselves that set the war in motion. That’s a dangerous claim, and not a politically comfortable one. Revolutions are not, in themselves, the cause of war — that needs to be said clearly. But I think we need to draw together the debates among contemporary revolution theorists — the work of Mark Beissinger, liberal and left-wing scholars alike, the fifth generation of revolution theory — and develop a vocabulary capable of making sense of the dramatic political role that revolutions play, and the consequences they unleash. Those consequences can be grim. That doesn’t make revolution wrong. The contribution of left analysis here might be to think seriously about what revolutions could look like — what forms they might take, what different outcomes they might produce. And this isn’t a question confined to the post-Soviet region; it applies everywhere.

That line of thinking brings us back to Russian imperialism. As Vlad said, it was a blind spot — one that prevented many of us from seeing the war coming. Saying that Russia pursues an imperialist policy is a start, but it’s not enough. We need to understand what actually drives this imperialism.

If the driving force isn’t the one Rosa Luxemburg or Lenin described — the conquest of markets driven by capital’s drive to expand — then how do we account for it? One option is to follow Ilya Matveev and Ilya Budraitskis and shift the question onto the terrain of ideological theory. That’s a legitimate move. But there is another problem that interests me: namely, that in launching an imperialist war, Russia has in some ways ended up asserting itself more as a nation-state than as an empire. The imperial ambitions, in other words, haven’t gone particularly well — NATO expanded again, Ukraine has held firm.

At the same time, our research suggests that while nationalism is becoming more widespread among Russians, it isn’t imperial in character. What we hear repeatedly is: “We don’t need these new territories,” “We don’t understand why we’re fighting Ukraine — it’s a separate country, a separate people.” So at the level of popular consciousness, nationalism is becoming an increasingly common identity, but imperialism — the vision of a borderless imperial space in place of distinct sovereign states — hasn’t taken root in the same way.

On the economic level, meanwhile, Russia has been fairly successful at constructing a kind of economic nationalism: import substitution that works reasonably well in certain sectors, a form of military Keynesianism. The picture that emerges is a paradoxical one: by launching an imperialist war, Russia has reinforced an already existing trend toward the reassertion of nation-states — and in the process, has itself been moving in that direction, even though the war began as an imperialist venture.

These are, admittedly, purely theoretical questions. But I think they carry real political weight. The better the left understands the nature of Russian imperialism and what it has set in motion, the clearer its own position on imperialist policy can become. I’ll leave it there for now.

S: Thank you both. I’d like to return to a few elements of the Ukrainian and Russian left’s initial position on the war that we haven’t yet addressed — specifically, the predictive assumptions that were built into that position from the start and that have continued to shape the analysis ever since. The first is the framing of the war as a national liberation struggle for Ukraine. The second is the thesis that Russia will not stop at Ukrainian territory — that without a strategic defeat, the war of conquest will continue into the Baltic states and Poland. It is this thesis that largely underpins the skepticism toward negotiations and the conviction that there is no alternative to a military path to Ukraine’s liberation. And it is this position that defines itself, in part, against the Western left — which functions in this analysis as a kind of negative reference point, the stance that Ukrainian and Russian leftists are pushing back against. I’d like to discuss all of this in light of what you’ve both said, and in light of your own research. Has anything shifted? Do these hypotheses hold up, or do they need to be revisited?

V: Let me respond briefly to Nikolai on the question of what drives Russian imperialism, and then turn to the implicit assumptions around the national liberation war and the other issues raised.

PS Lab’s work on Donbas was one of the things that convinced me, over the course of 2021, that a large-scale war was a real possibility. That was the first piece. The second was that, against that backdrop, I was watching developments in Belarus very closely — the tendencies Nikolai has described as counterrevolutionary. At the time, I found myself thinking of what was happening in both Donbas and Belarus as anti-Maidan regimes. I had a sense that a particular model of social control was taking shape — one that could be scaled up. It seemed to me that post-protest Belarus, with its reactionary backlash, had drawn heavily on the repertoire of repression that had been developed in Donbas. And it was clear to me that any meaningful reintegration of Donbas into Ukraine was simply off the table.

There are other factors too — less theoretical than methodological. They come down to stepping back from the grand explanatory frameworks that we on the left relied on in the 2000s, during the twilight of American hegemony, when the structures of global domination seemed suddenly legible. My focus shifted to concrete trends. What was actually happening in Donbas? What was happening in Belarus? Abstract talk about the manifestations of global capitalist forces isn’t enough — you have to understand what is happening on the ground.

The second thing that allowed me to read the situation with some degree of realism was this: whatever shifts were taking place in Russian public opinion before the full-scale invasion, nobody in Russia was expecting a war with Ukraine. And yet, whatever those expectations were, the decision was made — not by an entire class, but by a particular elite faction — on the basis of their own calculations, their own worldview, their own theories. And those theories carried more weight than our Marxist theory, for the simple reason that they had the missiles. This has to be reckoned with.

In this sense, I find myself somewhat closer to the approach of Matveev and Budraitskis — though where they place ideology at the center, I’m less convinced. Ideology strikes me as too unstable and too eclectic, in both Ukraine and Russia, to bear that much explanatory weight. Decisions about going to war, militarizing the economy, mobilizing society — these are ultimately pragmatic, and in my view, rational. Reading carefully between the lines of the Russian authorities’ rhetoric, or the interpretations of it, you could see fairly clearly that the leadership was moving toward a decision on war.

What I think is more useful right now is to study those kinds of trends closely, rather than leaping straight to broad generalizations — even if broad generalizations have their place. The idea of counterrevolutionary rebirth is genuinely interesting from a comparative perspective, and the question of how it connects to revolutionary moments is worth pursuing. But the decision to go to war was not inevitable. The Russian elites could have exploited the dynamics in Donbas in other ways. That’s why I think it matters more to look directly at how decisions get made within the narrow circle of the Russian elite — at the actual mechanics of that process.

In some ways this elite has remained technocratic — what changed is its objectives. And that’s worth examining closely: what exactly are those objectives, and what vision of the world lies behind them? On this point I find myself edging toward what is called offensive realism — a framework I don’t particularly like, frankly dislike as a theoretical matter, and yet can’t entirely dismiss. Mearsheimer’s claim that Putin is his student is, I think, more than a quip: Putin and his inner circle really do read this material. Their reasoning runs something like: a window of opportunity has opened, we have the resources, so why not take it? The window being the decay of American hegemony and the rise of Chinese influence. In plain terms: “If we don’t act now, who’s going to call us smart?”

What this points to is the importance of taking seriously the working theories of global order that elites actually operate with — what the anthropologist Steven Reyna calls the “hallucinations of militant elites” that lie behind the decision to go to war. Domestic political factors were also in play, and the revolutionary episodes we’ve discussed form part of the backdrop. But none of this is single-cause. We also have to reckon with the rational calculus of these elites and the choices they made. And we need to ask a sharper question: who, precisely, is this counterrevolution being waged against? Is it directed at a faction of the state-capitalist class, or at something else entirely? We need to understand how the global capitalist class is fragmenting and realigning into competing blocs.

That’s my thinking on explanations that rely solely on internal factors — there’s something to be gained from them, but they only take you so far.

Second, on imperialism and national liberation wars. Let’s be honest: these are clichés. “Imperialism,” “national liberation movement” — as these terms circulate around the Russian-Ukrainian war — are not serious theoretical language. They are ready-made phrases that people reached for in a moment of danger and emotional upheaval because nothing else was at hand. That doesn’t mean we should discard them. It means we should be clear about what they are: political language, carrying political freight, built around concepts like imperialism and the clash between empire and nation-state. Personally, I don’t see much value in dwelling on them without a shared alternative language and theoretical framework to replace them. What is imperialism, exactly? I have no interest in wading into that battle of labels and definitions. The right starting point is the forces themselves — their contradictions, their relationships.

I’ve developed something of an anthropological sensitivity to the existence of this kind of language. Anthropologists have a technique for handling it: they put such terms in quotation marks or italics and call them “emic concepts” — the insider vocabulary of a particular group or worldview. That’s what imperialism and national liberation war have become. They’ve migrated from being analytical, historical concepts to being emic ones — fragments of common sense, pieces of a shared idiom. They can still be useful, both descriptively and theoretically, but only if you do the necessary work on them first.

Think of concepts like taboo, totem, hau, mana. All of them originated in specific religious or proto-religious contexts. We don’t ask the peoples of Central and West Africa, Australia, or Melanesia to explain how exchange or religion works in Europe — we take those terms and either develop our own theory from them or elevate them to a genuinely theoretical level. That’s how I would approach this newly formed koine around the war. These terms are inherently ambivalent: the right uses them, the left uses them, the far right uses them. Right now they are theoretical dross — material that has to be handled with care and always kept in quotation marks.

It matters to track what is actually happening inside Ukrainian society — what conflicts exist or are quietly building. Because, unfortunately, Ukraine tends to be read by the left, both in Russia and in the Western public sphere, in only one of two ways: as a victim, or as a kind of Eastern European Sparta. The victim framing rests on a particular picture of the world — one divided into nations and states that either repel each other like billiard balls or smash into one another. But that picture is theoretically impoverished, and it won’t do.

When leftists, including Russian leftists, declare that they too want Ukraine to win and Russia to be defeated, they imagine they are extending agency to Ukraine. But you can read it differently: they are actually stripping agency from the people who live there, or projecting the agency of one particular group onto everyone. Ukraine becomes a unified actor, a symbol, rather than a society full of contradictions.

And if you look at what has been happening in Ukraine over the past year, it is, frankly, a troubling picture. The fault lines now emerging bear little resemblance to those that formed in the wake of Maidan and the revolution.

S: Could you say a bit more about what those differences look like?

V: Yes. The first and most fundamental divide is between those who have participated in the fighting — people who have poured their efforts, their money, their health, their limbs, their families into this war — and those who, for whatever reason, have not. The second is the experience of displacement: what began as wartime refuge is increasingly solidifying into something more permanent, a diaspora in the making. And then there is a third shift: the disappearance of any positive ideological framing of the war within Ukrainian public life — even if only an emotionally positive one.

What’s left is just one unifying feeling. That feeling is distrust, and a deep, visceral resentment — a hatred of Russia as a state, as the force that has made normal life impossible, that has destroyed everything. That hatred is real, and it persists. But that is all that remains. Hatred has become the only common currency, the one emotion that still circulates across the different fragments of society. Nothing else holds them together.

Some groups do still genuinely believe in national liberation. They have an ethno-national project, one that the state is increasingly absorbing as its own. Parts of the left have translated this project into the language of decolonization — though without any real change in substance. It’s telling, in this regard, that Russia’s doctrine of multipolarity has also been dressed up in decolonial language. Mignolo himself has written of his anticipation of this new era arriving. But these ideological currents remain minority positions. On the whole, Ukrainian society is deeply fragmented.

What Ukraine is living through, in any case, is an ideological crisis. The fault lines run between the elite and the broader population; between different elite factions — those oriented toward the West and those more dependent on domestic resources; between those who have fought or are fighting and those who haven’t and don’t want to. These divisions are deepening, and there is currently no language capable of articulating them in any coherent way. None of the factions has anything resembling a compelling idiom — nothing that inspires, or even finds much of an audience. That, in itself, speaks to the depth of mistrust and suspicion that now permeates Ukrainian society. If hatred is what gets projected outward, suspicion is what governs within. That’s the picture.

So can this be called a war of national liberation? If we use the term as a cliché — there is a nation, there is a territory within which that nation exists, it has a state, and that state is at war — then yes, it fits. Whether there is something more substantial behind it is a question worth sitting with.

N: Vlad, what do you mean when you say that by calling for Ukraine’s victory, the Russian left is taking agency away? Are you saying that not everyone in Ukraine actually wants that victory?

V: Nobody really knows what victory means anymore, or what it would actually take to achieve it. Even the president has been hedging — suggesting that perhaps not all territories need to be reclaimed by force, and floating the idea of some kind of peace conference. There are more radical groups for whom victory means nothing short of Russia’s collapse. But at the same time, other groups are forming — still largely online for now — that are openly saying it’s time to stop. Some argue they need a pause before the next war; others say the country is simply exhausted. Against that backdrop, the calls to push forward — coming from the West or from pro-Ukrainian leftists — land very differently than they did in 2022.

S: Vlad has given us a picture of the mood and trajectories within Ukrainian society — so it seems worth turning to Russia as well. Nikolai, what can you tell us about how Russian society has changed since the war began?

N: The way I’ve come to think about it is this: the gulf between society and the state is becoming increasingly visible — to put it in the simplest possible terms. The fact that most of the people we studied don’t respond to the language of imperialism — the vision of a Russian world without borders — is itself a symptom of society and the state inhabiting entirely separate worlds. We saw this before the Bolotnaya protests too: society and the state in Russia were already living in parallel, and we described that as depoliticization. After 2011, a rapid politicization took hold in certain parts of society — but even then, this logic of parallel worlds persisted, now reproduced within a politicized state. The question isn’t only that the state has been radicalizing and restructuring itself in response to the politicization of civil society. The question is also that these mutually reinforcing processes are unfolding within a condition of permanent duality that is never resolved. That chaotic, dual character of the state’s counterrevolutionary transformation may also explain a great deal about the decision to invade.

Russian society, for its part, wants to push the war out of its mind. It doesn’t understand the decision — Putin’s decision — to start it. And yet life is finding a way to reconstitute itself. The invasion and the front line exist on one plane; on another, a new kind of normal is taking shape in the Russian interior, driven by an emerging economic policy that we’ve been trying to capture with the term military Keynesianism. There are ideological shifts too, but they follow the same logic of duality — because there is no democratic politics through which they could be otherwise expressed.

Russians are becoming more patriotic, as I said — but not in the sense of subscribing to any nationalist doctrine or embracing the state’s militarism. What’s strengthening is something more like national identity: a sense of “I am Russia,” of living together in one country in the middle of a war whose causes most people can’t even fully grasp. Many observers expected that because the state had upended ordinary life by going to war, Russians would take to the streets. Instead, the majority have simply gotten on with things — rebuilding their lives, adapting to new conditions, largely independent of the state’s military and ideological agenda.

When I talk about distance from the state, I want to be clear that I don’t mean the familiar liberal thesis about Russian society living “in the shadow” of the state. Russians are, on the whole, reasonably satisfied with economic policy and receptive to social support. What most of them don’t understand — and don’t embrace — is state militarism and the drive to seize new territories.

Liberals tend to reach for the metaphor of a social contract: there was an implicit deal between state and society, and the war broke it. But that metaphor doesn’t quite hold, because there was never any dialogue to begin with. The terms of the supposed contract were never articulated anywhere. When the state began radicalizing in response to revolutions and protests, it didn’t do so in dialogue with them, or through any struggle for hegemony — it did so in parallel, on its own terms. You might call it the radical self-organization of the Russian elite.

Something similar is unfolding in Russian society — with the crucial difference that society remains politically passive. People are learning to live differently, fashioning a new patriotism or nationalism that doesn’t map neatly onto the official state versions. The words they reach for may sometimes echo official propaganda — people watch television, they read the news, and so they may say that Russia is under threat, that the “special operation” was unavoidable, that it had to prevent an attack on Russia itself or on the “LNR and DNR.” But they don’t trust the state, which inhabits its own separate world. So even when they reproduce official rhetoric, they pour their own meaning into it.

They are becoming more patriotic — but what does that patriotism actually consist of? A sense that the country is in trouble, that the world is talking about it constantly and mostly unfavorably, which sharpens their feeling of attachment to home. Beyond that, Putin’s regime and the conservative wing of government responsible for the economy have been managing the situation well enough that people — workers and business owners alike — are finding new opportunities within the shifting system.

What Putin achieved through the invasion and the restructuring of the state was less a matter of leading society toward transformation than of changing the basic parameters of the whole system. People are making those changed conditions their own, adapting as best they can.

S: Can I follow up on something? Vlad described the state of Ukrainian society in affective terms — two dominant emotions in particular: hatred toward the Russian state, and in some cases toward Russians as such, and suspicion, a pervasive sense that no one can really be trusted. Is that a framework you work with at PS Lab, or do you approach it differently?

N: Two things stand out for me here. The first is that Russian society is in a state of deep collective depression. That alone sets the current situation apart from what’s typically described as rallying around the flag — which implies positive emotions, a surge of solidarity and purpose. Those are absent.

The second point concerns something that genuinely interests me: whether people in wartime become more or less attuned to their own emotions, more or less able to articulate them. Some of my colleagues think less. But based on my interviews — and I haven’t studied this systematically — I suspect the opposite may be true. Precisely because people have been left to their own devices in this new reality, with no political leader, no party, no project, no one stepping forward to address the shared experience of catastrophe and war, they are turning inward. And in doing so, they may actually be developing a sharper, more precise sense of what they feel. I find that genuinely interesting.

S: There’s one issue we haven’t touched on yet — the positioning of leftists and researchers who identify with the left. The first part of it is this: a significant portion, possibly the majority, of Russian and Ukrainian leftists are now outside not just the conflict zone but the countries they are actually analyzing. In public discourse, this tends to get framed as the problem of those who left versus those who stayed. Does that affect your research and your analysis? The second part is the question of self-censorship — and censorship more broadly. In both private and public conversations, there is often a quiet acknowledgment that certain things simply can’t be discussed without bias, because there is pressure from within one’s own community. Is that real? Have you experienced it yourselves? And does it shape your work in any way?

V: It’s a question I’ve thought about a great deal. Let me start with censorship and self-censorship.

A paradoxical situation has developed: I am still, in some sense, a Ukrainian researcher — or at least a researcher with connections in Ukraine who studies Ukrainian realities. And yet I’m the one speaking here under a pseudonym, when you might expect that to be Nikolai’s situation rather than mine. That paradox is itself revealing. It connects directly to what I said earlier: the dominant internal affect and mode of social interaction in Ukrainian society right now is suspicion.

What I’m saying in this conversation is not the kind of thing that would necessarily land me in prison. But it would generate a great deal of suspicion — and that suspicion has a way of ricocheting. It could touch my family, who are still in Ukraine, my colleagues, and others. And some of it, if pushed far enough, could lead to criminal charges, because Ukraine has laws — the law on justifying Russian aggression, for instance — that are broad enough to be applied to almost anything.

There are two distinct levels at work in Ukraine. The first is the level of suspicion — not adherence to some fixed ideology you’re not allowed to deviate from, but suspicion, precisely because ideological positions shift so quickly. What was unthinkable in Ukraine a year ago is now simply mainstream. Take my own research: I study draft evasion and those who avoid mobilization. In 2022, this was barely discussed — and when it was, it carried real shame. This was seen as a classic war against a foreign invader; how could anyone evade it? Now, avoiding mobilization has become almost mainstream, quietly accepted in certain public spaces. People don’t speak about it with pride yet, but it’s no longer condemned as flatly as it once was — because suspicion has crept in: suspicion that the state, military officials, and commanders can’t be trusted, that you can’t put your life in their hands. And who, exactly, is going to condemn you for that?

At the same time, those same draft evaders get accused of spreading “Russian narratives” the moment they speak about arbitrary treatment or injustice in the country or the army. This is the dynamic of suspicion at work: it tears society apart from the inside, while the authorities harness it as a tool of control. Whatever you say, it can always be made suspicious. Some group will always find something in it — and in that way, suspicion that might otherwise be directed at those in power gets neutralized and dispersed.

All of this makes it extraordinarily difficult for the left to develop any language adequate to describing reality. Which is why Ukrainian leftists are so hard to read: their language sometimes becomes almost indistinguishable from official rhetoric — not out of conviction, but because taking a step to the side is frightening, and nobody even knows exactly where the forbidden side begins.

Some Ukrainian leftists are serving in the army, where certain things simply cannot be said or discussed — the consequences range from prison to informal punishment. Others fear repression or persecution, whether from the state or from civil society itself. The result is that even internal discussion among Ukrainian leftists has become impoverished; very little actually gets talked through. And paradoxically, in some circles, there is more genuine conversation and exchange with foreign leftists or sympathetic groups abroad than among Ukrainians themselves. That’s what can be said regarding censorship and self-censorship.

As for the fact that so many left activists and researchers are now outside Ukraine — I don’t think this is as damaging as it might seem, at least for the Ukrainian situation. The divide between those who left and those who stayed hasn’t cut through the left in quite the same way it has through the broader population. In some respects, leftists abroad are actually better placed to study certain processes in Ukraine: ideological shifts, for instance, tend to be felt more sharply and more quickly in emigration. People there have access to a wider range of information sources, more avenues for communicating with different groups, and far less censorship and fear of persecution.

Inside Ukraine, the landscape looks very different. There is the state telethon and the official line that is difficult to escape. There is a professionalized civil society with Western connections and ties to the security services, capable of accusing the authorities of insufficient patriotism while simultaneously pursuing people for spreading “Russian narratives.” And then there is the atomized mass of ordinary people — hiding from military recruiters, looking for ways to get out, seething over corruption and arbitrary treatment, reading dissident Telegram channels or watching “suspicious” YouTube videos.

So while Ukrainian researchers abroad — men especially — have limited access to fieldwork inside the country, there is a compensating freedom that shouldn’t be underestimated.

As for research conducted inside Ukraine — surveys, sociological studies, or what might more accurately be called political technology research — these need to be handled carefully, with a clear understanding of how they are produced and for what purposes. That’s not to say they are falsified. It’s more that they carry a great many implicit biases and are subject to publication delays. They’re useful for tracking dynamics over time — but not for getting a reliable snapshot of Ukrainian society at any given moment.

N: It’s an important question, and a genuinely difficult one — not just because it’s hard to answer, but because it contains so many distinct sub-questions.

Censorship is, in itself, a serious problem. But it’s worth being clear that what we’re dealing with isn’t only censorship — there is also repression. PS Lab being designated a foreign agent, and Ilya Matveev being designated one personally, has been a significant blow to everything we do. It carries a whole set of legal consequences that we now have to navigate just to keep working.

Then there’s the question of being abroad. What does that actually mean for us? It means we face certain constraints that go beyond censorship — constraints that are fundamentally disciplinary in nature. Sociology as a field emerged, in part, as a response to the scale of social change taking place in specific societies — changes so profound that existing disciplines couldn’t account for them, and that demanded new methods. But it also required something else: a degree of stability, some semblance of normal conditions, so that those changes could be examined calmly and productively.

The post-Soviet region and the world are in the midst of sweeping change — and however tragic that change may be, it is, at a purely disciplinary level, fertile ground for sociology. But doing this work inside Russia — where some of the most significant changes are unfolding — is simply not possible. The risk of repression, or outright arrest, is too real. We conceal the identities of our interviewers and volunteers. Our work is, by necessity, clandestine.

And yet we have two things working in our favor: a relative freedom to do research in the West, and a network of volunteers, interviewers, and colleagues still operating inside Russia. But, of course, if we could spend more time in Russia ourselves — if we could breathe that air — there are things we would probably understand better.

On self-censorship: there’s an observation I’ve been carrying around for a long time and hope one day to write up as an autoethnographic piece. When we started out at PS Lab, we wanted to be radical left-wing sociologists — committed to engaged, politically avowed research. But when we turned to Ukraine, we quickly realized that Ukrainian studies was already thoroughly politicized without any help from us. And politicized in two directions at once: on one side, toward Ukrainian nationalism, which struck us as not only politically hostile but epistemologically bankrupt; on the other, toward a Kremlin or Russian nationalist agenda — far less visible in the West, but present nonetheless.

Faced with that landscape, we found ourselves redefining our own position — thinking of ourselves less as engaged scholars and more as moderate ones, committed to the norms of scientific neutrality rather than to any explicit political line. Part of what drives that is simply the absence of a left political force we could anchor ourselves to — one that might give our analysis some political traction. Since that force doesn’t exist, we fall back on the autonomy of scholarly production. But it’s not only about the missing left. There are also purely epistemological stakes: in a field as right-politicized as this one, fighting for the politics of truth matters in its own right. That’s worth naming clearly.

On what Vlad said about self-censorship and the pressure to conform to the correct ideological line — in Ukraine and in the West alike. It strikes me that rigorous academic and theoretical analysis, which by its nature has to push beyond the boundaries of official ideology, might actually be the most promising terrain for cooperation between Ukrainian and Russian Marxists. I’m talking specifically about academic research into politics. It could be genuinely shared ground — and it would carry political weight too, because the demand for languages that go beyond the official line will inevitably grow as exhaustion with that line sets in. The more insistent — and perhaps repressive and censorious — official discourse becomes, the greater the appetite for alternatives. Left analysis could be one of those alternatives. There’s a potential point of connection here between rigorous left scholarship, the impulse to exceed official language, and something more than analytical writing — perhaps something agitational, for which there will be real demand.

And finally: everything needs to be analyzed together. I agree with Vlad that we need to look closely at what is happening in specific places — but it has to be different places, not just one. Otherwise we end up no different from Russian liberals who gather at their congresses and declare that Putin must be removed, the Russian people must repent, and then everything will be fine. But nothing will be fine on those terms. We need to understand not only the internal but also the international roots of Putinism — there is no avoiding it. That is the large task that will confront Marxists in the very near future.

S: Nikolai, thank you — you’ve already partly anticipated our final question. It’s precisely about whether any kind of joint analysis of the ongoing invasion is possible between the Russian and Ukrainian left. In other words: can a united left subject be formed, capable of carrying out that kind of analysis while remaining distinct from the official consensus — and here I mean primarily the broadly European consensus, rather than the pro-Russian one Vlad mentioned in connection with what someone like Mignolo represents. Do you think such a possibility exists, and is there a genuine need for it? And what might such an analysis actually look like — or what might serve as its foundation, and what would follow from it in terms of action?

V: Let me first say a word in my own defense regarding Nikolai’s point: I’m not arguing for positivism or for limiting ourselves to individual phenomena. What I’m saying is that trends deserve particular attention. And at the level of analysis, in both the short and medium term, what bothered me at the start of the war — and still bothers me — is the tendency to collapse the distance between theoretical constructs and specific events, as if you could move directly from one to the other without friction. A kind of short circuit. Unfortunately, a great many Marxists still fall into this trap.

Theory needs to be adjusted on the basis of concrete observation — not in a positivist spirit, but by working to reconstruct larger theoretical frameworks through their application to specific, visible trends. Those trends are otherwise very easy to miss, precisely because they don’t fit neatly into anyone’s existing schema — not Mignolo’s, not those who focus exclusively on American imperialism, not those pro-Ukrainian decolonizers who see struggles against various imperialisms everywhere but remain vague about what they’re actually fighting for. There are enormous gaps here. But there isn’t much else to work with. I’m not saying we should abandon these theoretical constructs — only that we need to handle them with considerably more flexibility.

On collaboration: yes, absolutely — it’s necessary. It is hard to do theory alone; in an environment as charged with suspicion and hostility as this one, it becomes even harder.

One idea I’ve been developing is a study of the unprecedented wave of migration that began in 2020 — treating it as a single, unified process and looking at everyone together: Ukrainian refugees, Belarusian refugees, Russian refugees. On one level, this reflects the fact that fundamental changes have swept through the post-Soviet space and Europe has responded to them in one sweeping motion. On another level, despite all the ideological divisions — many Ukrainians hate Russians, look down on Belarusians, and so on — spaces and groups are spontaneously emerging where migrants are hybridizing and re-hybridizing across those divides. That’s just one field, one phenomenon that I find personally compelling. I think it would be genuinely productive to study it together.

There are many other possibilities. War itself can be studied from both sides. In a conversation with the Russia researcher Jeremy Morris, the idea came up of comparing mobilization in Russia and Ukraine — what it reveals, for instance, about the state as a form of organized legitimate violence, about state power, or about how states are being transformed by war. There is no shortage of topics on which meaningful analytical collaboration is possible. And that kind of collaboration, I think, would ultimately produce far more substantial political results than signing a joint statement or manifesto.

N: I agree with Vlad, and I don’t see anything standing in the way of collaboration. I follow Vlad’s work; our group has been working with Ukrainian sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko for many years, and I read other Ukrainian sociologists and historians as well. Marxists should be doing both things at once: studying the changes unfolding across the region — in Russia, Ukraine, and the other post-Soviet republics — in a comparative global perspective, while also comparing Russia and Ukraine directly with each other. Two countries at war are a natural point of comparison, especially if what we’re witnessing is indeed a transformation of both states. I also think the mobilization and state question is exactly right. Charles Tilly wasn’t a Marxist, but his famous formulation — that wars make states and states make wars — is about as foundational as it gets.

Despite their differences, Russian and Ukrainian scholars today have every opportunity to cooperate — to exchange arguments and data, to conduct research together. I genuinely hope that will happen, because Marxist analysis could serve a political function as well: helping to forge an alternative language, free from censorship, if its conclusions are actually communicated to a broader public. That won’t save the left, of course. The left doesn’t come into being through analysis — it emerges from other processes entirely. But let’s talk about what we can actually do, rather than what we can only dream about.

Translation: Vladlena Zabolotskaya