For the moment, this will be the last lot of readings we’ll be posting up about the situation in the Ukraine. As promised in the previous post, they’re all from anarchists. More importantly, they’re from anarchists based in the region. They know the situation better than the likes of us over here ever will because they have to live with and deal with it each and every day.

At some point over the weekend, we’ll be putting more of our thoughts down about the situation while obviously recognising that a fair number of our readers may not give them the same weight as the pieces cited below. Fair enough – that’s something we’re prepared to accept. The last couple of weeks have been a learning curve for us and we recognise that there’s still a long way to go before we have a full grasp of the situation. So, anything we post up is basically us thinking out loud.

Dave – the editor

Spring Is Coming: Take to the Streets against the War – Avtonom | March 4, 2022

We refuse to submit to Russian military censorship. We say openly and clearly: this is war. This is a war of conquest and the Russian army is running it. With weapons in their hands, Ukrainians are successfully defending themselves from the invaders, but we, who are inside Russia, cannot stand aside from these events. We must show each other and the world that we are against this war, that only Putin and his gang need it. To be against the war is genuine anti-fascism right now.

Russian anarchists against Putin’s war in Ukraine – Avtonom | February 24, 2022

As the full scale military operation began this morning, it is important to show that the Russian people don’t need this shameful war. There were dozens of antiwar protests all over the country in the past days mostly in the form of single-person pickets, which according to Russian laws don’t need any notifications. But the majority of protestors were detained nevertheless.

For more anarchist perspectives on the crisis, it is definitely worth regularly checking in on this site – https://avtonom.org/en – which published the above two articles.

War and Anarchists: Anti-Authoritarian Perspectives in Ukraine – Published on: CrimethInc. | February 15, 2022

We present this article composed by anarchists in Ukraine to give context for how some participants in social movements there see the difficult events that have played out there over the past nine years. We believe that it is important for people everywhere to grapple with the events they describe below and the questions that those developments pose. This text should be read in the context of the other perspectives we have published from Ukraine and Russia.