AS WAR PROFITEERING NUCLEAR TYRANTS PROMISE ARMS-DEAL APOCALYPSE, ANARCHISTS CONTINUE TO RESIST IN UKRAINE ~ Josie Ó Súileabháin / Photos: Fran Richart ~ On the east coast of the United States of America a deal is going down. For the past week Ukrainian ministers have flown from Kyiv to Washington to discuss the exchange of drones for tomahawk missiles. This weekend Trump and Zelensky will meet to finalise the movement of long-range missiles to Ukraine, and the cut throat discount on Ukrainian-manufactured drones sold to the U.S. at 20% the going rate. The art of this arms deal is a threat. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said in response that the transfer of missiles would be “a qualitatively different level of escalation” as he claimed it would require U.S. army personnel on Ukrainian territory to operate the missiles. The armed forces of Russia launched over 71 missiles across the frontline on 5 and 10 October, along with hundreds of drones directly targeting the energy sector of Ukraine. The military have continued to bombard Ukraine with these mass drone and rocket attacks as Zelensky arrives in D.C. Among those killed was a 15-year-old girl with her family in Lviv Oblast, and a 71-year-old man who was sitting in a civilian train carriage in Sumy when it was attacked by Russian drones. Hundreds of items transported by Boeing and Airbus have made their way to Russia, according to customs data analysed by Investigate Europe. Some of the subsidiaries from India are themselves on sanctions lists for transporting military personnel into the DPR and other Russian occupied territories. All western companies deny knowledge of committing any crime. “The willingness of the groups management to supply ammunition even to warring nations,” wrote Otfried Nassauer, the late German peace campaigner, “and states that blatantly disregard human rights, is an essential prerequisite for the economic success of Rheinmetall’s ammunition business.” From Indonesia to Yemen via South African subsidiaries, Germany’s largest weapons manufacturer is attempting to repeat it’s historical economic successes of the first and second world war by arming the world through a shadow export business. Rheinmetall call this blatant war profiteering “taking responsibility in a changing world” as the company profits have multiplied following the outbreak of the Russian war in Ukraine. International support for Ukraine has been fickle. While western nations promise their support for Ukraine in the defense of Europe, arms-dealers are continuing to subvert international sanctions through third party countries. Ammunition produced by Rheinmetall is making its way into the hands of those resisting tyranny and occupation around the world. Flights with western cargo are continuing to land in Russia. Profit trumps peace, after all. In Berlin, the air-raid siren is blaring with the beeping of phones marking the emergency tone. The trams are painted camouflage and posters for political parties are replaced with recruitment for the security services. Germany is slashing social security and its arms manufacturer is making a killing. The lights go out in Ukraine but the residents of Europe are still sleeping, dancing a conscious delirium that now threatens to consume us all. As the Doomsday clock reaches 89 seconds to midnight, how long until we are awoken by the sound of bombs? “Everything is as pleasant and beautiful as possible,” Greta says walking through a park, on the frontline of the impossible spring of our waking nightmares. It is calm and peaceful. The sound of birds fill the air. Bakhmut has roses and Greta is eating a falafel. “Another interesting thing about the psyche…” Greta says, picking up a medic pack and rifle resting by the tree. “When you fall asleep in such conditions on the frontline you usually have very good and pleasant dreams, things I don’t have in my normal life, the complete opposite of all the horrors that is… and this is interrupted when I am woken up. Because I am a medic rifleman. When I hear that one of our guys has been wounded I have to quickly get my shit together to help him.” Greta is awake, moving into position on the frontline with a comrade. Something felt wrong. A Russian solider ambushes their position and throws a grenade, destroying Greta’s automatic machine gun. Grot had managed to wound the Russian soldier, Greta tells Solidarity Collectives. It probably saved their life. Grot “had been hit by a bullet and had multiple shrapnel wounds,” Greta says. “I thought he was dead… I think the experience could have had a strong impact on my perception because it felt like I had died at that moment. I thought that was it. I didn’t expect to get out of there and survive… that moment was psychologically tough.” After being deployed to Klishchiivka close to Bakhmut, Greta requested rehabilitation in Odessa. “As a medic I provided assistance to both comrades and allies, but this deployment was simply ineffective,” Greta says. “I spent 8 days in a basement, completely confused because drones filled the entire space and field.” Solidarity Collectives have interviewed international anarchist medics in Ukraine since 2022, and spoke to Charlie this year. “During work, there is no space for anything but work,” Charlie says, “I mean when we have a wounded person and we need to, you know, do something about it, stop the bleeding and all that, this is what you do and it has nothing to do with politics.” “The fact that I’m here, it’s already connected with the fact I’m an anarchist and believe in solidarity with the people… all the decisions I make, they actually come from what I believe in and what I think is right.” Charlie started working as a medic on the frontlines with anti-authoritarian units in the armed forces of Ukraine and has been there since 2022. “I actually came to Poland for a short holiday for just a couple of weeks to see my friends,” says Charlie. “We got up in the morning and saw the news and I realised that I am not going back. I’m not going back to Belarus. I am not going home because it was just impossible for me. My country was bombing another country.” “Very often anarchist movement becomes extremely marginalised and impenetrable for people from outside,” Charlie reflects. “Anarchism and feminism and veganism, for me it’s first of all not struggle but first of all it is care. Care for people, care for women, care for animals and on the second place it is struggle. Very often activists are caught in this struggle and forget about care.” “The deepest feelings, of course, I have towards Bakhmut,” Charlie says. “I remember it as an extremely beautiful city with a very beautiful cape. Like, there were these swans and this nice river and full of roses. I arrived there at the end of summer, the weather was beautiful and it was all green and there were many flowers. So I have a strong bond with the city, completely destroyed now, just a graveyard… we lost a lot of comrades and Marcy isn’t with us today.” Marcy was a gardener from London who came to Ukraine to support people during the invasion. He drove an ambulance with Charlie as a volunteer in Bakhmut. After joining the armed forced he was killed in Avdiika. “The vast majority of people we are picking up from the frontline”, said Marcy back in 2022, “who have horrific wounds are ordinary working people. I think they should ask for free healthcare and free education after this is done because I smell that blood everyday and they have paid…” “They should see all the desperate people in Bakhmut, who don’t have anything as civilians,” Marcy reminded us, “just been left behind there.” Solidarity Collectives work alongside Solidrones for the construction and assembly of UAV drones, as communities seek to defend themselves rather than wait for the delivery of tomahawk missiles. What does victory look like when we fight for our freedom? “I really want people to win,” says Charlie. “Not the governments. Screw governments. I want people just to breathe freely without being afraid to be killed by some random aviabomb.” For the last 20 months, the frontline has been moving towards the mining town of Dobrophillja, with an attack on a market and shopping centre in July causing the authorities to evacuate most of the population of the mining town. The Russian Federation currently occupies around 70% of the Donetsk Oblast in the east of Ukraine, declaring a de facto client state along with other territories in 2014. Those who have escaped are finding themselves constantly bombarded. “For ordinary people like us, it’s just misery,” Ivan told Медузы (Meduza). “So now, I’m about to leave with my wife. She packed herself a bag full of medicine, and well we’re heading out. My wife hasn’t slept for three nights. She is afraid of everything,” he said. Those who remained in the town despite the danger where the elderly, the disabled and internally displaced persons from Bakhmut. On the other side of the frontline, a show trial is commencing for the second time. As observed by Медиазона (Mediazona), at least 26 prisoners of war were convicted by the Supreme Court of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) multiple times for the same crime. Among the prisoners of war were former Azov brigade fighters, six convicted for the same act of terrorism on two occasions. A lawyer working in Donetsk has commented that by bringing repeated cases against far-right Ukrainian soldiers, Russia could “justify the invasion” under it’s own propaganda to portray Ukraine “as a nationalist and pro-fascist state,” the legal worker testified under anonymity. This violation of the law has become established practice in the show trials of prisoners of war. In the Russian occupied city of Enerhodar, the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant has been running on back-up generators for almost a month since it was severed from the electric grid following continuous shelling in and around the plant. “This is an extraordinarily challenging situation,” said International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi, as Europe’s largest nuclear power station is now kept from meltdown by eight diesel engines. In the early days of the Russian occupation of Enerhodar, an anti-fascist punk spoke of collaborators, arrests and interrogations by Russian soldiers, including staged photographs of an underground far-right element as ‘proof’ of the need to de-nazify Ukraine according to Russian state propaganda. These photographs and videos are then disseminated for both Russian and western audiences, appealing paradoxically to those whose politics are the polar opposite to the Russian Federation. “I think there is quite a big resistance against understanding the situation in Eastern Europe,” Belarusian anarchist Nikita Ivansky tells me. “Certain dogmas used within anarchist and left circles are not working in such a complicated situation. Instead of adapting the ideological ground for such a conflict and applying our values within the conflict – and find our place according to those political values – a lot of people try to stick to those written political ideas from the past”. “Anarchist movement has no mechanisms of dealing with disinformation – It is very easy to plant a certain narrative delivered via state propaganda channels and make it grow without serious push back,” Nikita writes. “The discussion about Maidan in 2014 is one of those perfect examples.” The fetishisation of far-right Ukrainian Nazi groups in certain ‘left’ publications risks blinding us to the actions of those putting anarchism into action on the frontline. Even in the western anarchist movement there are some who echo the paranoia of the Russian Federation in labelling the Maidan Uprising as a Nazi putsch, like a judge at the Supreme Court of the DPR. But away from headlines that promise apocalypse and despair from nuclear tyrants, anarchism continues to fight on the frontlines. Anti-authoritarian fighters are continuing to resist Russian occupation, as well as supporting internally displaced people and abandoned animals with mutual aid across the country. In the predictable failure of the charity of nuclear tyranny and the security of borders over solidarity with the people – all we have to fight for is each other. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Photos taken in Sumy and Kharkiv regions, the persons in the photos are not connected to the article The post Frontline solidarity at 89 seconds to midnight appeared first on Freedom News.

CIVILIANS FACE REPRESSION FOR SHARING RUSSIAN TROOP MOVEMENTS ~ Nikita Ivansky ~ In September 2025, opposition media in Belarus estimated that one thousand civilians —many unknown to to human rights defenders—have been prosecuted for spreading intelligence about Russian troop movements on Telegram since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2024. Preparations for the invasion were made in Belarus under the guise of military training. When Belarusians found themselves on the Kremlin’s side of the war, there existed a partisan movement which sabotaged the railroad system to paralyze troop movement, while a larger part of society joined the silent resistance by taking pictures and videos of Russian military personnel at bases or in transit. They sent these images and videos to different Telegram channels to provide the Ukrainian resistance with crucial information on the movement of aviation or rocket/drone launches, which often targeted civilian infrastructure One of the biggest information gathering projects that emerged from this was called Belarusian Hajun, a Telegram channel with a bot to where people could send pictures directly. Within several weeks, the project exploded, with over 30,000 information points sent in the first 45 days of the invasion. While the project was a huge open-source intelligence success in countering the Russian war, the Belarusian state began hunting those providing such information from the very beginning. Among them was antifascist Anna Pyshnik, who was sentenced to three years in prison for sending pictures of the military on Telegram. She served her whole term and was released in 2024, she had to leave Belarus in fear of further political prosecution. “When the war started, it was difficult to comprehend”, said Pyshnik after her release. “The very next day, I heard something like an explosion; even our building shook. I ran outside and saw a rocket trail. I decided to film it. You just stand there and realise how close the war is, you realise how the authorities are lying when they say that nothing will ever happen to Ukraine from Belarusian territory. I understood that people needed to know what was happening. So I sent the video I had filmed to independent media outlets. Two days later, I filmed military helicopters over the city and sent that to the media as well”. At the beginning of 2025, the Belarusian secret police infiltrated a critical Telegram chat on Belarusian Hajun, obtaining information on thousands of accounts working for the project. Many of these accounts belonged to people inside the country. Since then, a massive wave of repression has begun against anyone who participated in the project by sending reports. At least 54 people were prosecuted for helping the project under the charge of “aiding an extremist organisation”. The attack on the Belarusian Hajun project was made possible by an old link found on the phone of someone arrested before February 2025. Created in 2022, this link allowed them to join a closed chat containing critical information. This is not the first time the KGB has managed to access closed chats and collect information leading to more prosecutions. The post Belarus’s informational partisans appeared first on Freedom News.

HOW WESTERN LEFTISTS AND ANARCHISTS FOUND ‘CONVENIENT’ VOICES FROM EASTERN EUROPE ~ Nikita Ivansky ~ Debates on anti-militarism continue to shake the anarchist movement in the western part of the world. Often in these debates we can see some organisations from Ukraine or Russia show support for the ‘no war but class war’ position. Three and a half years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the anarchist movement is extremely divided. Previous strategies of ‘listening to local voices’ have mostly failed for those who were not interested in the first place. With more scandals certain to come in the future, it’s important to understand how we came to this point. More than 10 years ago, Russia annexed Crimea and occupied part of eastern Ukraine. Even then, the Kremlin cited various reasons for the occupation depending on the political views of its target audience. For the leftist/anti-fascist movement, Russian propagandists prepared a narrative that a fascist regime in Kyiv had seized power illegally. The 2014 invasion was presented as an anti-fascist action. Most anarchists and anti-fascists in the region had developed immunity to such lies over many years of propaganda. But for some Western anti-fascists and leftists, the presence of fascist flags during the Maidan protests was so shocking that they believed the story of a far-right coup without further facts.  Many anarchists in Ukraine at the time believed that to fight the Russian Empire, it was enough familiarise oneself with the situation in order to understand what was occurring in the country, and to provide facts what was happening. In Belarus, we had a similar idea of how to work with comrades in the West in the fight against Russian propaganda. This was: the truth speaks for itself, and those who insist on Putin’s position are just people who, for some reason, have not been reached by the facts. But, even then, we encountered people who knew better about what was happening in your own house. I still remember how, at one presentation, an anti-authoritarian activist from Ukraine talked about Maidan and the situation after the protests, and a German expert responded by talking about how Kyiv was simply occupied by fascists. Attempts to prove him wrong were useless in that moment. Russian propaganda had already done its job. Back then, sitting at a presentation about Ukraine, it didn’t even occur to me that we were incredibly naive in our belief in critical thinking within the anarchist and leftist milieu… After the full-scale invasion, I was one of those who insisted on the need to hear the voices of anarchists from Ukraine in order to understand the war and what we could do in this situation, depending on our capabilities. In my mind, such calls turned into the formation of permanent contacts between Western groups and activists from Ukraine/Belarus/Russia. And for a while, that’s what happened as people became interested, researched, and listened. But it didn’t last long. Soon after, self-proclaimed fighters with militarism within the anarchist movement appeared on the horizon. For them, the messages of Ukrainian and Russian anarchists were unacceptable. Instead of organising in solidarity, some Western leftists and anarchists decided to look for groups within Belarus/Ukraine/Russia that would fully correspond to their dogmatic perspectives on the war and the role of Western countries in it. In Russia, such allies were found relatively quickly. For anti-militarists, the Russian organisation KRAS-MAT’s positions was easily integrated into the Western mothballed analysis of wars. They turned the Kremlin’s attack on Ukraine into a clash between the ruling elites of both countries. Texts calling on Ukrainian society to lay down their arms and start fighting their own government began to spread across various anarchist and left-wing websites. The leftists and anarchists were not particularly interested in the criticism of KRA-MAT by other groups within the affected regions. The ideological proximity of the Western left to KRAS-MAT was more important than any political problems with the syndicate of academics, which had long since ceased to try to participate in the workers’ movement in Russia. However, KRAS-MAT’s position was relatively weak even in the eyes of Western anarchists. After all, the organisation exists within the aggressor state, where resistance to the war is almost completely absent. In this situation, some left-wing pacifists and anti-militarists began to chaotically search for allies in Ukraine and Belarus who could confirm their political analysis of the region. In 2022-2023, some pacifists and anti-militarists found the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement (UPM). The UPM has never declared its commitment to any leftist views, and a mixture of right-wing and left-wing ideas can often be found on the organisation’s information platforms. Moreover, Western leftists were not particularly bothered by the fact that one of the leaders of the organisation is the pro-Russian blogger Ruslan Kotsaba who was was expelled from the organisation in 2023. Nine months later he became part of the right-wing pro-Russian organisation ‘Another Ukraine.’ During the same period, European anarchists and leftists also discovered Assembly, another Ukrainian organisation. However, it was not the leftists who flocked to Assembly, but rather the authors of Assembly who, with the help of automatic translations, broke into leftist platforms such as libcom, completely filling the information field about Ukraine. The collective’s texts, often written in a sensationalist style, fit well with the old political analyses of leftists and some anarchist organizations in the West. For most activists, Assembly can be understood from this excerpt, which begins the story of resistance to mobilisation in Ukraine: “Throughout the territory of the Gulag darkness in the middle of Europe, a people’s war against war is spreading. The heirs of the freedom-loving Zaporozhye Cossacks, Makhnovists, and rebels of Karmalyuk and Dovbush are responding with their own violence to the violence of the heirs of the NKVD, Gestapo, and Pinochet’s death squads. And we are only on the threshold of a full-scale round-up of conscripts, which is expected after July 16.” In essence, Assembly does not write anything special. Rather, it collects discontent within Ukrainian society such as: the fight against corruption, resistance to mobilisation, the lawlessness of local officials. All of which is written about by the Ukrainian media and in social networks. The lack of criticism of the Russian regime and their attempts to put Russia and Ukraine on an equal political footing show, at least, Assembly’s unwillingness to understand the Russian world. The relative popularity of Assembly in Western circles has only reinforced the dogmatism of the group, which is completely removed from any anarchist organisations in the region. The only exception being their active cooperation with the aforementioned KRAS-MAT. Activists from Ukraine and Belarus tried unsuccessfully to draw attention to the inadequacy of the Assembly. But, once again, they came up against an ideological wall. Assembly, like other organisations, proved to be much more convenient for Western anti-militarists than the objective truth, which requires much greater effort in constant research, discussions, and even trips to war-torn countries. The situation in Belarus was even more complicated for the Western left than with Ukraine. After the 2020 crackdown on dissent and protests, there were only a few anarchist organisations left in Belarus and the leftist movement was largely absent and uninteresting. Belarusian anarchist organisations immediately condemned the war and called for resistance to Russian aggression. There were no equivalents of the Assembly or KRAS-MAT in the country. However, somewhere in the vastness of the internet and NGO business, the German left dug up Olga Karach with her project ‘Our Home,’ which since 2022 has been trying to sell stories to the West about mass resistance to compulsory military service in Belarus. Belarusian youth do indeed resist militarism, but this did not begin in 2022. It has existed for many decades. Websites and forums with information on how to avoid military service appeared in the early 2000s. But for Western activists, Olga Karach’s story seemed very plausible. Yet, the ideology of ‘Our Home’ can be described as… money. The project has been around for a long time and, during its existence, has managed to secure sufficient funds from European and American foundations for the development of democracy and human rights. But Olga Karach’s problems began after 2020, when Svetlana Tikhanovskaya appeared on the scene and dozens of new liberal organizations emerged to compete with ‘Our Home’s projects. For some time, Karach tried to fight Tikhanovskaya for leadership of the opposition, but she had relatively little chance, given that everyone within the opposition knew who Karach was. In November 2022, Pramen published an article about Karach with information that Western pacifists had begun to raise money for her projects. I personally had to communicate with some German leftists on this matter, but information about “Our Home” was largely ignored. Over many years in the NGO environment, Olga has become very skilled at selling the right messages to different political groups and seems to have become a regular contributor to the German anarcho-pacifist newspaper Graswurzel Revolution (Grassroots Revolution). At the moment, I doubt that discussions or presentations can lead to a greater understanding of what is happening among the ‘skeptics’ of the struggle against the ‘Russian world’. Further, in many ways three years of discussions about the war in Ukraine have once again shown my own naivety and belief in anarchists. For example, somewhere in the past we lost track of the pro-Russian Stalinist organisation “Borotba” from Ukraine, which for many years reinforced myths about the Ukrainian fascist regime, and no amount of texts or public speeches could eradicate this myth. Borotba’s ties to the Kremlin went largely unnoticed by Western leftist structures, and the damage done by the organization to the anti-fascist movement in Ukraine and beyond remains significant. For me, the situation in the anarchist movement is very reminiscent of something that happened to me in Greece. During one of my trips around the country, I had the good fortune to find myself in the same car as some Greek anti-fascists. It was a long journey, and I fell asleep quite quickly. Half an hour later, I was awakened by Russian Nazi rap. When I asked the Greek anti-fascists where they got such music, they replied that it was a gift from their anti-fascist friends in Donbas. When I told them that it was Nazi rap, they simply dismissed my comment. Fortunately, the Greek anti-fascists did not insist that we continue listening to the music of their friends from Donbas. Examples from three countries with different political groups shows that the concept ‘needing to listen to voices from the region’ does not work in cases of ideological dogmatism. Western leftists and some anarchists are willing to work with openly fraudulent organisations, just to preserve old ideological principles. With this approach, and in an atmosphere of information warfare, it becomes relatively easy to find a person or a group who will repeat slogans that are convenient and completely ignore a significant part of the organised anarchist movement. The post The anti-militarism of fools appeared first on Freedom News.

You can read the details of Operation Spiderweb elsewhere. What interests me are the implications for future warfare: > If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police > state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with > U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans > with South Korean air bases? Militaries that thought they had secured their > air bases with electrified fences and guard posts will now have to reckon with > the threat from the skies posed by cheap, ubiquitous drones that cFan be > easily modified for military use. This will necessitate a massive investment > in counter-drone systems. Money spent on conventional manned weapons systems > increasingly looks to be as wasted as spending on the cavalry in the 1930s...

DEDICATION AND TRAUMA AMID THE UNEXPLODED REMNANTS OF WAR ~ Josie Ó Súileabháin ~ “If people are tired of this war, tell them to come and join the fight. People are fighting and struggling here, and people need help. This is not a video game”.—Joy (Marcy–Yusef) In a darkness demanded for survival, an old man speaks to volunteers in Kupyansk, Kharkiv Oblast following the retreat of the Russian army. “They attacked here, first with airstrikes, bombing the area”, he says. “They dropped bombs here—I still have some in my garden”. “And did the animals survive?” the volunteers ask. “You see you were putting yourself at risk…” “I let them go when the Russians forced me to evacuate at gun point… a missile hit the yard, and the garage and the barn burnt down. The ducklings burnt to death… but the chickens managed to survive… people left everything behind. Many people lost their legs because of the ‘Lepestok’ mines”. “Clearing the gardens of mines?” he is asked. “Sometimes by accident”, he replies. “Most of them lost their legs and a lot of de-miners blown themselves up here”. The ‘Lepestok’ (PFM) mine is a scatterable munition that is identifiable by its green, petal shape and timed to explode. Ukraine has inherited millions of these small mines from the Soviet Union and destroyed at least half of them under efforts lead by the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. During the full-scale invasion, the Russian occupation has been documented using them around hospitals and in residential areas. “I remember these petals scattered all over the hospital”, a medical worker at Izyum Central Hospital told Human Rights Watch (HRW). During the Russian occupation of Izyum, the Russian army set up a field hospital in the basement within the central hospital to treat their own wounded. At one point, there were only seven members of staff for Ukrainian patients. “I heard a slam in the sky”, a neighbour to the hospital reported to HRW. “Previously I knew that if a cluster munition explodes above our heads, the submunitions would go over us because of inertia. Because of where they were, I understood they would fall on us. So I told my wife and we went to hide in the basement”. “But there was no explosion. And our neighbour said: ‘Have a look, a petal on the ground.’” Burial site outside Izyum When the Russians retreated from Izyum, they detonated the PFM mines around the hospital with their rifles to form a path of escape. Outside of the major urban centres, the situation is much worse with almost no access to medical care. Ksenia Kozeniuk, a volunteer with Solidarity Collectives, explains the situation. “Six or seven villages, I think, we’ve visited and the situation is really upsetting because these people are living extremely difficult conditions”, Ksenia says. “We were in Kupyansk, delivering food for an elderly woman who has about 40 cats under her care”. “We walked with the cats”, the elderly woman tells volunteers outside of her home in Kupyansk. “The neighbours have little kids; they went to Poland and abandoned their pets. Just as they left, a missile hit the house. And my house was hit by a missile – the roof was blown off over there, and here the roof was torn off. The gas was cut off, the water was cut off, the sewage was cut off, and then they fixed the gas but not the sewage. No one will fix it”, the woman says. “In 2022, the frontline passed through the villages of Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, and they were completely destroyed”, Ksenia says. “Now the locals are slowly starting to return despite the fact that conditions are terrible because they have to rebuild their homes almost from scratch”. A volunteer asks a young child holding a cat; “did you come back here with your mother or did you never leave?” “I came back here”, the child replies in the darkness. “And your going to stay here, right?” the volunteer asks. “Well, yes, we live here now”, the mother replies. “We have repaired the house a little; it was my fathers house. Our house is destroyed. We lived on Kamianska street, there’s just a foundation left, and this house remained. I put a glowing bracelet on his arm”, the mother says, showing her sons arm. “And only by it when it’s dark I can tell where my child is”. “UKRAINE IS A SHIELD NOW” Darkness is required to move within a ‘zero’—an active battlefield—with drone flights and other Russian aircraft threatening death from above. Light is needed to see the Unexploded Remnants of War (URW) and other unexploded ordinance that literally is designed to imitate nature in order to kill. These humanitarian trips are described by Solidarity Collectives volunteer Serhiy Moychan as building long term connections with the community beyond war, “so that in the future we can fight together with them for… social rights and guarantees”. “Social and economic justice is the basic core, the basic principle by which we fight”, Serhiy asserts. The work of Solidarity Collectives in supporting anti-authoritarian armed resistance against Russian occupation has spilled over to directing aid to civilians living on the front. “The armies of authoritarian regimes, they’re always stronger than those of some ‘democratic’ countries. They spit on people’s rights and freedoms and invest in specific interests, in this case war. And when there’s this fragmentation of opinions or the set phrase ‘not everything is so clear’—it all fragments and gets complicated”, says Lastivka, an anarchist, feminist, activist and squatter and commander of a UAV drone unit. Lastivka interviewed by Solidarity Collectives “I haven’t heard of European anarchists ever taking a stance on this war”, Lastivka continues, “I hope they don’t have to face the hardships that Ukrainian activists have had to. But that depends on us too”. “How so?” Solidarity Collectives ask. “I really do fully support the idea that Ukraine is a shield now”. It appears that despite many declarations affirming the basic principles of armed resistance to occupation and mutual aid with those struggling to survive, some among the anti-authoritarian fighters in Ukraine still perceive a lack of international solidarity from western anarchists. Resistance against imperialist occupation has led to the deaths of comrades on the front line, as well as the imprisonment and torture of others. The comrade Joy—quoted at the top of this story—would have been 36-years-old in March this year if he was not killed by the Russian occupation in 2022. Vladyslav Yurchenko ‘Pirate’, Ruslan Tereschenko ‘Skrypal’ and Roman Legar were all killed in the last year fighting the Russian invasion. Ihor, Kolyah ‘Vagon’ and Atton – all members of the Kharkiv Hardcore Group were also killed. Still missing-in-action are comrades Cooper Andrews, Finbar Cafferkey and Dimitri Petrov who were last seen alive on the “road of life” after fighting in the battles around Bakhmut. These internationalists brought together perspectives from different struggles as praxis for resistance. Finbar brought the ideas of Rojava, Dimitri brought together movements in Europe, Ukraine, Russia and Syria, and Cooper brought the ideas of black autonomy in the U.S. for the fight against Russian occupation. There are 17,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war held either in the 20% of Ukrainian territory that Russia occupies, or within the empire itself. The anti-authoritarian journalist Maksym Butkevych was recently released as part of a prisoner exchange from the occupied Luhansk Oblast. Maksym reports that both soldiers and civilians are being held in these prisons and urges those outside to not forget them. “I witnessed torture, humiliation, beatings, electrocutions, starvation”, Maksym reports, “and other methods to humiliate people, undermine their health, and break their morale”. Some like Denys Matsola and Vladyslav Zhuravlov are still in prison after three years with no sign of release. Denys and Vlad were fighting together in the 505 Battalion when they were captured in Mariupol. Denys was placed in solitary confinement in the Ivanovo Region of Russia. Vlad is also in Russian captivity and at risk of torture, but his whereabouts are unknown. “The start of the war was worse”, says Lastivka, “but at the start of the war we knew absolutely nothing and it was only fear… if you’re talking about how we saw missions then we were like helpless kittens… the scariest missions are when you are in unknown territory, when you feel how weak and vulnerable you are, with no control over your own life, with destruction all around you…” “… we didn’t know where the enemy was”, Lastivka says. “I’m so happy that I’m not alone. There are people with whom I can share this experience. I can’t imagine how hard it is when a person finds themselves somewhere alone, isolated. That’s scary too. Although I like to criticise everyone and everything and say that the worst is yet to come, in reality my imagination carries me forward”. “Doing our job wasn’t the hardest thing”, said Dr Yuri Kuznetsov, one of the last surgeons working at Izyum hospital during the occupation, “the hardest thing was just staying alive”. “Several weeks ago, my office door opened, and the man came in and said ‘doctor, do you remember me? I’m alive!’ We have all had moments when we thought of fleeing. We’ve all had meltdowns and periods of depression, but its moments like that and the solidarity of my colleagues that have kept me here”, says Yuri. “People helped us lot. You know, to put it mildly”, Yuri reflected, “there was nothing to eat, people looted shops and pharmacies. What they didn’t need, they brought to us. Every day bags were brought and left under the door”. Yuri’s shift at the occupied hospital lasted four months and a half. Dr Yuri Kuznetsov at Izyum Central Hospital in the Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine The slashing of USAID funding under the Trump Administration has consequences for both military and healthcare operations in Ukraine, including the funding of clinics for recovery from trauma and amputations associated with war. Two projects have suspended funding to a healthcare system that has endured over a thousand separate and direct Russian military attacks to health infrastructure and workers in Ukraine. Black Flag Medical have been supplying both frontline fighters and civilians with medical mutual aid. Solidarity Collectives supports those fighters who are injured and need recovery. 100,000 amputations have been performed in Ukraine since 2022 and Izyum hospital has treated over 400 patients with injuries directly from mines like PFM. It is predicted to take decades to clear the area of this ordinance. How long does it take to recover from trauma? Against the Janus face of nationalist humanitarianism from the U.S. and imperialist occupation from Russia, our power is solidarity. Instead of debating conspiratorial geopolitical madness to hide defeatist political inaction—we must learn from our comrades east. Solidarity begins by listening. From collectives in Czech Republic that teach anti-authoritarian fighters how to contruct, program and deploy drones as a means of community defence—to events across Europe that have raised money for equipment in the fight against Russian imperialism, “you do not win a race by running alone”, Solidarity Collectives write to European anarchists, “you only run alone like an idiot”. Anti-authoritarian fighters on the front line in Ukraine. Solidarity Collectives “Strength comes from connection, from solidarity, from collective struggles. Solidarity with the people’s who resist is a political gesture which we can’t let be manipulated into a threat to gain benefits”, Solidarity Collectives write. “Anti-fascism is not contemplation but action”. “Some people turn their eyes from the war”, said Lastivka, “how much more of that can I stand? Some people are just tired and want to live normal lives but in order to live normal lives, and for you not to be bothered by news of war…you have to do something about it”. The post Ukraine: On the ground with Solidarity Collectives appeared first on Freedom News.

On Sunday night, CBS’s “60 Minutes” aired an interview featuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who once again deplored the fact that US officials have been promoting Russian disinformation about the war between the two countries. By Monday morning, President Donald Trump proved his point once more. Through a translator, Zelenskyy told 60 Minutes Correspondent Scott Pelley: “I believe, sadly, (that) Russian narratives are prevailing in the US.” “How is it possible to witness our losses and our suffering, to understand what the Russians are doing, and to still believe that they are not the aggressors, that they did not start this war?” he continued. “This speaks to the enormous influence of Russia’s information policy on America, on US politics and US politicians.” Referring to Trump’s claim that Zelenskyy is a “dictator” and the now-infamous February sit-down in the Oval Office, during which Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Zelenskyy and demanded he thank the United States for its support, Zelenskyy told Pelley through a translator: “It’s a shift in tone, a shift in reality..and I don’t want to engage in the altered reality that is being presented to me. First and foremost, we did not launch an attack [to start the war]. It seems to me that the Vice President is somehow justifying Putin’s actions.” > “How is it possible to witness our losses and our suffering, to understand > what the Russians are doing, and to still believe that they are not the > aggressors?” asks Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.   WATCH ⏱️ > youtu.be/odFTqgm0984?… > > [image or embed] > > — 60 Minutes (@60minutes.bsky.social) April 14, 2025 at 12:40 PM The comments appeared to trigger Trump, who took to his Truth Social platform on Sunday night to lambast CBS for airing the interview. “They did not one, but TWO, major stories on ‘TRUMP,’ one having to do with Ukraine, which I say is a War that would never have happened if the 2020 Election had not been RIGGED, in other words, if I were President and, the other story was having to do with Greenland, casting our Country, as led by me, falsely, inaccurately, and fraudulently,” Trump wrote. “I am so honored to be suing 60 Minutes, CBS Fake News, and Paramount, over their fraudulent, beyond recognition, reporting.” (Trump is, indeed, suing the network and television show, alleging they deceptively edited an interview with former Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to make her look better; CBS has said the lawsuit is “without merit.”) Trump went on to argue that CBS “should lose their license” and urged his Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Brendan Carr, to “impose the maximum fines and punishment, which is substantial, for their unlawful and illegal behavior.” “CBS is out of control, at levels never seen before, and they should pay a big price for this,” Trump concluded. But for all his bluster, Trump managed to prove Zelenskyy’s point less than 24 hours after the CBS interview aired. In another early morning meltdown on Monday, Trump wrote on Truth Social that the war is “Biden’s war, not mine,” adding, “President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin.” Still, the facts remain: It was Russian President Vladimir Putin who invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Since then, Russian forces have committed war crimes and likely crimes against humanity, according to Amnesty International. One of those alleged crimes includes kidnapping and deporting Ukrainian children to Russia, for which the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for both Putin and another Russian official in March 2023. Russia’s aggression has continued, with Ukrainian civilians among the victims. Earlier this month, Russia launched a missile at a site near a Ukrainian playground, killing 19 people, including nine children. On Sunday, two Russian missiles reportedly hit the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy, killing  35 people and wounding 117 more, according to Ukrainian officials. Trump called that attack “terrible,” “a mistake,” and “a horrible thing” on Air Force One on Sunday, according to the White House Pool Report. But by Monday, during remarks in the Oval Office alongside President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, Trump had reverted to his pro-Russia talking points, repeating the false claim that Ukraine started the war with Russia. “He’s always looking to purchase missiles,” Trump said of Zelenskyy. “Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win the war. You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles.” > Trump has fully turned on Zelenskyy: "He's always looking to purchase > missiles. Listen, when you start a war, you gotta know you can win a war. You > don't start a war against somebody that's 20 times your size and then hope > that people give you some missiles." > > [image or embed] > > — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 14, 2025 at 11:56 AM At another point during that meeting, Trump insulted Zelenskyy’s intelligence, stating, “The mistake was letting the war happen. If Biden were competent and if Zelensky were competent—and I don’t know that he is. We had a rough session with this guy over here,” Trump said, referring to the February Oval Office blowup. “He just kept asking for more and more.” Trump also propped up Putin while also doubling down on the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. “I went four years and Putin wouldn’t even bring it up. And as soon as the election was rigged, and I wasn’t here, that war started, there was no way that war should have been allowed to happen, and Biden should have stopped it,” he said. “And and you take a look at Putin. I’m not saying anybody’s an angel, but I will tell you I went four years and it wasn’t even a question. I told him, ‘don’t do it, you’re not going to do it.'” > Reporter: You mentioned last night that Russia's attack on Ukraine was a > mistake— what is the is mistake? > > Trump: The mistake was letting the war happen. If Biden were competent, and if > Zelenskyy were competent— I don’t know that he is. pic.twitter.com/yhoHWWpiuQ > > — Acyn (@Acyn) April 14, 2025 Let’s not forget, though, that for all of Trump’s claims that the war is not his problem, he promised he would end it within 24 hours if he was reelected. More than—checks notes—2,000 hours later, and the war is still raging while Trump spreads disinformation about who really started it.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON WHERE WE ARE AS WE TEETER ON THE CUSP OF A DECADE-DEFINING SHIFT INTO ARMED NATIONALISM ~ Rob Ray ~ In the deluge of capital-N News we’ve had over the last month, by far the most consequential for our war-distanced isles has been the announcement, Europe-wide, of massive rearmament. In the wake of dizzying spending plans from Germany and the EU, as well as a belated realisation from local powers that maybe outsourcing production to rivals wasn’t good strategy, Labour’s pledge to cough up 2.5–3% of GDP on defence isn’t even looking like the most aggressive commitment around.  But it seems likely that the next decade will be one of transformation on a number of levels, with the further ascension of far-right political groups dovetailing with military revivalism, permanent realignment of the Great Game and, most likely, abandonment of environmental commitments even as the consequences of climate crisis quite literally come storming into our daily lives. As we march towards this catastrophe for the world’s working classes (who will be forced to suffer the costs and consequences even while being told it is all their fault), Britain’s anarchists can and should work on ways to stop it. But we must also consider that, as for most of the last four decades, we won’t have the wherewithal to do so, or even to slow it down. As a movement with limited means, what are our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats? STRENGTHS Let’s be honest, physically we don’t have many at the moment. There’s a lot of unconnected local groupings, a small (albeit feisty) squatting scene, a smattering of places like Freedom or the Star and Shadow, a few co-ops like Radical Routes, publishers like Active, some legal support, a fringe social network, that sort of thing. That’s not to say the potential is absent—we’ve made serious strides from lower points before now. The last three waves of anarchist-influenced activity, 1999-2003, 2010–2013 and the mutual aid movement of 2020-2021, have not faded from memory just yet and have many lessons to teach, plus there’s a large groundswell of alumni who could potentially be re-enthused by an offering which has learned some lessons about not just inspiring movements but sustaining them.  Unlike our frenemies in the social democratic and trade union scenes, we’re not flailing at the wrong end of a challenge-fail cycle and in fact many of our predictions about the shortcomings of Corbynism were fully vindicated. We have an excellent recent example of spontaneous mass mutual aid (Covid) to point at when arguing our case for (re)building decentralised networks of solidarity across the working class. For all that we lack large federal organisations able to reach across the country, we do have spaces which could act as nexus points for rapid growth, as well as at least some friendly contacts with centres run by fellow travellers (Friends Meeting Houses, workingmens’ clubs, worker co-ops and the like).  And for all the many terrors ahead, our politics are likely to be thrown into sharper relief by the increasingly repressive behaviour of governments both foreign and domestic. The British public has, on the whole, been astonishingly lackadaisical about protecting its own freedoms in the last decade. It looked the other way as protests were reduced to police-approved walkabouts, while direct action was criminalised and prison sentences imposed, as town and city centres across the country were placed under the permanent watch of Big Brother’s glass eyes. We can point to years of warnings and propose action when one event or another, triggered by the new order of things, shocks the public into paying attention. Standard left-wing respectability politics has had little of note to say about these assaults beyond “that’s bad mkay” while the Free Englishman Ruuule Britannnia, so-called pro-liberties mob (Spiked!, right-wing broadsheets, etc.) either ignore it or actively cheer for more. Anarchists are one of the few groupings that have consistently not just warned there’s a problem, or whinged vaguely at a Westminster that absolutely does not care, but advocated for and sometimes taken action to fight it. With the pandemic anti-mask phase some of our more conspiratorial comrades went through out of the way, there’s lots of scope for pushing back if we’re smart. We have know-how both active and historic on the true state of the law and our vaunted “freedoms” that gives us an outsized influence at street level when shocks like a wave of military nationalism rolls through. WEAKNESSES Hoo-boy, do we have a few of those. Within the scene there’s a back-biting, rumour mongering, cut-em-off-for-a-slight culture that has hamstrung us for the best part of a decade now, worsened by the tiredness of groups which (understandably) often find it easier to automatically cold shoulder rather than get sucked into yet more interminable arguments and insoluble investigations. We’ve split repeatedly over trans rights, relative positions on international conflict and good old fashioned burnout-fallouts. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeonly ‘guy points at factory shouting organise’ type, other than thrashing things out over trans rights (directly relevant to our ability to organise where we are) we should not have been self-destructing over these issues.  My personal views, for example, on Ukraine and Palestine are largely consistent—I have been in favour of supporting the people in both countries. In Ukraine the people (and the anarchists) do not wish to be an imperial outcrop of a bloody-handed autocratic Russia known for killing dissenters. In Palestine they don’t want to be ethnically cleansed. I find these both to be pretty reasonable, while understanding and appreciating the broader importance of the No War But The Class War position.  But realistically what I think is unimportant, outside a tiny section of a British left that has historically been really quite rubbish at stopping even its own government’s wars, let alone anyone else’s. And arguments we have on the subject should not be making us worse at tasks where we actually can make a significant difference. I don’t have to agree with people about Ukraine to work with them on other issues, and our movement, lest we forget, is supposed to be heterodox. As it stands however it is often alien and unwelcoming to outsiders (sometimes to insiders) held back by constant internecine bickering, often hiding personal beefs behind hyperbolic Political Disagreements.  More broadly, we suffer both poor integration with the left base that does exist in this country and from the long malaise that base has been experiencing. Anarchism has a history of plucking many of its best organisers from the ranks of trade unions, student movements, minority activism and the disillusioned far left, all of which are struggling. Those unions and left groups are politically moribund and for the most part have been in managed decline for some time bar a few groupings in strategic industries, such as RMT on the tracks or healthcare workers in the chronically understaffed NHS. NGOs, where they aren’t just flat-out liberal in ways useless to us, have been in large part neutered by the government simply making “being political” a black mark for their funding, or even illegal. The co-op movement has long since lost most of its radical edge, bar a fringe of smaller entities active in fields like housing, book selling, bikes and wholefoods (those last being a small one to potentially put in the strength category, though they often struggle to compete effectively enough to provide a financial backbone). The institutions’ slumber and our haphazard connectivity with them undermines or ability to successfully approach and mobilise extra-parliamentary action in communities – and the greatest weakness of all is that we lack a clear, approachable base in most places outside certain areas of  big cities and particular small-town enclaves. It will take significant effort to rebuild the base that has historically sustained much of the left more generally as political class consciousness is so fractured, demobilised and alienated. I acknowledge this ends the article on something of a bum note but never fear! It’s opportunities next week and there’s quite a few of those. Part 2 of this article will appear next Sunday. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Pic: Number 10/CC The post Anarchism and the New Military Wave (pt.1) appeared first on Freedom News.

HOW THE RUSSIAN ANARCHO-SYNDICALIST BECAME A POLITICAL JOURNALIST, ENDED UP IN THE RED ARMY, AND HELPED ORGANISE KROPOTKIN’S FUNERAL ~ Nikolai Gerasimov ~ In the 1930s, Chicago was the capital of American gangsters. The mafia gang of Paul Ricca and Tony Accardo successfully continued the work of Al Capone—they controlled the entire shadow economy of the city and most of the criminal business of the northwestern United states. The American government did everything possible to destroy organised crime, but did not forget about another threat to national security—left-wing radicals. Since the late 1920s, Chicago police regularly conducted raids in places where Russian immigrant workers congregated. The secret services were afraid of the “Red Threat” and saw every “leftist” as a potential agent of Soviet intelligence. Russian anarchists fleeing Bolshevik terror and fascist concentration camps were persecuted by the FBI. Among those who attracted the unwanted attention of the authorities was the leading theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, Gregory Maximoff. Gregory Petrovich Maximoff (1893–1950), a journalist and revolutionary who stood at the origins of the anarchist labour movement, having survived two World Wars, Red Terror, and emigration. Before his eyes, the revolution turned into a reaction, and the liberation movement died out, faced with a new enemy—the totalitarian state. Even before Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt, Maximoff began to study the origins of totalitarianism and the reasons why the good, progressive undertakings of revolutionaries lead to the creation of inhuman political regimes. His biography is inseparable from the history of the development of anarchist thought. Gregory Maximoff was born on November 10, 1893, in the village of Mityushino in Smolensk province. After finishing school, his parents sent the future revolutionary to the Vladimir Seminary to study theology. Maximoff had an ideological conflict with the seminary administration, and he realized that theology was clearly not his calling. Maximoff met the beginning of the First World War in Petrograd, where, under the influence of Kropotkin’s writings, he carried out revolutionary agitation. In 1915 he entered the Higher Agricultural Institute, studying to be an agronomist. But the war required new human resources—Maximoff was mobilised. However, even in the army, he continued to spread anarchist ideas. The February Revolution freed Maximoff from service. From that moment on, he took an active part in revolutionary events—in particular, he became one of the organizers of the Petrograd student group of anarcho-syndicalists and the group Golos Truda [The Voice of Labour]. In the summer of 1917, Maximoff was a representative of the newly formed Union of Anarcho-syndicalist Propaganda (SASP), from which he was elected to the Central Council of Factory and Plant Committees of Petrograd. Under the pseudonym “Mr. Lapot,” he wrote articles for the newspaper Golos Truda, in which he examined issues of a socio-economic nature: the organisation of labour collectives, the economic reorganization of society on the principles of anarchism, as well as ways to support grassroots social initiatives. Collaboration with Golos Truda became one of the most important stages in the life of the thinker. The periodical was organised in 1911 in the USA by Russian émigré workers who closely interacted with American anarcho-syndicalists and exchanged experiences with them. In 1917 the editors took advantage of the general amnesty and moved the publication to Petrograd. Maximoff did not know that in less than ten years he would again have to publish in émigré journals. In 1918 the first large-scale repressions against anarchists began: the authorities closed printing houses, arrested activists, and significantly limited the distribution of political literature. Publication of Golos Truda was temporarily suspended. In the autumn of 1918, Maximoff was elected secretary of the Executive Bureau of the All-Russian Confederation of Anarcho-syndicalists. In the same year, the organisation was liquidated due to both internal (political disagreements among anarcho-syndicalists) and external (Bolshevik repressions) reasons. Despite a series of arrests, Maximoff agreed to join the Red Army. However, his service did not last long: in 1919, in Kharkiv, he refused to carry out an order to suppress an uprising of peasants unhappy with Bolshevik policy. In 1950 the anarchist M. Gudel recalled this episode in Maximoff’s biography: > > > [In] 1919, he was in the ranks of the Red Army and fought against the counter-revolution with revolutionary zeal, but when his unit was called to pacify the Ukrainian peasants, Maximoff, having learned of the appointment, declared to the head of his unit: "The Red Army is organised to fight against the enemies of the Russian people, and not against the peasants and workers, I will not go to pacify the peasants." He was well aware of the meaning and consequences of this protest. He knew that in the Red Army, as in any other, refusing to obey and carry out an order was punishable severely.  He also knew that the head of the unit had enormous powers and could shoot him without any trial. He knew the consequences of the protest and nevertheless went through with it. He acted this way because he knew, he was convinced, that the suppression and disarming of revolutionary peasants was one of the government's steps that was dangerous for the revolution. He did not want to be a participant in this crime. Maximoff was indeed sentenced to death, but was pardoned and released thanks to the efforts of the All-Russian Union of Metalworkers. After all that had happened, Maximoff became an implacable opponent of the Bolsheviks and even rejected the very idea of the Soviets. The power of the Soviets, in his opinion, is no different from any other form of power and does not lead to the withering away of the state, but to its strengthening. In 1919, Maximoff wrote for another anarcho-syndicalist journal, also called Golos Truda. He reviewed works on the theory of anarchism and discussed the possible directions of development of Russian anarcho-syndicalism. While criticising the Bolsheviks, Maximoff did not forget about the theorists of anarchism, many of whom, in his opinion, distort the traditional socio-political meaning of anarchist doctrine. In particular, Apollon Karelin and his community of mystical anarchists came under fire. Maximoff in 1921 In opposition to the anarcho-mystics, pan-anarchists and many other thinkers, Maximoff proposed to create a “program” of anarcho-syndicalism understandable to the general public, where the actual philosophical part would be an outline of political ideas from William Godwin to Kropotkin. It is noteworthy that philosophy in his project is subordinated to the political program of building an anarchist society. Maximoff was not interested in metaphysics, aesthetics, or ontology. He allowed people of different philosophical views into the ranks of anarcho-syndicalists, as long as these views did not contradict the practice of revolutionary struggle. At the end of 1920, the Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, defeated the rebel army of Nestor Makhno. Already in 1921, along with the “Makhnovshchina”, all anarchist institutions on the territory of Ukraine were liquidated, including the Confederation of Anarchist Organizations “Nabat,” many of whose members (Volin, Mark Mrachny-Klavansky, Aron Baron, Alexey Olonetsky, and others) were under arrest. In January 1921, the prisoners were transferred from Kharkov to Moscow. The general atmosphere of anxiety was aggravated by the fact that the health of the 79-year-old Kropotkin, whose authority had long prevented mass repressions against anarchists, had deteriorated sharply. In an attempt to establish a dialogue with the Bolsheviks, a delegation of anarchists (Maximoff, Alexei Borovoy, and Alexander Shapiro) went to the Cheka, but the initiative did not bring any results. Meanwhile, a bulletin on Kropotkin’s health was published in Izvestia, and Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman went to see the sick man. The Bolsheviks showed the utmost possible care for Kropotkin, but the arrested anarchists continued to be kept in prison. When Kropotkin died (8 February, 1921), the Soviet authorities decided to arrange a funeral for the great revolutionary at the expense of the state. Obituaries were published in Izvestia and Pravda. Maximoff became one of the main initiators of the campaign aimed against the Bolsheviks’ attempts to use the memory of Kropotkin in their own interests. Through the efforts of Maximoff, Borovoy, and many others, the Commission of Anarchist Organizations for the Funeral of P. A. Kropotkin was created. Maximoff recalled its activities as follows: “By energetic actions, the Commission discouraged the Bolsheviks from burying P. A. at state expense and thus once again advertising themselves to the international revolutionary proletariat, for which the Bolsheviks, in turn, tried to cause the Commission a number of difficulties, which the latter wrote about in its report. “The Cheka was waiting for the moment to deal with everyone who actively spoke during Kropotkin week, and at the same time to settle scores with some members of the Funeral Commission. This moment soon arrived”. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE BY MALCOLM ARCHIBALD This is a translated excerpt from the new book To Kill in Oneself the State – How rebels, philosophers and dreamers invented Russian anarchism, published in Russian by Moscow philosopher Nikolai Gerasimov. The phrase “I killed in myself the state” is a refrain from the popular song “The State” by the Russian anarchist poet Yegor Letov. This survey includes chapters on such familiar figures as Peter Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Emma Goldman, as well as such diverse thinkers as Alexander Sviatogor (biocosmism), Georgiy Chulkov (mystical anarchism), and Andrey Andreyev (neo-nihilism). The Red Terror of the early Soviet state, followed by the Great Terror of the 1930s, physically eliminated those proponents of Russian anarchism who had not fled abroad. Gerasimov points out that in post-Soviet Russia the Communists could still rely on nostalgia for their former political culture. But for anarchists, instead of a living tradition there was only a void. Nevertheless, he has some hope for the future because anarchists, with their willingness to take bold measures, can thrive in an era of crisis such as the one we live in now. The excerpt is from Chapter 9, pp. 279-286. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Top photo: Maximoff at Kropotkin’s funeral (top left, behind Emma Goldman) The post The adventures of G. P. Maximoff appeared first on Freedom News.

This story was originally published on Vince Beiser’s Substack, Power Metal, to which you can subscribe here. Just days before President Trump called Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” who was somehow to blame for Russia’s invasion of his country, Trump floated the only slightly less controversial idea that Kyiv should pay the US for protection, in the form of Ukrainian minerals. “I told them I want the equivalent of like, $500 billion worth of rare earth, and they’ve essentially agreed to do that,” he said on Fox News on February 10. “We have to get something.” Besides the glaring moral questions this proposal raises, there’s a practical one: Can Ukraine actually deliver what Trump wants? > Breaking China’s critical metal dominance “is one of the main geopolitical > drivers in Washington right now.” First, as the author of a recent book that covers the global trade and geopolitics of metals, I’m sure Trump is not talking only about rare earths. This is a term that confuses many people; it’s often mistakenly applied to all the critical metals we need for the Electro-Digital Age. In fact, rare earths are a subset of those critical metals. Rare earths are a group of 17 obscure, esoterically named elements, like praseodymium and yttrium, that are crucial for electric car motors, cellphones, wind turbines, and a range of health and military technologies. The more familiar-sounding critical metals, like lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper, are not rare earths. Anyway, Ukraine does have some rare earths. But no one knows exactly how much, or even where they are. Ukraine’s claims about its mineral riches are based on Soviet-era exploration that was carried out decades ago. “Unfortunately, there is no modern assessment” of rare earth reserves in Ukraine, the former director general of the Ukrainian Geological Survey told S&P Global. And there aren’t any active rare earth mines, either. We do know that Ukraine holds sizable deposits of several other important metals and minerals, including: * Lithium, graphite, and to a lesser extent nickel and cobalt, all of which are needed for the batteries that run EVs, cell phones and other cordless electronics * Titanium, important for many military technologies * Gallium and germanium, essential for semiconductors, TV and phone screens, solar panels, and military gear In theory, gaining access to Ukraine’s minerals could not only make America money but help it reduce its dependence on China for these substances. The danger of that dependence was highlighted in December when Beijing banned exports of gallium and germanium. Breaking China’s critical metal dominance “is one of the main geopolitical drivers in Washington right now,” Bryan Bille, a policy expert at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, tells me. And Ukraine is willing to cut some kind of deal. Kyiv has been courting American investment since 2023. According to the New York Times, that push included a Trump-Zelensky meeting and visits to the US from Ukrainian officials pitching deals for lithium and titanium. The US and Ukraine are still discussing some kind of metals-for-security deal. Whatever happens at the abstract heights of international diplomacy, however, there are major obstacles on the ground. Ukraine’s metals aren’t piled up in a treasure chamber somewhere. They’re in the ground—often in ground that Russian troops are standing on. As much as half of Ukraine’s total mineral resources are estimated to be in the four eastern regions largely occupied by Russia. At least two established lithium deposits are in Russian-held territory, and another is just a few miles from the current front line. Few investors want to put their cash into mines within artillery range of a war zone. Mines also require lots of energy, and the war has mauled Ukraine’s power grid. Ditto for roads and other transportation infrastructure. Plus there’s the inevitable environmental damage to be considered. Critical metal mining in Ukraine “has the potential to impact wetlands and rivers, old-growth forest and steppe,” cautions the Conflict and Environment Observatory. “Given these barriers to mining and investment, we don’t expect any new substantial critical mineral supply anytime soon,” says Bille. Nor, it seems, should Ukraine expect any substantial new help from America anytime soon. Indeed, amid the negotiations over Ukraine’s future, Russian president Vladimir Putin, eager to reciprocate America’s newly friendly attitude toward his country, has extended a metallic olive branch. On Monday, the Times reported, Putin bragged on state TV that “Russia’s deposits of rare earth minerals used in high-tech manufacturing were ‘orders of magnitude’ greater than Ukraine’s. He said Russia could work with American companies to help develop those deposits, even inside Russian-occupied Ukraine.” 

AFTER THREE YEARS OF FULL-SCALE WAR, WE NOW FACE AN AUTHORITARIAN WORLD ORDER ~ Nikita Ivansky ~ Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, believing in it’s own imperial myth of military strength. It hoped to swiftly take over Kyiv and the rest of the country and establish a puppet regime. But the Russian army choked on the scattered forces of Ukrainian army, volunteer battalions, and small groups who took action against the invaders. The Ukrainian people became the mud in which the Russian war machine began to sink.  Now, we face a new world order where Putin’s friend in Washington has started blackmailing the Ukrainian government into a colonial-style deal intended to extract as much resources from the region as possible. Meanwhile, European countries are struggling to get some space for future discussions of what Trump and Putin have been agreeing behind closed doors. With all of this, the interests of ordinary people in Ukraine and Eastern Europe are being left behind. We are once again in the age of global empires that use brute force to batter people into submission. This fits in perfectly with the MAGA narrative that Trump has been pushing so hard to US voters for almost a decade. And while the “free” world was inspired by the resistance of the Ukrainian people in the first months of the invasion, more and more people in Europe and the US are tired of the war as it threatens their first world comforts.  After a drone attack in Sumy, Ukraine, 30 January Ukrainians are now in peril of being left on their own, with very limited possibilities to resist the Russian invasion. Grassroots solidarity won’t be able to provide as many resources as necessary to fight back. Trump understands this perfectly. The new “king” of the USA, as he called himself, understands the power he has over the Ukrainian state at this point of history, and through this power he is trying to benefit from this war without all these conversations about protecting the free democratic world from authoritarianism. Trump himself wants to have the same power dynamics between the state and the people as they currently have in Russia or China.  That is why those who shout for “peace” at right-wing rallies around the world are actually repeating the Kremlin’s propaganda. They are not in favour of peace, but against a war from which they do not profit. Fascism is not an ideology of peace. It is an ideology of conflict, and it benefits from creating chaos and confusion to establish and maintain its rule. Except for a very few groups and organisations, anarchists and anti-authoritarian leftists have so far failed to develop a common platform to approach this crisis. We are in the darkest of times on this planet. The new world order is being built by forces that have little regard for human life or freedom. It is easy in these moments to drown in self-pity and sadness, to abandon political engagement, or to find safety in social media bubbles. But now is the time when the struggle matters most. It is not the time for despair, but rather for anger and hope, because history has shown that darkness can be scattered by the brave souls who dedicate themselves to the struggle for a better world. It is our turn to pick up that torch. The post Putin’s friend blackmails Ukraine appeared first on Freedom News.