Yuliya Yurchenko expands the frame for understanding the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Yuliya Yurchenko is a senior lecturer and researcher in political economy at University of Greenwich. She is currently in Ukraine on an extraordinary leave. And while she writes that she is, for the moment, in relative safety, that could change any moment. Being a Ukrainian, an activist and an academic, Yuliya traveled to Ukraine on Feb 19, 2022 as part of a fact-finding and solidarity mission with a number of MPs, trade unionists and journalists. The goal, she says, of this mission is to connect with civil society organizations, trade unions, activists and politicians, and “to express direct, cross-border solidarity from the UK working class to the Ukrainian working class.” She not only demands that Ukraine’s foreign debt be canceled, but that the international community also provide reparations for 8 years of inaction on Russian aggression. If we want to understand this war, Yuliya points out, it is going to be necessary to look past the headlines. The simplistic black and white portrayals we’re receiving do not do justice to the complexity of the situation. And although she recognizes that this lack of nuance largely results from a desire to give the public a “coherent frame,” it’s just patently the case that, right now, “conventional frames don’t work” and for that reason, she says, we need to deeply reassess “what constitutes evidence” even, and evolve methods of analyzing disinformation, emotion, belonging, statehood and aggression beyond traditional Western scholarship and standard modes of political science. While we’re still encouraged to think in terms of the rule of law when trying to understand these sorts of conflicts, Yurchenko emphasizes that societies without the rule of law require us to “be more flexible” in our theorizing. Why can’t we incorporate “interdisciplinary and open-minded… frameworks” to understand what’s happening? This is what I kept hearing in my conversation with Yuliya: a tension between wanting to, herself, offer clarity, and knowing that the whole situation is, on some level, hopelessly complicated. So, for that reason, in part, she says she is necessarily hopeful that peace is possible, but has to be pragmatic about the evidence, which suggests that the war is going to drag on. So she continues to communicate publicly for peace. She talks at the beginning of our conversation about the fact that she derives a lot of strength from just fighting for the future through care – that these contributions to collective living-on have become a kind of personal coping mechanism, It speaks to the spirit of Yurchenko’s writing. Her book Ukraine and the Empire of Capital (https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745337371/ukraine-and-the-empire-of-capital/) is not only full of profound analysis, it also, importantly, centres the living labour of workers, people who are focused not on extraction, profit, and domination, but on trying to care for themselves and their families. These people are not, as she puts it here, just “pawns in imperialist games.” They deserve collective ownership of their own future. In the end, she argues that we must stop “competing for the crumbs of Empire,” “we need to imagine a future” of demilitarization, we need to imagine a world in which hate and resentment and competition for those crumbs no longer drives world affairs. In short, as she puts it, “we need to imagine the future before we can build it.”