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Ukraine Going From Maidan To War / Volodymyr Ishchenko

Ukranian troops

 What kind of Ukraine is emerging as a result of this war? A Ukraine with very limited political freedoms with the ethnonationalist policies which in my opinion, are impossible to support with profound dependency on foreign aid. And like most fundamentally, it's a demographic catastrophe. It's the prospects of the catastrophic depopulation of the country according to the United Nations projections. They published in 2024, 2 years ago. And they assumed that the war was going to end last year in 2025. And so under these very optimistic projections, they forecasted Ukrainian population down to 15 million by the end of this century. From 52 million that Ukraine had after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992. From 52 to 15, that's the depopulation, less over than 70% of the people in Ukraine. So if, if this is the war that is going on, we are going to have even less people. And without people we don't have the future.

Research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin and sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko returns to discuss the Russia-Ukraine war and many of the misconceptions we may have regarding the ongoing conflict. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Jacobin and New Left Review. He is the author of “Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War”, published by Verso Books.

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Guest

Volodymyr Ishchenko

Volodymyr Ishchenko was born in the city of Hoshcha in western Ukraine in 1982. He grew up in Kiev, taught sociology at Kiev universities and was active in the Ukrainian new left. He is now a researcher at the Freie Universität in Berlin. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Jacobin and New Left Review. He is the author of “Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War”, published by Verso Books.