Since arriving in Ireland, more than 10 million people have watched clips from my investigation into Aughinish Alumina, a Russian-owned refinery on the Shannon Estuary that continues to export alumina to Russia.

I’ve interviewed Irish ministers, MEPs, workers, local journalists and residents. I’ve tracked ships, followed supply chains, obtained a sample from the refinery, and spent days trying to understand how a fine white powder produced in rural Ireland could end up connected to Russia’s war economy.

The story has exploded far beyond anything I expected.

Politicians who previously said little are now being asked questions. The issue has been discussed at the highest levels of Irish and European politics. New commitments have been made. And for the first time, it feels like genuine pressure is building around a story that many people thought would never enter the public conversation.

But the reality is that this issue is still incredibly complicated.

Most people don’t spend their days thinking about bauxite, alumina, aluminium smelters, sanctions loopholes or global supply chains. So one question kept coming up again and again:

How exactly does a white powder made in Ireland end up linked to Russia’s war machine?

That’s what I wanted to answer.

In the video below, I break down the entire process step by step — from bauxite arriving at the refinery, to alumina production in Ireland, to exports into Russia, and why this supply chain has become the focus of growing scrutiny from journalists, politicians and campaigners across Europe.

Whether you agree with me or not, understanding how the system works is the first step.

And thank you to everyone who has followed this investigation, shared it, challenged it, criticised it, supported it, and helped bring it into the public conversation.

I’ve been in Ireland for a week investigating Aughinish Alumina — the Russian-owned refinery on the Shannon Estuary that has become one of the most uncomfortable political questions in the country.

It is not a small place. It is not a marginal operation. It is one of the largest alumina refineries in Europe, sitting beside quiet Irish villages, supplying a material that continues to flow into Russia while Europe claims to be tightening the screws on Moscow’s war machine.

And yet, for weeks, the people with the power to answer basic questions about it have been remarkably difficult to pin down.

One of the hardest to reach has been Niall Collins.

Collins is not a backbencher shouting from the sidelines. He is a government minister. He is also one of the politicians who has repeatedly defended the refinery while avoiding the central question: why is Ireland still allowing this supply chain to continue, and why has the government not done more to investigate where this material ultimately ends up?

So, after days of official silence, unanswered questions and careful political footwork, I did what any totally normal journalist would do.

I put on a pair of Wellingtons and went to the Newcastle West Agricultural Show.

There, between tractors, livestock, local families and the gentle theatre of rural Ireland, I finally found the minister.

It was, in many ways, the perfect setting. This investigation is not happening in some abstract geopolitical space. It is happening in Ireland. In small towns. Beside farms. In villages where Russian corporate power has been allowed to become part of the furniture while everyone is told not to look too closely.

When I asked Collins about the Russian-owned refinery and the signs of its influence locally, his response was extraordinary.

He told me he had not heard of them.

A government minister, in a county where this refinery is one of the most politically sensitive industrial sites in the country, appeared to suggest he had somehow not noticed the Russian presence that locals, workers and reporters have all been forced to notice.

It would have been funny if it were not so serious.

Because this is the pattern I have seen again and again since arriving in Ireland. Nobody wants to own the question. Nobody wants to say clearly why the material continues to move. Nobody wants to admit that a Russian-owned refinery in Ireland has become a moral, political and strategic problem for the country.

So the question keeps being dodged.

But it is no longer disappearing.

The video of the confrontation has now been viewed by nearly a million people. Other exchanges I have had with Irish politicians on this issue have also travelled far beyond Ireland, drawing international attention to a story that was, for too long, treated as too complicated, too local, or too inconvenient to confront.

Now people are talking about it. Other outlets are beginning to pick it up. Politicians who once hoped this would remain a niche question about industrial exports are being forced to explain themselves in public.

That matters.

Journalism is often imagined as something that happens in studios, press conferences and carefully arranged interviews. But sometimes it happens in a field, in the mud, at a farming show, because that is the only place a politician who has avoided difficult questions can finally be asked them directly.

I came to Ireland to investigate a refinery.

What I found was a political class still struggling to explain why, in the third year of Russia’s full-scale war, Ireland is comfortable allowing this supply chain to continue.

Watch the exchange for yourself

Bakhmach, Chernihiv region. Photo: Rubryka

In the Ukrainian town of Bakhmach, in the northern Chernihiv region, three librarians named Valentyna, Inna, and Vira had been doing something unusual every summer since 2017.

Once a month they loaded fifty books into baskets on their bicycles and rode to the parts of town where it was hardest to reach the library. They met people on the street, outside their homes, near the shops. An elderly woman carrying a bucket of apples saw them coming and stopped to treat everyone to fruit. A shop clerk sweeping the pavement outside her store looked at the baskets and joked: buy some bread from me, and I’ll take a book. A trade was made. They called it the Bike Library, the velobiblioteka, and after seven years it had become, in its quiet way, essential.

Between 2022 and 2024, the same library decommissioned 70,000 copies of Soviet-era literature under Ukraine’s law banning Russian imperial propaganda. The librarians who had spent years bringing books to people were now deciding which books could no longer stay.

This is a story about what libraries are for, and what happens when someone decides they are dangerous.

What a Library Is

The monitoring report that documented what happened to Ukrainian libraries since 24 February 2022, prepared by the Luhansk Regional Human Rights Centre Alternative, opens with a sentence that sounds almost plain until you sit with it.

Libraries are centres of intellectual freedom and civic engagement, promoters of the national idea, patriotism and European values, and places of education and tolerance.

It is not surprising that Ukrainian libraries have become targets of Russian aggression, which pursues a single goal: the destruction of Ukrainian identity.

This is not editorialising. It is a statement of mechanism. A library is not simply a building full of books. It is the place where a culture stores its memory of itself: its arguments, its history, its self-definition across generations. Destroy the writers and you silence the present. Destroy the libraries and you erase the past. Both have been happening in Ukraine, in different centuries, by the same hand.

Valentyna, Inna, and Vira understood this without needing to say it. That is why they got on the bicycles.

The Scale

Since 24 February 2022, Russian forces have destroyed or damaged almost a thousand libraries across Ukraine, and with them more than 200 million Ukrainian books. Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture puts the number of affected libraries at 854 and rising. From the occupied territories, the full picture cannot yet be assessed. Damage continues. Libraries are still being shelled.

Before the full-scale invasion there were around 40,000 library institutions of various kinds across Ukraine. As of the end of June 2023, the number of public libraries alone had decreased by 2,560 institutions. In Zaporizhzhia oblast, 50 public libraries were damaged, 4 completely destroyed. In Kherson oblast, libraries suffered perhaps the greatest damage of any region. In Mykolaiv, 12 libraries ceased to function entirely from direct missile strikes, and 52 sustained varying degrees of damage.

And then, on 23 May 2024, Russia escalated. Missiles struck Factor Druk, a printing facility in Kharkiv that produced a third of all books printed in Ukraine. Seven workers were killed. More than 50,000 books burned. The message was not subtle: it is not enough to destroy the libraries. Destroy the places that make the books in the first place.

Factor Druk was fully rebuilt by March 2025, funded by an American philanthropist. Kharkiv, 25 kilometres from the Russian border, still prints 80 percent of Ukraine’s books.

Factor Druk, Kharkiv. Left: 24 May 2024. Right: 20 March 2025.

Almost a thousand libraries. More than 200 million books. The accumulated reading life of a nation, reduced to rubble and ash, and still being printed, still being read, in a city within artillery range of the country trying to erase it.

What Survived Everything Else

In the centre of Chernihiv, the same region where Valentyna, Inna, and Vira ride their bicycles through the summer streets, stood a library that had survived everything.

It was built in the late nineteenth century in the pseudo-Gothic style: pointed arches, ornate facades, the kind of building a city puts up when it believes in permanence. In 1902, it housed a museum of Ukrainian antiquities. In 1918, the Bolsheviks bombarded Chernihiv. The library stood. In the Second World War, the German Luftwaffe bombed the city. The library stood. For more than a century it accumulated books, survived occupations, outlasted empires, and kept its collections intact through everything history threw at it.

On 11 March 2022, Russian aircraft dropped three 500-kilogram high-explosive bombs on its courtyard and the nearby stadium. One destroyed the library’s wall and interior ceilings. Seven thousand books were lost in the rubble. The building was included on the UNESCO list of damaged cultural sites in Ukraine.

Chernihiv Regional Library: before and after 11 March 2022.

It had survived the Bolsheviks. It had survived the Nazis. It took Putin’s air force to finish it.

This is the context in which the librarians are working. Not a natural disaster. Not the incidental damage of war. A deliberate, sustained campaign against the places where Ukrainian culture is stored: the buildings, the collections, the irreplaceable local histories that exist nowhere else.

Nadiia

The Kherson Regional Universal Scientific Library was first opened on 18 June 1872. By the time of the full-scale invasion it had grown into one of the great libraries of southern Ukraine: twelve thousand square metres of reading rooms and depositories on the banks of the Dnipro River, eleven specialist reading rooms, nine hundred and seventeen seats, a book depository designed for 1.2 million volumes. Its local history collection was the largest of its kind on the history of the southern part of Ukraine. Much of what it held existed nowhere else.

On 3 March 2022, Russian troops occupied Kherson. The library stopped working. The male staff, locksmiths, watchmen and electricians, stayed on to protect the building from looters. In April, the occupiers began moving through the building. In May, on the eve of Victory Day, Russian soldiers kicked out all remaining security staff and locked themselves inside to celebrate.

The director, Nadiia Korotun, described what the staff found when they were allowed back in on 10 May.

It was a nightmare. The building was an absolute mess, all the doors of all departments on four floors were open, some were broken, cabinets and cupboards were broken on the floor. Spoons, plates, cups, kettles, coffee, tea and sugar were all stolen. The entire floor was covered with paper, and glass was broken in one of the departments. Then the entire library staff spent another 2–3 days washing and cleaning everything up.

Kherson Regional Library: reading room before occupation, and after Russian shelling.

Through the summer, the staff quietly moved what they could: computer equipment to the basement, employment records, personal files, financial documents carried out by taxi one load at a time to avoid attracting Russian attention. Some documents had to be destroyed outright to prevent the occupiers from accessing information about the library’s projects and contacts.

Then the occupiers came to Nadiia directly. They offered her the chance to continue heading the library, under Russian administration. She refused. Under threat to her life, she left for Odesa oblast. Out of 155 employees, 19 agreed to work with the occupiers. Employment contracts with all 19 were later terminated.

Before the Armed Forces of Ukraine liberated Kherson in November 2022, Russian trucks arrived at the library. They loaded everything they could carry: furniture, equipment, and the rare pre-Soviet publications from the local history collection. The largest archive of the history of southern Ukraine, assembled across 150 years, driven east into Russia.

Then, retreating, they shelled the building anyway.

The library has been hit at least three times since liberation. A gaping hole more than a square metre wide torn through the roof. The third floor partially collapsed. The building mothballed. No services provided.

Nadiia’s crime was refusing to hand it over. The punishment was losing it anyway, piece by piece, shell by shell.

The Purge

The shelling is only part of what is happening to Ukrainian libraries.

In the occupied territories, a different and more deliberate destruction is underway. After Russian forces established control, formal orders were issued, in the name of occupation administrations styling themselves as legitimate governments, requiring the removal of Ukrainian literature from library collections. The category applied to these books was precise: extremist.

Extremist literature, according to the occupation authorities, includes school textbooks on the history of Ukraine. Scientific and popular historical works. Books about the Ukrainian liberation struggle. Literature about the Holodomor. Journalism published after 2014. Comics for children and teenagers. Books from the Famous Ukrainians series. Fiction set in modern Ukraine. And Ukrainian classics, among them works by Lesia Ukrainka, one of the most celebrated writers in the language’s history.

Local librarians were required to compile lists of the seized material under their personal responsibility. They were instructed to pack the books in boxes and bags and seal them. Russian FSS curators participated in commissions inspecting collections and drawing up lists of titles to be destroyed. In their place, Russian publications were imported, including books on historical topics promoting the Russian narrative of the war.

Books discarded from a Ukrainian library under occupation.

In Mariupol, a pile of discarded Ukrainian books was photographed under the windows of a university that had been shelled. In Irpin, Russians took hundreds of Bibles outside and burned them. In Zhukotky, soldiers entered the village library, took the stationery, and used the books to make their beds.

This is not the chaos of war. It is a policy. The forms are filled out. The lists are compiled. The boxes are sealed and signed for.

It happened before. In 1931, Ukrainisation was reversed and the books and journals it had produced began to disappear from shelves. The writers who had filled those shelves were arrested in the years that followed. Their names were removed from encyclopaedias. The silence was made to look as though it had always been there.

The mechanism is the same. Only the paperwork has changed.

What Stalin Could Not Finish

There is a reason the anthology matters.

In 1959, in Paris, a Ukrainian literary critic named Yuriy Lavrinenko published a collection of works by the Executed Renaissance, the writers Stalin had killed or silenced in the 1930s. He had spent years reconstructing it from scraps: periodicals held in foreign libraries, archival fragments, the memories of survivors. The anthology existed because libraries outside Ukraine had preserved what Ukraine had been forbidden to keep. Because someone had filed the journals. Because the books had been in foreign collections beyond Stalin’s reach.

The anthology gave the dead generation back its name. It made the silence visible. It ensured that when Ukraine was eventually free to remember, there would be something to remember with.

That is what a library does. It is the place that holds the scraps.

Now Russia is targeting the libraries. And not only destroying them: looting the rare collections, the pre-Soviet materials, the local history funds that exist nowhere else, and driving them east. The Kherson collection. The Mariupol collection. The irreplaceable local histories of communities that have been under bombardment for years.

If those collections are gone, there are no scraps left to reconstruct from. There is no Paris anthology possible for what is being lost right now, because the originals are not in foreign libraries. They were in Kherson. They were in Mariupol. They were in Chernihiv.

Stalin killed the writers and thought he had killed the culture. He had not, quite. The books outlasted him. The anthology was possible because some things survived.

Russia has learned from that mistake.

The Ones That Got Away

In Trostianets, after liberation, the library opened its doors on 6 April 2022. There was no electricity. No internet. People came anyway, to talk to each other, to sit somewhere that still felt like itself. Within weeks the library was helping elderly people and displaced persons file applications for damaged property restoration. More than 2,000 applications submitted from a library reading room. Then psychologists came. Then British doctors, every Tuesday, providing specialist care to the residents of a town that had been occupied and traumatised.

In Mariupol, the director of the Central City Library sheltered fifty residents in the basement through the worst of the siege, alongside police officers who had nowhere else to go. They filled tanks with water before the supply was cut. They drained boilers, collected rainwater, melted snow. They listened to planes overhead and bombs falling in the dark and did not leave.

In Mykolaiv, after a rocket exploded near the children’s library, the director arrived the next morning with her staff to clean up the damage. “We are glad that at least the equipment remained intact,” she said.

In Kharkiv, in Sumy, in Chernihiv, in village after village across the oblasts that were shelled and occupied and shelled again, librarians made the same series of small decisions. Hide the computers. Move the collections to higher ground. Come back when it is safe enough. Open the doors. Let people in.

These are not dramatic acts. They are quiet ones, made in the middle of catastrophic circumstances, by people whose professional identity is bound up with the idea that knowledge should be preserved and shared. They did not stop believing that when the bombs started falling. If anything, they believed it more.

The exiles who rebuilt the Executed Renaissance anthology in Paris were making the same calculation. The cost to them was years of painstaking work, reconstructing a generation from fragments. The cost to the librarians of Ukraine is measured differently: in sleepless nights in basements, in decisions made in occupied buildings, in the controlled grief of watching trucks carry away collections that took 150 years to build.

Someone always keeps count. Someone always decides the books are worth it.

They bombed the printing house in Kharkiv. They rebuilt it. It is still printing, 25 kilometres from the Russian border.

The question this war is forcing is a harder one: what happens when the people doing the counting are outgunned, and the things worth saving are being shelled faster than they can be carried out?

In Kherson, the trucks came before anyone could stop them. The rarest books are in Russia now.

The building shaped like the word for ‘word’ was damaged thirteen days into the invasion.

The library that survived the Bolsheviks and the Nazis took three bombs in 2022.

This is not the chaos of war. It is a project. It has always been a project. And it is further along than it has ever been.

In Bakhmach, when the summer comes, Valentyna, Inna, and Vira load up their bicycles. Fifty books in the baskets. Five kilometres through the town. They go to the people who cannot come to them.

They have been doing it for seven years. They are still doing it now.

Valentyna, Inna, and Vira outside Bakhmach Central Library. Photo: Rubryka

Sources: Russian Attack on Ukrainian Libraries: Monitoring Study on the Consequences of the Russian Army Shelling of Library Infrastructure from 24 February 2022 to 15 November 2023, Luhansk Regional Human Rights Centre “Alternative”; Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine; UNESCO damaged cultural sites registry; Rubryka, “Books, bicycles, and three librarians,” September 2024; Kyiv Independent, “Ukrainians find solace, identity in books amid Russia’s war,” 2024; National Resistance Centre of Ukraine.

In this film, I investigate reports that Russian forces may be launching drones from the area of the nuclear plant itself. If true, it would mark a terrifying new escalation: explosive drones operating around Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant.

The plant is already under occupation. The Kakhovka dam has been destroyed. The reservoir that once helped cool the reactors is gone. Workers have been pressured, threatened or forced out. The risks are growing, and the world is still not paying enough attention.

I speak to the mayor of Nikopol, the mayor of occupied Enerhodar, local residents, evacuation teams, police, soldiers and nuclear experts to understand what is happening, and what could happen next.

I make these films independently. No government money, no billionaire backers, no shady sponsors. This reporting is only possible because of my Patreon community.

If you find this film important, please share it, leave a comment, and let me know what you think I should investigate next.

Thank you so much for watching.

Victor Vizu, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1929, the Soviet government of Ukraine did something remarkable. It built a palace.

Not a palace for commissars or party officials, but for poets. For novelists, playwrights, and essayists. The building rose in Kharkiv, then the capital of Soviet Ukraine, a six-storey constructivist block of sixty-six private apartments, each fitted with a telephone, an extraordinary luxury for the era. It had a garden, a laundry, and a kindergarten. The architect, Mykhailo Dashkevych, designed it in the shape of the Cyrillic letter С, the first letter of “slovo”, the Ukrainian word for “word”. The House of Words, built by the state for the wordsmiths of a nation.

The finest writers in Ukraine moved in. Novelists, poets, playwrights, directors. The building hummed with argument and creativity. The literary conversations that took place in its corridors during those early years were extraordinary, as a generation at the peak of its powers finally found the space to express themselves.

By 1940, the arrests had touched forty of its sixty-six apartments. Thirty-three residents had been executed. The people of Kharkiv had a name for it by then. They called it the crematorium.

The Flowering

To understand what was lost, you have to understand what existed first.

The 1920s were, by any measure, an astonishing moment for Ukrainian culture. The collapse of the Russian Empire had ended a century of imperial censorship that had, at various points, banned the Ukrainian language from public life entirely, from schools, from official correspondence, and from the stage. When that censorship lifted, the result was not a gradual recovery but an explosion. Scores of new writers appeared. Dozens of literary groups formed and argued and published. Prominent Ukrainian intellectuals who had fled abroad returned home to participate in something that felt, genuinely, like a renaissance.

The early Soviet state, for its own strategic reasons, permitted and even encouraged these developments. For its own strategic reasons, the Soviet state permitted and even encouraged Lenin’s policy of ‘korenizatsiia’, or ‘nativisation’, to win loyalty from the national republics by allowing limited cultural expression in local languages. In Ukraine, it was called Ukrainisation. Ukrainian became the language of instruction in schools; by 1927, over ninety-seven per cent of Ukrainian high school students were being educated in their own language. The number of books and journals published in Ukrainian rose exponentially. The Communist Party of Ukraine itself became majority Ukrainian in membership for the first time.

It worked, in the sense that it produced exactly what it claimed to want: a flourishing national culture. What the architects of the policy had perhaps not fully anticipated was that a flourishing national culture would produce Ukrainians who thought of themselves as Ukrainians and who began to ask uncomfortable questions about their relationship to Moscow.

The writers who moved into the Slovo House were not, for the most part, anti-Soviet. Many were committed communists. What they were, stubbornly and brilliantly, was Ukrainian. They wrote in Ukrainian, thought in Ukrainian, and argued in Ukrainian about what Ukrainian literature should become. And in that, without quite intending to, they had made themselves dangerous.

The Trap

There is a theory, held by a number of historians and difficult to entirely dismiss, that Ukrainisation was designed to work exactly as it did. That allowing Ukrainian cultural life to flourish was never an act of generosity but of entrapment. The intention was to allow talented individuals to rise to prominence, make themselves known, publish their names in journals, and move into a centrally located apartment block with a telephone in every room so that when the time came, the authorities would know exactly where to locate them.

Whether by design or by the logic of events, that is largely what happened.

The starting gun was the 1930 show trial of the so-called Union for the Liberation of Ukraine, a fabricated organisation whose membership was invented by the secret police. Forty-five Ukrainian intellectuals were convicted of anti-state activity. Up to thirty thousand more would be arrested, deported, or executed over the decade that followed. In the spring of 1933, the NKVD’s black cars began arriving at the Slovo House after dark. The arrests came on fabricated charges: plotting to assassinate Soviet leaders, membership in underground nationalist cells, and counterrevolutionary activity. The charges were absurd. The outcomes were not.

Ukrainisation was formally reversed in 1931. Russification replaced it. The same language that had been celebrated in schools and newspapers six years earlier was now, in practice, evidence of suspicious attachment to a dangerous idea. The policy had changed. The people who had built their lives around it had not.

The Swans

Drai-Khmara (third from left in upper row) with a group of Ukrainian authors in 1923

Mykhailo Drai-Khmara was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most remarkable human beings in Ukraine in the 1920s. He spoke nineteen languages, including Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. He was a poet, a literary scholar, and a researcher of the Ukrainian scientific language. During the Holodomor, when Stalin’s engineered famine was killing millions across the Ukrainian countryside, Drai-Khmara found a fifteen-year-old orphan on the streets of Kyiv and took her into his home. He was that kind of man.

He was also a neoclassicist, part of a circle of poets who believed that Ukrainian literature should reach back toward the forms of ancient Greece and Rome, toward the universal. In 1926, he published his only poetry collection. Somewhere in that period he also wrote a sonnet he called Swans.

The poem described five swans in flight. Five birds, guided by the stars of the Lyra constellation, are migrating away from a frozen land toward something warmer, freer. It was, in form, a piece of classical symbolism: beautiful, measured, melancholy. To the NKVD, it was a coded message. The five swans, they determined, represented Drai-Khmara and his four neoclassical colleagues: Rylsky, Zerov, Fylypovych, and Klen. The frozen land was Soviet Ukraine. The flight was an invitation to resist.

The official report was explicit: “In one of his works, Swans, Drai-Khmara called on nationalist writers not to give up their stand. When proletarian critics exposed the counterrevolutionary essence of this poem disguised as symbolism, Drai-Khmara published an untrustworthy explanation.”

He was arrested. He died in a Soviet labour camp in 1939. Accounts hold that near the end he stepped between a guard and a younger prisoner, offering his own life instead. Whether the story is precisely true or not, it fits the man, the same instinct that had led him to take a starving orphan off the streets of Kyiv years before. The poem about swans outlived him.

A man who knew nineteen languages was killed because one poem about birds flew too freely.

The Numbers

Memorial plaque consist of writers and artist s who resided in the building

By Tala tamila - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51234169

The scale of what happened between 1930 and 1938 is almost impossible to absorb in the abstract. In 1930, two hundred and fifty-nine Ukrainian authors were being published. By 1938, thirty-six of those people remained alive. In a single decade, approximately four-fifths of Ukraine’s entire cultural elite, its writers, artists, philosophers, theatre directors, and educators were executed, imprisoned, or driven to suicide.

The Slovo House was a microcosm of this. The building itself still stands in Kharkiv. It is still shaped like the letter ‘C’ for ‘word’. After the wave of arrests, the residents who remained had a choice that many of them could not live with. Mykola Khvyliovyi, the writer who had been, in many ways, the intellectual leader of the generation, the man Stalin had personally ordered silenced in 1926, invited two colleagues to his apartment on a Sunday morning in May 1933. He told them he wanted to show them how a proletarian writer should behave. Then he shot himself. His friends could hear it through the walls.

This was not an aberration. It was the mechanism. The violence was the point, but so was the terror that preceded it. A generation of Ukrainian writers watched their colleagues disappear, wrote their confessions, praised the regime that was killing them, or fell silent. Some survived by severely limiting what they published. Some survived by writing odes to Stalin so debased that the poems read, in retrospect, as a kind of second death. All of them knew what had happened to the ones who had not bent.

What It Was For

The destruction of the Executed Renaissance served a double purpose.

The first was immediate and obvious: eliminate the individuals most capable of articulating Ukrainian identity in terms that could inspire resistance. Writers are not soldiers, but they are something the state fears differently than soldiers. A soldier can be killed and replaced. A poem can travel further than the poet ever could; it can be passed hand in hand, memorised, and outlived by both the man who wrote it and the regime that killed him. Stalin understood this. The arrests were not random. They were a targeted removal of the people most capable of making Ukraine real to Ukrainians.

The second purpose was longer-term and perhaps more profound. A culture is not only its present practitioners. A culture encompasses not only its current practitioners but also its collective memory, which includes the accumulated works, arguments, and self-definitions that are passed down from one generation to the next. By destroying the writers, banning their books, and erasing their names from the record, the Soviet state was not only eliminating individuals. It was attempting to sever a people from its own past. To make the silence seem like it had always been there.

The Echo

In occupied Ukrainian territories today, children are being enrolled in Russian schools where Ukrainian history is not taught or is taught as the history of a country that does not really exist. Ukrainian-language books have been removed from libraries. Street signs have been changed. The names of towns, of squares, of the dead, are being quietly altered.

This is not incidental to the military campaign. It is inseparable from it. Russia is not only trying to hold Ukrainian land. It is trying to hold it in a way that, given enough time, will make the holding seem natural, will produce a generation for whom Russian is the language of childhood, of school, of family, of everything that matters.

Stalin’s method was the bullet and the labour camp: remove the people who remember, and the memory dies with them. The method being applied today is slower, more patient, and in some ways more insidious, the gradual replacement of one childhood with another, one language with another, one name with another. The goal is identical. Fewer Ukrainians in the world. Not necessarily by killing them, but by transforming them into something else.

The Executed Renaissance did not succeed, in the end, in its own erasure. In 1958, a Ukrainian literary critic named Yuriy Lavrinenko, himself a survivor of that generation, living in exile in Paris received a letter from a Polish publisher named Jerzy Giedroyc. Giedroyc had been helping Lavrinenko compile an anthology of the banned literature, reconstructed painstakingly from archival scraps, from periodicals held in foreign libraries, and from the memories of those who had escaped. He wrote to suggest a title. Could it be better to give it a generic name: ‘Executed Renaissance’? The name would sound spectacular. The anthology appeared in 1959. It preserved the work of the dead. It gave a name to what had been done to them. It made sure that when the time came, there would be something to return to.

The Question

Members of the literary group Lanka in 1924. From left to right: Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Hryhorii Kosynka, Maria Halych, Yevhen Pluzhnyk, Valerian Pidmohylny and Todos Osmachka. Kosynka, Pluzhnyk and Pidmohylny would all be executed under Stalin.

By Дмитро Тупчієнко - https://tsdaea.archives.gov.ua/Publications/fotolitopys/content.php?chapterFolder=1920s&item=Kyiv_1920s#fancybox-9, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=100302981

In 1963, a young Ukrainian poet named Vasyl Symonenko was walking in Bykivnia forest near Kyiv when he came across some boys playing football with a human skull. The mass graves of people murdered by the Soviets lay hidden among the trees. The skull had surfaced, as such things do, from the ground.

The dead of the Executed Renaissance were buried in places like that. For decades, the Soviet state suppressed the truth of what had happened to them. Their books were banned. Their names were removed from encyclopaedias. They did not exist.

They were found, eventually. The anthology in Paris. The graves in the forests. The poems passed hand to hand in secret. Someone, always, was keeping count.

The Ukrainian children now inside Russia, learning Russian, given Russian names, and enrolled in schools where Ukraine is a fiction, are living through a different version of the same erasure. They did not choose it. Most of them are very young. Some are infants.

The question the Executed Renaissance leaves us with is not whether such projects can be survived. History answers that, barely, with a yes. The question is what it costs to survive them, and who does the work of remembering when the state has decided to forget.

Last time, it was a handful of exiles in Paris, working from scraps.

This time, we have no excuse not to know what is happening while it is happening.

The Slovo House is still standing. In 2018, nearly eighty years after the last of its residents were shot or broken, it reopened as a literary residence, a living space for contemporary writers, and a place where Ukrainian literature could breathe again. It had survived Stalin. It had survived the Soviet Union. It had become, cautiously, something like itself again.

On 8 March 2022, thirteen days into Russia’s full-scale invasion, Russian shells damaged its facade.

The building is shaped like the word. Still standing. Still a target.

Sources and further reading: Euromaidan Press, Slovo House reporting; Wikipedia, Executed Renaissance; Mykhailo Drai-Khmara biographical sources; Byline/Stephen Komarnyckyj translations; University of Connecticut LibGuides, Interwar Soviet Ukraine; 1930 Union for the Liberation of Ukraine trial records; Yuriy Lavrinenko, The Executed Renaissance: An Anthology, 1917–1933 (Paris: Kultura, 1959); Bring Kids, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slovo_Building

ust days after Russia’s deeply embarrassing Victory Day parade, where almost no major military hardware was shown, Moscow has now come under one of the biggest long-range attacks since the full-scale invasion began. One of Russia’s most protected oil refineries was hit at a time when the Kremlin is struggling more and more to convince its own people that this war is still a success.

That doesn’t mean the war is ending anytime soon. But it does mean something important: Russia suddenly looks weak, both inside and outside the country.

I just got back from Venice a few days ago, where Russians seemed desperate to project strength to the world through culture, influence, and propaganda. But after spending time around it all, what struck me most was that the messaging no longer feels aimed at the West. It feels aimed inward. The propaganda now seems focused on reassuring Russians themselves that everything is still under control.

This week, I spoke to Bill Browder about what he believes is happening inside Russia right now, why the Kremlin is becoming increasingly obsessed with controlling perception, and what that tells us about the state of Russian society today.

I hope you enjoy the report. If you do, please consider subscribing 🙏Most of my reporting focuses on the front lines in Ukraine and Russia’s wider propaganda war across Europe.

I’ll also be publishing a major documentary this week filmed in Nikopol, right beside Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, looking at how Russia has weaponized the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant during the war.

TV Host Nataliia Lutsenko and Caolan Robertson, Irish journalist, documentary filmmaker, discussed the topic of where he has visited the Venice Biennale, a space of art that Russia is once again trying to turn into another battlefield, a battle for attention, legitimacy, and its own genocidal narratives under the cover of culture. Was the Russian pavilion popular over there in Venice? Russia is weakening while still having the possibility to make massive attacks on Ukrainian cities. Should Europe take a leading role in the negotiation process right now? If they continue, or should the United States remain the main mediator?

This video contains footage from @CaolanReports

This year, the headlines around the Venice Biennale have been non-stop.

The world’s most prestigious art festival has been wrapped in scandal because the Russians are back. So I decided to go there myself and find out why.

This came just after my trip to Hungary, where I investigated what Viktor Orbán is doing, and then from Hungary to Nikopol, right across from the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant. Now from Nikopol to Venice.

Slowly, Russians are being invited back into polite society through operas, Oscars, film festivals, and now art festivals. And when I searched for serious investigations into how this is happening and why the Russians are back at the Biennale, I could barely find any.

The president of the Biennale has been avoiding questions. The Russian delegation has been avoiding questions. So I wanted to ask them myself and try to find answers.

This film is completely independent. No government funding, no billionaires, no shady sponsors, no USAID, none of that. Just me, my camera, and the support of a great community on Patreon, which keeps all of my work free forever.

If you enjoyed this documentary, please consider joining. And next week, I’ll be releasing a major new film from Nikopol and the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.

Also, if you want to help boost the algorithm, leave a comment. I read as many as I can and genuinely love seeing the feedback.

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Left: The devşirme—Christian boys presented to Ottoman officials for induction into the Janissary system. Miniature from the Süleymanname, c. 1558, Topkapı Palace Museum. Right: Ukrainian children undergoing "re-education" at Russian military camps. Photo: Bring Kids Back UA

For hundreds of years, the Ottoman Empire ran one of history’s most sophisticated systems of forced assimilation: the devşirme, literally ”the gathering”. Christian boys from the Balkans and Anatolia were taken from their families, converted to Islam, given new names, and trained to serve the sultan. The best of them became the Janissaries, the empire’s elite infantry. Some rose to become grand viziers. Many never saw their families again.

Today, as documented by Ukrainian officials, international investigators, and the International Criminal Court, Russia is engaged in what critics and legal scholars are calling a systematic programme of relocating Ukrainian children to Russian territory, stripping them of their nationality, enrolling them in Russian schools, exposing them to state-directed ideological curricula, and, in many cases, placing them with Russian families for adoption. Russian officials have, at various points, spoken openly and approvingly of this process.

The parallel is not perfect. No historical parallel ever is. But it is close enough to be worth examining seriously, because the devşirme tells us something important about what such programmes are for, how they work on the children subjected to them, and what they mean for the societies from which those children are taken.

The Gathering

The devşirme operated on a rough cycle, typically every few years, in which Ottoman officials would arrive in Christian villages and select boys between the ages of roughly eight and eighteen. The criteria were specific: healthy, intelligent, good-looking, and neither too tall nor too short. Sons of craftsmen were preferred, sturdy, capable, and with practical intelligence. They had to be Christian, not Muslim (the logic being that converting them was the point). They could not be only sons, because wiping out a family line entirely would have caused too much local unrest.

The boys were marched to Constantinople. Their heads were shaved. They were circumcised. Their Christian names were replaced with Muslim ones. They were assigned to Turkish families in Anatolia first, to learn the language and customs, and then brought back for training in the palace schools, an education system that was, by the standards of its era, remarkably rigorous. Languages, theology, horsemanship, archery, administration. The brightest were channelled towards statecraft. The strongest support is towards the military.

The Janissaries who emerged from this process were, by most historical accounts, extraordinary soldiers. They were also, by design, men without a homeland to return to. They were barred from marrying for much of the corps’ early history. Their loyalty was to the Sultan and the empire because the empire had become everything: mother, father, faith, and identity.

The Filtration

Russia’s deportation of Ukrainian children has been documented most extensively by the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab and by Ukrainian government records. As of mid-2023, Ukrainian officials estimated that over 19,000 children had been confirmed deported, with the real figure potentially running into the hundreds of thousands. The ICC issued arrest warrants in March 2023 for Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Children’s Rights Commissioner, specifically for the unlawful deportation of children.

The mechanism, like the devşirme, is layered and somewhat varied. Some children were evacuated from active conflict zones, a process that has a surface plausibility as humanitarian. Others were taken from orphanages and state care institutions in occupied territories. Some were separated from parents during filtration processes. Once inside Russia, the children enter a system that is difficult to exit.

They are enrolled in Russian schools, where Ukrainian history is not taught or is taught as the history of a country that does not really exist or that was always properly part of Russia. They are instructed in Russian civic identity and, frequently, Russian Orthodox religious practice. Some are sent to camps, not labour camps, but the kind of ideological summer camps that have been a feature of Russian state youth programmes for decades and which have intensified significantly since 2022. They are, in many documented cases, formally adopted by Russian families, who are given state incentives to take them.

Russia disputes the characterisation of these as deportations. Their official stance is that these are humanitarian rescues of children orphaned or endangered by the conflict, which Russia claims Ukraine initiated, provoked, or is not losing.

What It Does to a Child

Here is where the comparison becomes most psychologically acute.

Ottoman sources, and later European accounts of encounters with Janissaries, suggest that most of the devşirme boys did not remain in anguish about their origins. Some did; there are records of Janissaries who maintained quiet contact with Christian relatives or who retained some private attachment to their birth communities. But the system worked. The conversion was generally real. The identity was genuinely transformed. Men who had been born Jovan or Georgios became Ibrahim and Mehmed, and they were Ibrahim and Mehmed. They served, often brilliantly, and they identified with their service.

This is the disturbing genius of beginning with children. Adult prisoners of war can be broken, but they rarely truly convert. A child of ten, placed in an immersive new environment with a new name, new language, new religion, and new social bonds and deprived of the old ones, that child’s identity is genuinely plastic. The new self is not a mask over the old one. In many cases, it simply becomes the self.

Child psychologists who have worked with conflict-affected children and researchers who have studied programs of forced assimilation from residential schools in Canada and Australia to the Nazi Lebensborn program consistently find the same thing: the younger the child, the more total the separation, and the more immersive the new environment, the more complete the identity transformation tends to be.

This is what makes Russia’s programme, if the worst accounts of it are accurate, so much more serious than simple propaganda exposure. Propaganda can be later unlearned. A childhood, the language of childhood, the religion of childhood, and the names and faces of the people who raised you are far harder to revise.

The Political Logic

The devşirme served the Ottomans in two ways simultaneously. First, obviously, it produced soldiers and administrators of exceptional loyalty and capability. Men who owed everything to the empire had every incentive to serve it faithfully. There was no rival clan, no ancestral land, no old religion pulling them in a different direction.

Second, and perhaps more importantly for the long run, it was a tool of cultural and demographic management. The Balkans remained restive under Ottoman rule. The devşirme did not stop Greek or Serbian or Bulgarian culture from surviving, but it systematically removed from those communities their most capable young men generation after generation. It was, in effect, a recurring brain drain imposed by force on conquered peoples, a slow, steady extraction of human capital that weakened the capacity of those communities to produce future resistance.

From an outsider’s perspective, Russia’s apparent logic operates similarly at both levels. Children raised in Russia, fluent in the language, deeply connected to Russian culture and heritage, and with Russian families, are unlikely to fight for Ukraine. Should they be returned or find their way back, they might even serve Russian interests within Ukrainian society. Furthermore, removing a generation of children from Ukrainian communities, especially those in occupied territories, has significant material and cultural repercussions that extend far beyond the individual children.

It is, in this sense, a policy aimed not just at the children but at Ukrainian identity itself. The goal, to put it plainly, is to make there be fewer Ukrainians in the world, not by killing them, but by transforming them into something else.

The Difference That Matters

The devşirme was, for most of its history, institutionalised and regularised, an accepted feature of Ottoman imperial administration. The boys taken knew, and their families knew, that this was how the empire worked. There was grief, but there was also, in some communities, a complicated ambivalence: a devşirme boy who rose high could sometimes protect his home village, and some families are recorded as having tried to get their sons selected.

There is no such ambivalence in occupied Ukraine. The children taken are taken from a society that is actively resisting the power taking them. Their removal is not a tax paid to an accepted sovereign but an act committed against people who contest Russian authority over their land entirely. And it is happening in the context of a war, which means that many of the children’s parents are dead, displaced, imprisoned, or simply unable to reach them.

There is also the matter of international law, which has evolved considerably since the fifteenth century. The forcible transfer of children from one national group to another is defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention as one of the acts constituting genocide, when committed with intent to destroy a national group in whole or in part. The ICC warrants reflect exactly this legal framework.

The Janissaries were a prominent feature of their era. What Russia is allegedly doing constitutes a crime under our laws.

The Children

In the end, what connects the devşirme and the Donbas most viscerally is the simplest thing: individual children, removed from everything they knew, asked to become something different.

Some Janissaries rose to greatness by their own standards, while others became administrators who built lasting legacies. A few even achieved historical significance. To us, the system that created them appeared monstrous, yet the men themselves were complex, much like people.

We don’t yet know who the Ukrainian children will become. Many are young, some are even infants. Currently, they’re learning Russian and being gently, perhaps even lovingly, introduced to their new identities by their adoptive families, without mentioning “Ukraine”.

Whether they’ll ever find their way back to themselves, if they choose to, is one of the quieter tragedies unfolding in this war. History suggests it’s incredibly difficult, yet it’s not entirely impossible. Some Janissaries managed to remember.

The question remains: will anyone be there to help them remember when the time comes?

Sources and further reading: ICC arrest warrants (March 2023); Yale Humanitarian Research Lab reports on Ukrainian children’s deportations; Devşirme historical scholarship, including Halil İnalcık’s The Ottoman Empire*; and the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, Article II(e). *

https://www.friendsofeurope.org/insights/what-happens-to-a-kid-abducted-by-russia-survivors-and-detention-camp-maps-reveal-a-system-of-indoctrination/

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/lithuania-commits-eur10-million-to-return-and-reintegrate-ukrainian-children-kidnapped-by-russia-18682

https://www.dw.com/en/ukrainian-children-held-in-russia-militarized-reeducated/a-77124356

https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/president-von-der-leyen-addresses-international-coalition-bring-ukrainian-children-home-eu-doubles-down-support-ukraine

https://universitytimes.ie/2026/05/the-kilkenny-lad-russia-wants-to-arrest-caolan-robertson-is-still-in-kyiv/

Ukrainian officials have learned to use a phrase with quiet bitterness: “Russia’s word.” It’s uttered whenever Moscow announces another humanitarian pause holiday truce or energy-infrastructure agreement. It’s not said with hope but with a painful memory.

This memory stretches back decades. It includes two Chechen wars, a grinding proxy conflict in eastern Ukraine, a devastating campaign in Syria and now the fourth year of Europe’s bloodiest war since 1945. The pattern is strikingly consistent in each case: Russia agrees to stop fighting only to resume it. Ceasefires become cover for regrouping humanitarian pauses become leverage and holiday truces are announced with fanfare only to be violated within hours and blamed on the other side.

This isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It’s a documented, repeated and increasingly well-understood instrument of Russian military and diplomatic strategy.

Chechnya: Where the Playbook Was Written

The groundwork for Russia’s ceasefire strategy was laid in the 1990s amidst the ruins of Grozny. Following a military defeat in the First Chechen War, Russia brokered a ceasefire in August 1996 and withdrew its troops. This withdrawal left behind a staggering death toll of between 30,000 and 50,000 Chechen civilians and up to 6,000 Russian security personnel, making Grozny the most devastated city in Europe at the time.

This ceasefire held, but only because Russia had lost. By 1999 fighting resumed, leading to a second major armed conflict and widespread destruction of the Chechen capital. Unlike the first war, the Second Chechen War was pursued without the diplomatic restraint of the previous conflict. In the opening months, federal troops resorted to indiscriminate bombing and artillery fire, resulting in the deaths of dozens and sometimes hundreds of civilians to eliminate a handful of fighters.

In February 2005, Chechen separatist president Maskhadov called for a ceasefire lasting until at least February 22, presenting it as a gesture of goodwill towards President Putin. However, on March 8, 2005, Maskhadov was killed in an operation by Russian security forces. Tragically, no ceasefire followed his death. By then, Russia had developed a clear doctrine: to negotiate peace when it served its military interests and to resume hostilities when it did not.

Georgia exemplified this pattern.

Lasting just five days and resulting in the breakdown of a fragile agreement.Following an August 2008 escalation between South Ossetia and Georgia, Russian forces crossed the international border to support South Ossetia. They also entered Abkhazia, another breakaway region, despite the absence of fighting there. The conflict concluded on August 12 with a ceasefire brokered by international diplomats.

The ceasefire was swift, reflecting Russia’s success. The Russian government recognised South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations, with some scholars viewing them as effectively Russian protectorates. Approximately 20% of Georgian territory fell outside Tbilisi’s control. This demonstrated Russia’s willingness to halt its actions once victory was secured.

The Syria Playbook

In Syria, Russia’s intervention since 2015 led to the development of the “Syria playbook”. Analysts described this as a sophisticated use of ceasefire agreements, not as genuine pauses in conflict, but as tools to consolidate military advantage regroup forces and deflect international pressure.

Russia had a history of utilising ceasefires and humanitarian access agreements for strategic gain or agreeing to ceasefires it didn’t adhere to. This pattern was particularly evident during the 2016 campaign against eastern Aleppo.

A ceasefire unanimously agreed upon by the UN Security Council in February 2016 held for most of April. However, this period of relative calm allowed Russia, Syria and their allies to prepare for the subsequent coordinated military campaign. This involved a systematic siege of eastern Aleppo, characterised by tightened blockades, intensified bombardment of residential areas attacks on hospitals and the use of banned weapons such as cluster munitions and incendiary devices. Independent monitors documented over 440 civilian deaths in just one month of bombing, including more than 90 children.

Brief humanitarian pauses were announced only to be rendered meaningless. The UN stated it couldn’t deliver aid due to the lack of safety guarantees.

Perhaps the most striking example occurred in Eastern Ghouta in 2018. A 30-day ceasefire was agreed upon in UN Security Council Resolution 2401 amidst a brutal military campaign against the besieged area. However, it was never implemented. The population eventually surrendered in April following a surge in violence including chemical weapons attacks.

Analysts at the Atlantic Council bluntly concluded that Russia’s brief ceasefires in Syria – which prevented aid deliveries and couldn’t be trusted to allow civilians to evacuate – were delay tactics designed to gain bargaining leverage and reduce international pressure.

Donbas 2014–2022: Twenty Agreements, Zero That Held

Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine marked the beginning of a sustained eight-year campaign of ceasefire theatre. France and Germany brokered over 200 negotiation rounds and more than 20 ceasefire agreements. However, each was ultimately undermined by Russia.

The very first agreement set the precedent. Following the signing of the Minsk Protocol (Minsk-1), a ceasefire commenced at 6 p.m. on September 5, 2014. However, the next day Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council reported that Russian troops had fired at Ukrainian positions at least ten times since the ceasefire was declared.

Minsk-2, signed in February 2015 after seventeen hours of negotiations involving Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine, was even shorter-lived. Within minutes of the agreement taking effect, Ukraine’s military reported Russian units firing on a checkpoint near Zolote in Luhansk Oblast. Two days later pro-Russian forces captured Debaltseve after heavy fighting, clearly violating the deal. The OSCE documented over 4,000 violations in 2015 attributed to Russian forces or their proxies.

One particularly horrific violation occurred the previous summer. Putin had promised a humanitarian corridor for Ukrainian troops besieged in Ilovaisk. However Russian and separatist forces then opened fire on the retreating convoys, killing at least 366 soldiers. This event became known as the “Ilovaisk Cauldron.”

Violations continued unabated. From 2016 to 2022 Russia repeatedly broke ceasefire terms. The two sides attempted to reach truces over Christmas, New Year, the start of the school year and the harvest. Unfortunately none of these truces lasted. A “harvest” truce in July 2019 was broken within hours of taking effect. Even a “full and comprehensive ceasefire” declared in July 2020 was broken within 30 minutes when Russian forces attacked the 36th Separate Marine Brigade.

By the eve of the full-scale invasion, violations were occurring at an alarming rate. Between February 18 and 20, 2022 – just days before Russia launched its full-scale invasion – the OSCE documented a staggering 3,231 ceasefire violations in a single day within areas largely controlled by pro-Russian forces. This included 2,158 violations in Donetsk and 1,073 in Luhansk.

The Full-Scale Invasion: 2022 to the Present

On February 24, 2022, Russia abandoned all pretence. The ensuing invasion introduced a new and extensive catalogue of ceasefire violations on a larger scale, involving more witnesses and occurring in real-time. Holiday ceasefires followed a similar pattern. Attempts at Easter and Orthodox Christmas truces in 2022 and early 2023 failed to materialise due to both sides’ inability to reach agreement.

In March 2025, following a phone call with President Trump, Putin agreed to a 30-day halt on strikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. However, that very night Russian drone swarms attacked Kyiv and targeted a hospital in Sumy. When Zelenskyy accused Russia of violating the partial ceasefire after an energy facility was damaged in Kherson, he urged the U.S. to respond, stating, “This is not a battlefield. Civilians are losing energy.”

In April 2025, an Easter ceasefire was declared, but it ultimately proved ineffective. A Ukrainian brigade communications officer reported that while artillery fire had ceased in his sector, Russian forces continued striking Ukrainian positions using drones as soon as the ceasefire began. He stated that the ceasefire wasn’t being observed by the Russian side. Furthermore, the Ukrainian Air Force revealed that Russia had launched 160 drones at Ukraine overnight, hours before the ceasefire was even scheduled to commence.

As of early May 2026, the cycle of conflict has unfortunately repeated itself. Russia declared a unilateral ceasefire for May 8–9, coinciding with its Victory Day celebrations, and threatened a “massive missile strike” on Kyiv should Ukraine breach it. In response, Ukraine announced its own separate ceasefire for May 5–6, resulting in two competing pauses that don’t overlap. Each side accused the other of bad faith.

Prior to Russia’s announced truce, Russian drone and missile strikes had already claimed at least 22 lives and injured over 80 others across Ukraine. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy condemned Moscow’s actions, describing them as “utter cynicism” for calling for a ceasefire while simultaneously launching attacks. This mutual-accusation dynamic has become a weapon in itself, deliberately obscuring the historical record and allowing sympathetic observers to portray the situation as complex when it is not.

Analysts in Europe have observed a growing blurring of the line between a truce and the continuation of combat. Modern warfare, characterised by the use of drones, electronic warfare and long-range precision strikes, enables sustained pressure even during supposed pauses in fighting.

Russia has effectively utilised the ceasefire as a tool of war over the past three decades across various theatres. Local truces become appealing when regrouping and resupply are necessary. Humanitarian pauses generate positive international attention while failing to achieve any tangible ground changes. Holiday truces performed for foreign audiences can be easily violated by nightfall, allowing for plausible deniability.

Zelenskyy has made the situation crystal clear: since 2014, his own count as of February 2025, there have been 25 significant ceasefire violations. Analysts believe this figure is likely an undercount, considering the thousands of individual incidents documented by the OSCE before its monitoring mission was suspended in March 2022.

The underlying issue is structural. As a researcher at the University of Bath explained, Russia’s objectives – Ukrainian neutrality, “denazification”, and “demilitarisation” – are maximalist and incompatible with a genuine ceasefire. He argued that if Russia were to agree to a pause, it would only be to strengthen its forces and resume the war.

This is the reality. There have been no disputed incidents, no miscommunications, and no confused frontline. Thirty years have passed, encompassing two Chechen wars, one Georgian war, a Syrian proxy campaign, and eight years of proxy conflict in eastern Ukraine. Now, four years of full-scale invasion have unfolded. Ceasefires have been announced, broken, and blamed on others.

Until this record of deeds changes, not just declarations, there’s no reason to believe the next ceasefire will be any different.

Sources & Further Reading

1. OSCE Special Monitoring Mission Reports, 2014–2022: Documented thousands of daily violations in eastern Ukraine; mission ceased operations on March 31, 2022. osce.org

2. “The list of ceasefire agreements violated by Russia and pro-Russian forces in Ukraine”: Outono.net, March 12, 2025. outono.net

3. “Russia’s History of Ceasefire Violations and What It Can Tell Us About Today” by United24 Media, published on March 23, 2025, at united24media.com.

4. “Russia’s history of violating ceasefire agreements in Ukraine” by Kyiv Independent, published on March 7, 2025, at kyivindependent.com.

5. “Approach with caution: Lessons for Ukraine from the Russian approach to ceasefires in Syria” by the European Leadership Network, published on europeanleadershipnetwork.org.

6. “Russia/Syria: War Crimes in Month of Bombing Aleppo” by Human Rights Watch, published on December 1, 2016, at hrw.org.

7. “A Trail of Broken Ceasefires in Syria” by the Atlantic Council, published on March 2018, at atlanticcouncil.org.

8. “Orthodox Easter ceasefire falters as Ukraine says Russia continues drone strikes” by PBS NewsHour / AP, published on April 2025, at pbs.org.

9. “Zelenskyy claims Russia violated partial ceasefire after energy facility damaged” by ABC News, published on March 27, 2025, at abcnews.go.com.

10. “Russian strikes kill 22 in Ukraine before looming ceasefire” by PBS NewsHour / AP, published on May 2026, at pbs.org.

11. “Ukraine and Russia declare competing ceasefires” by Al Jazeera, published on May 4, 2026, at aljazeera.com.

12. “A Chain of Wars, a Chain of Crimes, a Chain of Impunity” by Novaya Gazeta Europe, published on February 24, 2023, at novayagazeta.eu.

Chernobyl was the world's worst man-made nuclear disaster.

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It happened on Ukrainian soil and changed the way the world thinks about nuclear energy safety. Four decades later, we still often call it an accident, but it exposed something much deeper, the entire Soviet system built on fear and lies. Today, Russia is again manipulating nuclear risk, occupying nuclear sites and turning fear into a weapon.

We didn’t talk about politics but about personal things—life in Ukraine, friends, hobbies, and when he first learned about Ukraine and why he wanted to come here. In this video, people will open another side of Caolan Robertson, vulnerable, honest, with principles, with its own sins and achievements.

Photo: TASS/Evgeny Leonov

MOSCOW — In a country famous for its grand ambitions — space rockets, nuclear arsenals, pipelines stretching to the horizon — something considerably more humble is falling apart. Russia’s lifts are in crisis. And, given that around 75% of Russians live in apartment buildings, many of them towering Soviet-era blocks, this is not a small problem. It is, you might say, a crisis that goes all the way to the top floor.

And then refuses to come back down.

The Numbers Don’t Lie (But the Cables Might)

Russia has about 550,000 elevators operating across its apartment blocks. Of these, roughly 100,000 have already surpassed their 25-year service life — and some have been running for over 50 years, relics of the Brezhnev era when Soviet engineers apparently believed a lift, like the Communist Party itself, should last forever. The deadline to replace all these ageing machines was initially set for 2020. It was extended, then extended again. Under the Technical Regulations of the Customs Union — the economic bloc of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus — the replacement was meant to be completed by February 2025. It was not. No one is particularly surprised. According to Russia’s Novye Izvestia, funding for replacing about 45,000 of these outdated elevators simply does not exist. The money, one suspects, is otherwise allocated.

An Accident Waiting to Happen (and Then Happening)

In 2023 alone, approximately ten high-profile elevator incidents occurred in Russia. The most alarming: a lift carrying a teenager plummeted from the 11th floor of a Moscow apartment building. This is not the kind of express service anyone expected.

Soviet-era flats from the 1990s which dominate Russian cities are falling into disrepair and the lifts have become death-traps Credit: robas/iStockphoto

Official statistics paint a concerning picture. Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations records around 30 to 40 elevator accidents annually, resulting in 10 to 15 deaths and another 30 to 40 injuries — figures that analysts expect to rise significantly as the ageing infrastructure deteriorates further. Svetlana Razvorotneva, deputy chair of the Russian parliament’s Housing and Communal Services Committee, did not hold back. “The cables will start to break, and there will be accidents,” she warned. “I think this will be a disaster comparable to what is happening now in the Russian housing and communal services system and heating networks. The situation is critical.”

To be fair to Russia’s housing system, it is working hard to reach this level of disaster across multiple sectors simultaneously. That requires a kind of grim coordination.

The Great Western Exit

Before February 2022, Russia’s elevator market was genuinely booming. Annual growth rates reached as high as 13 to 14 percent, and global manufacturers regarded Russia as a top priority market. Then came the invasion of Ukraine, and the industry’s foreign partners withdrew. Following sanctions imposed by the US and the European Union, major Western manufacturers — Otis, KONE, Schindler, and TKElevator — halted operations in Russia. KONE, the Finnish giant, was the last to withdraw, selling its Russian operations to the domestic holding company S8 Capital at the end of October 2023, which established a new entity called METEOR Lift. One can imagine the handover was conducted in haste. Chinese companies moved swiftly to fill the gap left by European manufacturers, especially in high-rise buildings — a shift evident not just in the elevator sector but across Russian daily life, where Chinese-made vehicles now fill Moscow’s streets by the hundreds of thousands. Whether Chinese lifts will prove more durable than the Soviet-era models they replace remains, as they say in diplomatic circles, an open question.

Sanctioned, stretched, and under-staffed

Russia’s domestic elevator manufacturers — names like Shcherbinsky Elevator Factory, Karacharovsky Mechanical Plant, and the cheerfully named Siblift — have been left to shoulder an enormous amount of responsibility. Industry roundtables in 2024 identified three core challenges: rising metal costs, a shortage of skilled labour, and a lack of working capital.

The skilled labour problem has a particular cause. The ongoing war in Ukraine and Russian military mobilisation have drawn a significant number of qualified elevator specialists into the army. Russia is, in other words, fighting a war while its lifts break down, its technicians carry rifles instead of wrenches, and its parliamentary committees issue increasingly anxious press releases.

Meanwhile, the Russian Central Bank raised interest rates to a record 21% in October 2024 in an effort to control inflation driven by booming military spending — triggering a near-collapse of the mortgage sector, which dropped by 35% across 2024. Fewer new buildings mean fewer new lifts. And the old ones keep running. And running. And occasionally, falling.

2030 or Bust

The deadline has now been quietly moved to 2030. Some 96,000 elevators must be replaced by 15th February 2030, including around 43,000 in apartment buildings. Regional authorities have been instructed to develop five-year plans. Some regions, like Nizhny Novgorod, have acted with genuine urgency: an accelerated replacement programme for around 2,400 elevators was organised in 2024–2025, with instalment payments stretched to 2030 at regional government expense.

Others have been less energetic. The federal government, for its part, declined to provide subsidies to the domestic elevator sector — a decision that surprised almost no one, given that the military budget has first claim on most available roubles.

There are, admittedly, some bright spots. Domestic manufacturers are increasing output. Shcherbinsky Elevator Factory produced nearly 6,000 units in the first nine months of 2025, up 8% on the previous year, and is expanding production lines and hiring new staff. One manufacturer even certified an elevator capable of travelling at 8 metres per second — fast enough, perhaps, to outrun the bureaucracy that surrounds it.

Going Up?

Russia’s elevator crisis is, in microcosm, a portrait of a country whose infrastructure is straining under the weight of war, sanctions, and decades of deferred maintenance. The Soviet system built vast, towering residential blocks and filled them with lifts that were never meant to last this long. Now, with engineers conscripted, foreign suppliers gone, and federal funds directed eastward, millions of Russians press the button each morning and hope for the best.

For residents of the 14th floor in Volgograd or the 17th in Yekaterinburg, the geopolitical situation is not abstract. It is the sound the lift makes when the doors close — that particular groan of aged metal — and the quiet calculation of whether today might be a good day to take the stairs.

This piece draws on reporting from Elevator World, Novye Izvestia, and industry analysis from the Russian National Elevator Union and Russian Elevator Association.

This is the final part of my Hungary reporting, and I just wanted to say thank you for following along.

Over the past 12 days, I’ve tried to get as close as possible to what’s really happening on the ground. That’s meant speaking to people across Budapest, visiting Orbán’s estate, filming it from above, looking into corruption, covering the festival and the atmosphere around it, being at the rally itself, and staying through the night as the results came in.

I’ve put everything I could into this series, and I’m really proud of how it’s turned out. Across all platforms, it’s now been watched by millions of people, which honestly means a lot, especially for independent reporting like this.

I don’t have any government backing, no big sponsors, no outside influence. It’s just me trying to tell these stories as honestly as I can.

If you’d like to support what I do and help me keep making this kind of reporting, you can join my Patreon.

Thank you for watching and for sticking with it from start to finish.