Day 422-ish

Random thoughts

Not sure about the Substack’s gallery feature. Will the pictures be enlargable after publishing this post? Dunno. I took the ones below not far away from the mighty Ros river on the border with Cherkasy region. It’s the nesting ground for a wide variety of raptors, wild pigs and, every once in a while, moose. There is also a wide variety of owls about and scary looking reptiles. It’s my backyard during dacha season :-)

Just listened to Timothy chat up Foreign Affairs.

Timothy mixes up some dates and gets a couple of things wrong in the interview. I stopped listening after this part about half way through:

The notion that Ukraine is just an object is the notion that Stalin had, that Hitler had in the first World War. The Germans and the Austrians viewed [Ukraine] as a breadbasket. The notion that [Ukraine] was an object for someone to take has a long history. We contributed to that, our politics contributed to that, by just treating Ukraine as object inside American political strife, American political contest. You can see Zelensky struggling with the situation, because Zelensky is all about subjectivity, like becoming a subject, like acting in the world. That’s his gift: changing the world. And his country and he personally are being pushed into yet another situation in which [Ukraine] is just an object and they’re not going to get anything out of it.

Actually, no. Z is all about applause.

The subject/object bullshit popped up during the summer of 2021 when Z’s popularity dropped like a rock (after he and his top state security lieutenants were caught lying publicly, repeatedly — that’s why the President’s Office hired Leshchenko and Arestovych)¹.

We wrote then:

Sovereignty [сувернность] — unlike subjectiveness — neither transcends nor resides in a person, but is a sequence of gestures and utterances – a repeated script – performed between those with credible parts to play and with command of the occasions in which to play them. That Zelensky doesn’t know the difference is besides the point.

I also disagree with Timothy’s belief that Team Putin invaded Crimea and Donbas in early 2014 in order to supress Russian speakers in Ukraine.

Not my recollection².

1. Setting the Plate Clear. Subjectivizing Ukraine (September 6, 2021)

2. Plan A (October 24, 2014) — future generations of students of Ukraine’s post-Independence history will note Volodymyr Syvkovych was behind the order to send riot police to beat the kids up on Independence Square on November 30 in order to stage the violent demo at the Presidential Administration on December 1. But that’s another story.