Ukrainesplaining©
To get into this party, you'll need to exaggerate
The key context of the term Ukrainesplaining is that it’s one part of an old tradition – of who gets listened to, and who gets believed. It’s one corner of a poorly-lit room, in which biases and statuses warp assumptions and allocate more bandwidth and consequence to some people than others, creating an inequality of agency.
Tymofiy is a Z loyalist1 and one of the country’s famous Ukrainesplainers. (@tabletochki is a non-profit that crowdfunds for cancer patients.)
Timothy Snyder is also a famous Ukrainesplainer. The history professor was in Lviv over the weekend chatting up students and faculty at the Ukrainian Catholic University.
The part about Z being a mystery (15:39) made me laugh.
When Zelensky remained, when he stayed in Kyiv, that was mysterious. It was a mystery, in the profound sense of the word.
Oh, puhleaze.
I’m a big fan of Tim, but a critic, as well, especially when he exagerates the influence of Polish intellectuals and civil society movements on what happened in Ukraine and Belarus during the late 80s and 90s2.
During the months leading up to the invasion, subjectiveness or subjectivity (субъектность) [of Ukraine] was used repeatedly as an artificial discursive term by Z to describe power-relations and social actions required for conducting foreign policy3. Unfortunately for Ukrainians, the president confused subjectiveness with sovereignty and no one bothered to explain to him the difference.
Z’s decision to remain in Kyiv after Putin’s not-so-secret sneak attack on February 24, 2022 can be explained easily this way: If Z had decided to leave the capital (after assuring us for months that Russia’s invasion was neither imminent or inevitable), his political career would have de facto ended.
The Bright Side of Shame. Something we already knew, but not really (May 17, 2020)
History of Modern Ukraine. Classroom lectures (November 19, 2022)
I think about the mess differently, because my intellectual political baggage is packed with Miłosz, Budinas, Bykov, Taras, Baradullin et al. Last time I checked, Poland’s experiment in state building had devolved into a weird pseudo religious strain of electoral authoritarianism.
Setting the Plate Clear. Subjectivizing Ukraine (September 6, 2021)