Stories: Ukraine
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Partying (and Praying) Like It’s 1899
When not praying, reading the Bible from a blinking iPhone screen, they were dancing, frenziedly shaking their ringlets into a blur. Sometimes, they managed both simultaneously. This past Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, I traveled deep into the Ukrainian countryside for four days, joining 20,000 Hasidic Jews for the world’s largest Jewish pilgrimage. "When not praying, ......
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Stateless in Ukraine
For a small community of ethnic Turks who have lived peacefully in Ukraine for twenty-five years, the current conflict is allowing the dream of a distant homeland to resurface. “With this war, Ukrainians have nowhere to go. But we do,” says Makhmud Manmedov, who manages a Turkish café in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson. Somewhat...
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God’s Oligarch
If being the subject of international sanctions is causing Konstantin Malofeev any stress, he’s not showing it. “The sanctions are a very stupid instrument that only Obama and his administration could believe will have any impact. It has not damaged my business,” he says. The 40-year-old multimillionaire, though, does allow that the sanctions have “had...
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Sloviansk: A City With PTSD
Psychologist Tatyana Aslanyan is on a mission to treat a city that seems to be suffering from a collective form of post-traumatic stress disorder. “Everyone, in some way or another, shows the symptoms,” she told me at the Donbass State Pedagogical University in Sloviansk, the eastern Ukrainian city where she is an associate professor. The concrete university is...
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The Scattering of Ukraine’s Jews
A Jewish IDP from Luhansk eats lunch in the Shpola camp in central Ukraine. (Courtesy of Joël van Houdt) Aleksandr Zadov recalls the last time war forced him out of his home in Donetsk. The year was 1941, and Nazi troops were occupying the eastern Ukrainian city. He and his parents escaped under the cover of darkness to...
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How Teflon Is Vladimir Putin’s Popularity?
I’m currently in Moscow thanks to a fellowship from the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins. I’ll be posting some lengthier dispatches from here in the coming weeks as well as keeping up the blogging on general world news. What, me worry? Photo: Kirill Kudryavstev/AFP/Getty Images The violence in Ukraine...
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Vladimir Putin Ramps Up His Postmodern Non-Invasion Invasion of Ukraine
The Russian government and the pro-Russian rebels in Eastern Ukraine used to denythat they were cooperating. All that advanced weaponry, including tanks and anti-aircraft systems, were simply captured from Ukrainian government forces, the explanations went. The Russians fighting with the rebels were simply private citizens and the Russian government had no control over them. This is...