Episode 1: "May The Atom (Never) Be a Worker, But a Soldier" with Svitlana Matviyenko

Svitlana Matviyenko with Yivha Zban’ and Lilia Yuldasheva

Yivha Zban’, a Ukrainian-born decolonial activist and artist, and Lilia Yuldasheva, a decolonial researcher and cultural worker talk to Svitlana Matviyenko, a scholar, whose research and teaching are focused on information and cyberwar; media and environment; infrastructure studies; digital militarism, practices of resistance, and nuclear cultures, including the Chornobyl Zone of Exclusion. 

While planning this episode, the authors thought that the topics of nuclear colonialism, in particular, soviet nuclear politics and russian nuclear terrorism would be at the center of the conversation. But eventually, it went further and included other trajectories, catching the diversity of the scales and dimensions of colonialism. So, they also speak about how it affects matter (land, air, water, plants, bodies) and various aspects of human and non-human lives such as temporalities, imaginations, emotions, and futures.

Timecode
0:00 — introduction, terms, and concepts of cyberwar
1:55 — interconnectedness, “Savage Ecologies”, life-supporting assemblages/martial assemblages, wars out of nowhere
7:45 — peaceful atom, the distinction between peace and war technologies, “Хуй буде атом робiтником, а не солдатом”
13:23 — instrumentalization of nuclear infrastructure by russia
15:50 — terror; unknown as an instrument of terrorism, (un)logical logic of russian colonialism
24:26 — the labor of witnessing, the Kakhovka dam explosion
33:05 — past/childhood landscapes, future, solidarity and agency
36:45 — external subjectivity, the return of the stolen steppe – ecocide happened much earlier (Vira Aheyeva)
49:20 — how to understand colonialism and its actors, (un)importance of languages and heritage/culture, 400 years of resistance in Ichkeria

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«Х_й буде атом робітником, а не солдатом»
Світлана Матвієнко, Ївга Збань та Лілія Юлдашева

Ївга Збань, деколоніальн:а активіст:ка і мист:киня українського походження, та Лілія Юлдашева, деколоніальн:а та культурн:а дослідни:ця, як:а цікавиться феміністичною та квір-політикою, розмовляють зі Світланою Матвієнко, науковицею, чиї дослідження та викладацька практика сфокусовані на інформації та кібервійні; медіа та середовищі; дослідженнях інфраструктури; цифровому мілітаризмі, практиках опору та ядерних культурах, зокрема Чорнобильської зони відчуження.

Під час планування цього епізоду, автор:ки розраховували, що розмова зосередиться на темі ядерного колоніалізму, зокрема радянської ядерної політики та російського ядерного тероризму. Але зрештою дискусія охопила інші траєкторії, як-от множинність масштабів і вимірів колоніалізму. Тому ми також говоримо про те, як колоніалізм впливає на матерію (землю, повітря, воду, рослини, тіла) і різні аспекти людського та нелюдського життя: темпоральність, уяву, емоції та майбутнє.

Хронометраж
0:00 — вступ, терміни та поняття кібервійни
1:55 — взаємопов’язаність; «Дикі екології»; асамбляжі життезабезпечення/асамбляжі війни; війни нізвідки
7:45 — мирний атом; розмежування технологій миру та війни, «Хуй буде атом робітником, а не солдатом»
13:23 — інструменталізація ядерної інфраструктури росією
15:50 — терор; невідоме як інструмент тероризму; (не)логічна логіка російського колоніалізму
24:26 — праця свідчення; підрив Каховської дамби
33:05 — пейзажі минулого/дитинства майбутнє, солідарність та свобода волі
36:45 — зовнішня суб’єктність, повернення вкраденого степу — екоцид стався набагато раніше (Віра Агеєва)
49:20 — як розуміти колоніалізм та його áкторів, (не)важливість мов і спадщини/культури, 400 років опору в Ічкерії

Transcript

Lilia [00:01:55]

We will start with our first question, which is a bit introductory. Of course, the main terms are cyberwar, nuclear war, cyberterrorism, and nuclear terrorism. Could you tell us about these terms and maybe talk about your previous research and how it's going now?

Svitlana [00:02:27]

Just for context, we probably need to define those terms because the term cyberwar in the way my co-author and I use it in our book is very different from how this term was used by military or security specialists in the States at the time of writing the book, but also elsewhere and especially in Ukraine today. Usually in military and security discourses, especially a couple of years ago, it was mainly about hacking and leaking everything digital. The cyber war was almost emergent as belonging to the entire digital domain, whatever it was. That was the reason why this domain had to be accepted. It had to enter the discourse and practices of warfare. If I'm correct, around 2009-2010, the United States Cyber Security Command added cyberspace as one of the domains of war, along with land, sea, etc. So it became an official domain, meaning certain techniques, tools, practices, institutions, offices, specialists, experts, etc. suddenly were concretized as a united military assemblage. And then cyber war appeared for them as something belonging to the cyber domain. However, they also acknowledge that it's not disconnected, just like any digital system from other domains — there were ways in which they intersect. 

Later, after Snowden's leaks, more interesting things were revealed through the NSA documents — there we saw that military and security specialists thought through the connections between digital and other layers of this huge military assemblage. They thought about how all platforms and things on the ground were linked, how the signal was transmitted, and what was the user behavior. It became clear after that leak that cyberwar does not belong to that domain and the links to other domains of war are not its extension. Maybe on these links and these roots cyberwar actually happens. Maybe cyberwar itself is the [multitude of] links between all these different domains: sea, land, space, and whatnot. It was very similar to how anything cyber was imagined in this early internet era when people like William Gibson were thinking about where cyberspace was. One of the sci-fi writers at the time said that cyberspace existed between the phones. 

So cyberspace is still between the phones, but it's not a vacuum. It's the space of all these material linkages of signal, affect, or other materialities, etc., and cyberwar is a connector. And this connector or material space where certain transactions and transitions are happening is the space of war. And what I'm now describing is already beyond how military and security specialists understood it. It's closer to how Nick and I started speaking about it. We were looking at all those interlinking materialities, connections, and power relations that would emerge or be mobilized in this very complex material space of connections. We also looked at the political economy in the making in this space that was erroneously thought by many as empty, but it wasn't. When we started speaking of power in politico-economic relations, we understood this complexity as cyberwar. Yeah, it's a long answer. And of course, this is even more complex and there are different ways to talk about this. But let us work with this one, at least in this conversation.

Lilia [00:07:45] 

During your answer, I was thinking about the importance of the topic of connections and how, for some feminist researchers, connections seem to be something positive, and a lot of hopes are put into the idea of interconnectedness. But I think there is another side of connections which can be called the dark side. What do you think about this? Maybe, the difference between this utopian dimension of connections and interconnectedness is a link to the openness and transparency of these connections, and this dark side is closer to power to hide connections and how they are used. 

Svitlana [00:08:23] 

The question of connections is very important, and I agree with you that it would be problematic to characterize them only as good and bad. Right. Both the existence and nonexistence of connections can be either problematic or a solution for something. But one work that inspired me to think about connections was the work by Jairus Victor Grove “Savage Ecology”. It's a book that speaks a lot about war, but also colonialism, coloniality, and modernity: it speaks about war as an important event of modernity, and not just an event, we could almost say, a technology, an invention of modernity. In a certain way, you would come with him to the conclusion that modernity doesn't exist without war, it expands it and makes progress using militarization and war. This means that war is a crucial thing for modernity. It's not an exception, it's what modernity is. In this book, he speaks about different types of assemblages and assemblages are connected entities. So some assemblages support life and peace — peaceful assemblages and other assemblages are destructive — martial assemblages. He speaks about the coexistence or substitution of some assemblages by other assemblages. So in a certain way, to see what war is or how it begins, even if there is no obvious intervention, you could almost, quote-unquote, measure it by the quantity or the presence of martial or militant assemblages. If you recognize a certain combination or connection between certain things as militant, and if you see that these units can be identified as related to war, even if there was no visible intervention, it's already war. If it sounds like a duck and moves like a duck, it's most likely a duck. 

In fact, it's a very important thing because it helps us to think of such a problematic phenomenon as proxy or undeclared war, which is also a modern invention. In a certain way, we could say that the wars that were openly declared belong to a different epoch. The wars that were declared are exceptions, and there are a massive amount of wars where someone is saying: “It's not us! We are not there, it's a special operation”. But you can see it, you can capture it, you can measure it by noticing the formation of militant assemblages, how they substitute life-supporting assemblages, peaceful assemblages, and how they change the regime of being. So that's why, for me, the idea of connections, assemblages, and relations between things, is very important. It allows me to talk and think about this type of war that we still do not sometimes recognize as a war, even in military theory. 

Of course, so many specialists who study wars can tell you a ton of things about some complex technologies. Their expertise is deep and amazing. But if you think about how these people, so knowledgeable about war, history, and theory, would be extremely traditional in terms of thinking about the beginning of the war or the end of the war, or what is war, or what is not war, and what is civil war. These things remain kind of dead looks in my encounter with military theory: I had to use and read a lot of sources trying to define and think about cyberwar — and I noticed this very strange traditionalism in terms of understanding these crucial moments and misrecognition of this very important change that happened maybe 100 years ago in modernity, in terms of wars that begin almost from nowhere. 

Lilia [00:13:24] 

This leads us to the second part of the question about nuclear infrastructure because it seems to be the perfect example of unrecognizable boundaries or hidden boundaries between peaceful and military. 

Svitlana [00:13:39] 

Yes. This is one of the core observations that comes from lots of writers and researchers who work with anything nuclear. The nuclear does have this double nature, and it has to do with being one foot on something military and one on something peaceful. In this double nature, nuclear is a symptomatic phenomenon of modernity.  The intersection of anything civilian and anything military tells us most about what modernity is. All major nuclear power plants in the world were engaged, both with the military and civilian life (it was in the UK, in the USSR, in the States, everywhere). So for quite a long period, no government would acknowledge that and would never speak about it openly, but, it was almost an open secret everywhere. And, if you speak about the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, definitely that open secret was very open for anyone who worked there. And that's why probably we have this wonderful story of a slogan about the peaceful atom that was set on one of the building roofs in Prip’yat’ “хай буде атом робітником, а не солдатом”, when at some point “хай” was turned into “хуй”. And it was recognition of this knowledge, of this open secret: we know that the atom is never fully peaceful (military-grade plutonium was produced there as well). So that's the double nature. Again, it's modernity as such, being on the side of peace and the side of war and mixing them. 

Lilia [00:15:50] 

Thank you. Maybe we could also speak about how Russia now is using this Soviet infrastructure (so-called peaceful atom, and nuclear power plants) as one of the tools for terrorizing not only Ukraine but also as a message for the whole world. And what features of this infrastructure let Russia do this? 

Speaker 2 [00:16:21]

Here we can speculate, of course, but I have some interpretations of why and how we can understand that. Of course, we are talking here about the weaponization of nuclear power infrastructure. Even if there was some activity, some open secret, and some engagement in the military productions and whatnot, now it serves civilians. But this dark secret of the recent past is now mobilized and it comes back as a certain strategy, a certain vision of how to use it as a weapon. 

I hear people calling the war we have now between the Russian Federation and Ukraine a total war. It's a complex term, and I still wouldn't use it, because what we observe now is a complex coexistence of war and peace in Ukraine. There are islands and some of them function like there is no war: people go to the cinema, watch “Barbie”, eat in restaurants, etc., and then BAM! — there is a ballistic rocket — and you’re reminded of war. Certain war regimes and regimes that remind us of peace coexist and fluctuate with one another. But when we think about total war, it's complete militarization of every inch. Now we live in reality confusing for some outsiders: some people come to Ukraine and see a peaceful day in Kyiv, and they say: “This is so strange. Where is your war?” And you realize that they just missed a drone attack by one day and arrived on this one little period when there were no attacks, and then there is a week of constant drone attacks and ballistic rocket shellings. 

Nevertheless, one of the things that the notion of total war gave us is the possibility to weaponize almost anything. When we call something a total war, we speak about total militarization and weaponization of everything. According to this principle (even though I don't call the Ukrainian situation a total war) we see how through this possibility for war to enter any dimension of life, Russia hits places far away from the frontlines — Western Ukraine, with specific attention to Lviv, and most recently Hmelnytsky region because there is another nuclear power plant there. So war appears anywhere, at any moment: just now, all is calm, but war enters this peaceful space at the speed of a ballistic rocket. 

And anything can be weaponized. Information can be weaponized, certain leaks can be weaponized. Certain scientific works can be also weaponized. That's why when we discuss different problems — critique, observation, or complex analysis of some situation, we think about how to say it so that some Solovyov wouldn’t bring it up in his stupid show, because anything could immediately become a weapon on Russian TV. And then again, there is such an easily weaponizable thing as the nuclear power infrastructure, which contains a real physical danger given its chemical characteristics, but also it has an informational affective sense attached to it. This reminds me of the work of an American scholar, Gabrielle Hecht, who writes about nuclear power infrastructures in different countries. She has a wonderful article which is called “A Power of Nuclear Things”, where she says that whatever nuclear thing it is, even if it's a container for the future nuclear something, the fact that it's somehow related to the nuclear makes it almost radioactive immediately. There is some power in nuclear things that has nothing to do with physical or chemical damage, and it's definitely in the perception and epistemology of nuclear. So nuclear power infrastructure is the object that is weaponizable in all these dimensions. 

When you speak with Ukrainian experts and ask them to evaluate the risks of an explosion somewhere around Zaporizhzhia, they actually (if they're real experts) wouldn't be as paranoid as many other experts. They would tell you: “Well, Zaporizhzhia is a pretty protected structure. It was built to survive a strong rocket hit”. But nuclear things also have the dimension where this knowledge doesn't really save you — you still don't know. There is so much we don't know: what if there is some reaction and some power wave or something else would initiate something terrible? We don't know. Right? Nuclear has a lot of concerns attached to it that have to do with something we don't know.

And of course, there is the legacy of Chornobyl: what we knew and didn't know about it, the confidence associated with RBMK reactors that were not supposed to explode. And when you think about that knowledge, which we now know wasn't accurate because there were some cases of RBMK explosion before, but they were hidden — that's how we inherited this extreme worry and the sense that there is unknown around it. So there is the power of nuclear things, and then there is something unknown: there are lots of risks attached, we do not know where someone could have positioned those explosives — what if they put them somewhere? We can see how easy it is to weaponize it if there are still so many unknowns in the symbolic, physical, and scientific realms. What is unknown is easily weaponizable. Again, to return to the notion of cyberwar: in addition to the physicality of leaks and breaks, cyberwar has much to do with affects, knowledge, and perception.

Yivha [00:24:26]

Let’s talk about the unknown and the speculation on it. The Russian army now occupies the Nuclear Power Plant in Zaporizhzhia. And we saw photos, images of some explosives on its roof. The word that hasn’t been pronounced in this conversation yet is ‘terrorism’. I want to link these lacunas of the unknown and the speculation on them to the creation of the spectacles — the theater of nuclear power and terrorism. Though some power plant experts say that the power plant is protected, we cannot know for sure. It creates this superpower of manipulation and terror that helps Russia affect the connections between Ukraine and its partners and influence the military help for Ukraine. They are afraid of Russian nuclear terrorism. And it’s their fear is understandable — we all remember Chornobyl and that the power of nuclear affects everything.

Svitlana [00:25:49] 

Yes, you are absolutely right. The unknown is the best weapon — based on the unknown lots of processes of this war unfold. And what I mean is, if we even think about the invasion itself, many people in Ukraine say that they knew that it would happen. I belong to the group that didn't know. Or rather, I thought that it would not happen because it was against the logic of survival for Russia itself. For me, it was clear that the invasion would hurt Russia so much that it didn’t make sense. They just wouldn't do it because of that. You can call that illogical, because there are other logics here, right? So here we speak about survival logic for the country. I thought that the primary logic at play would be survival for the country, for Russia itself to continue its imperial, colonial existence, and continue to be what it is. But no, this logic didn't work. 

Yivha [00:27:08]

But there are other logics like the invasion in Sakartvelo, the occupation of Chechya…

Svitlana [00:27:14]

Exactly. Colonial logic probably works almost against survival logic. Colonial logic is the logic of expansion, right? We can speak about other logics, right? There are certain economies, politics, and different regimes… There is also some kind of paranoid logic. These things almost constitute their own layers of reality. And you look at reality according to certain logic and you say, no, they will not do it because it's going to be a crash for Russia. But Russia suddenly works along with colonial logic…

Yivha [00:28:03]

Yeah, but Russia had, for example, their form of special relations with NATO — the special committee. So maybe, it has something to do with this hybrid image of Russia that is colonial and acts as a colonial regime, and some perceive it even as a scarecrow of sorts, at the same time it has some other dimension, and lots of people may choose to…

Svitlana [00:28:31]

… to see some part of it. We often speak about Russia as something unified, [and homogenic]. But it's not. There are Russias. So what is Russia? Where does it begin and where does it end? There is something that we call federation, which already indicates a multiplicity of some things. The regime that is spread everywhere til Kamchatka — is that Russia? Or is that a system of privileges? Is it this power apparatus? I'm not an expert here. I'm someone who has more questions than answers at this moment. I'm looking for language. I'm looking for ways to understand it. And I admit that I'm just speculating with all of you now — we're thinking together to understand this complex event and its potential consequences. We see that Russia’s logic constitutes a certain multiplicity and we do not know which one would be used next moment. What if its next gesture would be very much against survival logic? Would they put the explosives on the waste fuel container how strong and who would do this? And that is what cyberwar is about — we are in the realm of chaos. 

Chaos is an interesting invention. Even conventional wars would employ deception, but the level of that strategy usage in cyberwars is much higher. In wars combining peace and war, where the battlefield is shifting, deception and deterrence became the major language and strategy. What's more important is with this uncertainty, where we all are waiting for something like a potential explosion, it's not like “I'm sitting in my comfy chair and I'm just very uncertain about whether it happens or not”. When with Asia Bazdyrieva we spoke about the labor of witnessing, we had to admit this very laborious component of all these mental stages, or waiting, or perception of events, — these things just wear you out. You can be very close or far to the battlefield, you have your parents there, etc. and we know it reaches you. One of the most difficult things for me after the invasion was the Kakhovka Dam explosion. I almost had a nervous breakdown in Germany. I was shocked. I was thinking a lot about this, how did it touch me so powerfully? But it reached me easily. I spoke to many people and the explosion, in particular, had reached many, many people in Ukraine and outside Ukraine. And this is also a part of this war. How it takes all your energy, how it makes you go to a psychiatric hospital. What happens to you at this moment? It's it's crazy. And we need to understand that martial assemblages surround you wherever you are, they crawl into your reality, they substitute your life-supporting assemblages and you're suddenly worn out. So we should consider this type of labor as a labor of relation. As soon as you are related to this, you are engaged and this war is working against you. 

Since we are already talking about Kakhovka, may I ask you guys questions? So what happened? What do you think about this event of this war? What is it for you? 

Yivha [00:33:07] 

I do feel what you say about the labor of being connected. And, for me, it happened on the 3rd of March when eight bombs fell onto my street in Chernihiv, and a lot of people died there, I knew some of them… One of the eight bombs hit the drugstore building. I never knew that this building was so important to me. This place was like a scenery, a mental landscape of my past, my childhood, my life somehow... And suddenly it gets destroyed. 

I've never been to Kakhovka, but my friend had friends from there. At the time when Kakhovka was still occupied, she asked me to help her friends to evacuate. As I helped their family, they gave my contact to their neighbors. So by now, I know many people from Nova Kakhovka, and we all agreed that one day I will come there and they will show it to me. And after the dam explosion, I felt like the place suddenly stopped existing. And it wasn’t some landscape of my past, but it was some kind of future if I could say, some happy future… 

Svitlana [00:34:43] 

Yeah, that was a future possibility for solidarity. 

Yivha [00:34:49] 

I didn't know even how to put it into words, and I was thinking about a friend who lost her home several times. The first time — when Kakhovka was occupied, she lived under occupation for 2 or 3 months there. The second time — when she was forced to leave her home. And then the third time — when Kakhovka was flooded. I never knew that you could lose something three times. You start to understand there are a lot of ways to connect with a place, and not just mentally, it's somehow different.

Also, I was thinking about the pollution itself and the damage done to nature and people. We wanted to talk about pollution as a weapon of war and the temporal dimension of this pollution. Cadaveric poisoning of waters, from the bodies of people on the occupied left bank, who were not able to evacuate themselves... Cadaveric poisoning from the bodies of animals who weren't able to leave either. It's difficult to talk about that in some… civilized way. I just don't know. I don't have this, in me… at least not right now. Maybe I will never have it. I know that I felt really angry and helpless. So we decided to organize a demonstration in Berlin against the ecocide of Ukraine and started to raise money for the volunteers in Kherson and so on. On a personal level, it was a way to feel any subjectivity at all. 

Svitlana [00:36:46] 

Yeah, I think Kaknhovka had a huge impact. But events like this, along with so many other hits, destruction, and deaths also show what such subjectivity is. It's not about you. It's suddenly all outside. It's just like in psychoanalysis, Lacan used to say the unconscious is outside, — subjectivity is outside. Suddenly, all these spaces, landscapes, people, and connections are your subjectivity: some things that you build and cherish consciously or unconsciously. And that's why we feel like nothing. The more of all these outside elements of your subjectivity are touched, hurt, tortured or demolished, the lesser of you is left, because in the end, you are just little mechanics of life, and everything that constitutes you is outside. And this outside is destroyed. That is also one of the inventions of the 20th century and modernity. 

When we read Sloterdijk he reminds us to think about war environmentally: it's not just about pollution, it's actually about this outside subjectivity. You can be killed by killing your environment. You can be made into nothing if your environment is correctly destroyed if someone knows what to destroy out of your environment. If someone really knows where your subjectivity is invested, what your objects are. And sometimes it's not so many objects. So you can be just made nothing and you would never recover. And that is why they hit museums and libraries, because, among many other seemingly non-significant objects that constitute our subjectivity, there are some objects of higher significance that somehow, almost automatically, we are attached to, even if we've never been there. Like the house of Polina Raiko, a naïve artist, that went underwater, — I knew it existed. I’ve never been there, but her work incredibly interests me (as well as Maria Prymachenko’s works). I was something because this artifact existed somewhere: somehow something about me was invested in that future there. So I'm a subject because of it. And because of the fact that this place vanished, my subjectivity is hurt or maybe destroyed in a certain way. 

But our subjectivity emerges not only in attachment to cultural objects and objects of sentimental memory but also to fields, forests, and landscapes. So with this new ecological awareness of recent years, we started thinking of ourselves as environmental beings. And again, back to Sloterdijk, when we think of war environmentally, ecologized war means not only poisoning something and weaponizing actual chemicals, but it's also about killing you as a subject by destroying the landscape your subjectivity is attached to. Even if you have never been there, it constitutes you, along with many other things in a certain way. And that's what I am learning painfully during this war. This pain comes from the destruction of culturally significant, but also culturally insignificant objects. So maybe we are speaking about such things. We are not even talking about the blood and sweat of soldiers, which is an entirely unbearable and horrible topic. Especially when recently it became so clear that there are not so many [Ukrainian] people left, and there are still so many people in the Russian Federation, and we are running out of people. 

If you go back to Kakhovka, there is a theme that has lived with me for the last couple of months. Beyond the significance of that tragic event of ecocide, and the fact that ecocide is genocide and genocide is ecocide, this dam has a long history tied to colonialism and imperialism that is incredibly interesting and very problematic. You've probably heard some people talk about the controversial history of the Kakhovka HPP construction. And this is not my thought. I heard some of it from Ukrainian literature scholar Vira Ageyeva, who a very long time ago was my master's thesis director, she was my teacher until I escaped Ukraine in 2004. Vira Pavlivna Ageyeva became an incredible reader of Ukrainian literature, the way she understands the text of Ukrainian literature nobody does today. What she emphasizes in the texts, what she notices and observes, has such a profound significance in the context of the entire Ukrainian-Russian relations. I encourage everyone to read her texts. I was listening to one of the conversations with her online recently, and she mentioned something that was already in my mind, but she articulated it so well, that I decided to research and think more about it. She spoke about the other side of this catastrophe related to the painful history of industrialization and the construction of the water reservoir — the sea Dovzhenko wrote about and made a film “Poem of the See”, a celebration of the creation of the sea, the water reservoir. But Vira Ageyeva said that a huge part of the Ukrainian steppe was stolen [by the construction of the Kakhovka Dam]. So the ecocide happened then. You're probably familiar with some of my thoughts about the Chornobyl disaster where I say that the Zone wasn't created in 1986, it was created when the Duga radar and the power plant were built in the 70s. So the Kakhovka ecocide happened not just with this explosion, this ecocide had happened then as well. This was a theft of the Ukrainian steppe. And suddenly we have this steppe returned. 

In the concept of Anthropocene a human being is thought of as a force of nature. But in the noosphere, for Vernadsky, technology, human, human thought, industry, war — all of this together was the force of nature. We were mourning the disappearance of that steppe. And suddenly, a hundred years later, this anthropocentric force of nature returns the steppe in this horrific event of explosion. So sometimes I think about all these forces, powers, and colonialism as a logic that operates within this horrific return of the steppe. When I asked some Ukrainian experts and scientists about the state of pollution of the water in the Kakhovka reservoir, they were very reluctant to talk about it. Many of them simply said: ‘Well, next time we will do better”, because in fact, there was poison accumulating there since the beginning. It was a place of poison — the rotten wound of colonialism. And then this rotten wound explodes, and you don’t know what part of the story is the worst. At the moment, you think the explosion now is the worst, but then you realize that every step of this story is the worst. 

That's why I got completely sick when it happened. And then suddenly I decided to hurt myself even more thinking about the long story and why nobody, including me, paid attention. Because, in the end, it comes to us, right? It's not that someone didn't do something — we didn't do it. I didn't write about it. You didn't think about it, right? So why do we pay attention to those things only when something explodes, when war erupts? How do we notice things without these catastrophes? And it's already too late because I'm saying it in the context of the war when it seems all your attention has to go there. After all, this is the struggle now, especially when your future is constantly destroyed. I still want to think about the future and learn something, even amid this horrific situation, and think of how to do things or what should be done in the future in that time of the after-the-war. At the moment when your future has been destroyed, you build a future by setting up new tasks, you are substituting the losses this way. 

Lilia [00:49:24] 

I wanted to add some things about Kakhovka. I had mostly two reactions. The first one was connected to the impossibility of this: I couldn't believe that the scale of the impossible continues to grow, and this was another level of the impossible that was actually happening. But on the other side, I was thinking about the people involved in this process and the set of actions that should have happened to make it possible. I was trying to understand (of course, I couldn't) this colonial logic and the personal choices of people involved because it's quite the process (all the technologies, and set of actions). Also, I saw the video of two Russian soldiers talking about the house floating in the river and making jokes about it, and I was trying to understand them, but it was impossible. I was trying to understand the colonial logic we discussed, the aspect of this logic that makes impossible things (in terms of survival, environment, and life) possible. I was thinking of the idea of the level of acceptable pollution inherent to colonialism, or the way of thinking of lands and people as economic resources or labor forces. Coming from Uzbekistan I was also researching information on the Aral Sea and I was hoping to see what’s left of it. I was watching a documentary about people who stayed there even when the sea had left, and they were stuck in this non-time, waiting for the sea to come back. So colonialism stole from them the time itself: they're not living, they're just waiting for something that can never happen in their lifetime. I feel the responsibility to try to understand how this colonial logic works on different levels, the people involved, why they accept it, etc. What mechanism makes violence acceptable for them, and how it's still going on? What mechanism in this particular war does Russia use to make all this happen and be accepted by the people there, especially people directly involved in doing these things? Because I think probably without attempts to understand how it works, we cannot do something with it. 

But also I was thinking about the weaknesses of colonial logic because it remains insensitive to some things. They see resistance as something impossible. They see survival as something impossible. Political strategies of keeping dignity, memory, culture, languages are impossible and weak for colonial logic because it doesn't count them as powerful and important. But they are. I was also thinking about Ichkeria, and their resistance, which has been going on for 400 years and is still alive. 

Svitlana [00:53:18]
The things Lilia said were such a fantastic ending for the conversation. I just viscerally felt that it was just wrapped up suddenly. I don't want to say anything after that!