Introduction: Anthropological Perspectives on War, Displacement, Humanitarianism and the Hierarchies of Knowledge in the Studies of the Conflict

It has been a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. It is clear that the impact of this war goes far beyond Ukraine. We already know that it will have long-lasting consequences for the regional and global economy, in particular for energy and food security. The war is reshuffling old geo-political arrangements and alliances. It is also shaping the political landscapes of European states: international relations, inflation and migration are increasingly becoming key topics in national elections.

Certainly, this war will determine the future of Ukraine and Russia as well as Europe, the EU and NATO. Consequently, many people are identifying this war as ‘ours’. Many do so not only out of political awareness, but also in a gesture of solidarity. Yet I am hesitant to appropriate this war as ‘ours’ because, without a doubt, no one bears the cost and consequences of this war like Ukraine and its people do. I am deeply aware of my privilege, being in a safe location, with peace of mind, able to edit this Forum on war while others have to live through its unimaginable atrocities, caused by the Russian aggressor.

Since the 2022 invasion started, numerous articles and statements have been written. The strength of our discipline was reflected in many poignant essays offering insights into the situation on the ground, describing the experiences of people fighting to survive the violence (Kalenychenko 2022; Phillips 2022), self-organising defence and assistance (Caldwell 2022; Channell-Justice 2022; Nading 2022), managing the unimaginable. Many of those pieces were first-hand accounts by scholars who, in spite of difficulties, somehow found the strength to document the atrocities of this war. Most accounts grew out of long-term ethnographic engagements with local communities and in-depth knowledge of Ukrainian realities, and consequently showed very well what is at stake in this war.

Within this scholarship, special attention has been given to the Ukrainian people's displacement. It continues to be the biggest and the fastest displacement that Europe has witnessed since the Second World War. Since February 2022, approximately a third of the Ukrainian population has been at some point during the crisis either internally or externally displaced. For those reasons, our Forum is also strongly focused on this topic. By March 2023, nearly 10.2 million crossings were registered at the Polish-Ukrainian border. Of course, many people returned to Ukraine or moved to other destinations; nevertheless, in absolute numbers Poland ranks first among European states in hosting the largest number of Ukrainian refugees (approximately 1.56 million). If calculating per capita, it is Estonia and Czechia that are becoming the leading hosts (Trebesch et al 2023: 18). Even though the USA, EU institutions and the UK so far have pledged the highest value of financial, humanitarian and military aid to Ukraine, such commitments calculated in per cent of donor country GDP are the highest in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (Trebesch et al 2023). Clearly, Eastern Europe is an important stakeholder in the current crisis, hence our focus on this region in this Forum.

But the strong support that people fleeing the Russian invasion have received in the last 16 months exacerbates the problem of selective compassion in Europe. People who have been suffering the consequences of violent conflicts in Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq have been rightly asking why they are not receiving the same attention, compassion and support as people running away from Russian tanks in Ukraine. As a result, the celebratory accounts of humanitarian efforts undertaken by volunteers in Poland, Slovakia or Romania quickly gave way to accusations of racism.

However, as Céline Cantat (2022) has signalled, even if racism influences selective compassion, it cannot explain everything. One explanation can be found in the EU's own intergovernmental arrangements, which already in 2017 granted visa-free travel privileges to Ukrainian citizens holding biometric passports. Consequently, when the invasion prompted the great displacement, the EU was, in a way, forced to accept Ukrainians by its own legal system – there was no legal basis to perform a ‘push back’ or to forcefully detain in the camps people who are eligible to benefit from the EU–Ukraine visa-free agreement. Of course, legalism is just one of the many possible perspectives. That is why in this Forum we continue to look for further explanations of the current situation. Using their expertise in humanitarian, migration and security studies, the contributors provide valuable insights into the worlds of people who are fleeing Ukraine and those who are involved in border regimes and humanitarian actions. For instance, by juxtaposing the situation at the Polish–Ukrainian border with the pushback against the migrants from the Global South that is taking place at the Polish–Belarusian border, Karolina Follis (this issue) shows that current attitudes towards Ukraine are strongly motivated by European concern for its own safety rather than empathy for the invaded state. This is confirmed by Volodymyr Artiukh (this issue), who adds that the specific perception of Ukrainian migrants and Ukraine's defenders as a European asset is a result of the self-representation of those groups, who strategically portray themselves as protectors against the Russian advance into Europe.

Olena Fedyuk and Emma Rimpiläinen (this issue) propose another angle and explain the trajectories of forced migration through an economic rather than a security lens. Both show that, in order to understand the choices that migrants make and the opportunities that they are given, we have to consider socio-economic patterns that were shaped in Ukraine and in host countries long before the 2022 invasion started. Similarly, in my own piece in this Forum, I argue that Polish aid to Ukraine has neither been ‘spontaneous’ nor a reflection of some ‘hospitable nature’ of Polish society, but instead should be seen as a result of the long-term historical, economic and political connections linking both societies. Conversely, Elizabeth Dunn and Iwona Kaliszewska (this issue) argue that key to the effectiveness of the Polish humanitarian response is the ability to work against established patterns, through emerging rather than institutionalised networks.

But the humanitarian and economic consequences of war have not been the only issue concerning anthropological minds. Since the invasion started, many of us – anthropologists of and in Europe – were also preoccupied with the ‘why’ question. Why is Russia invading Ukraine? Who holds responsibility for the current state of affairs? Only four days after the invasion started, Focaal Blog issued an opinion piece by David Harvey (2022). He argued that the economic and political humiliation Russia experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union was to be blamed for the current state of affairs. He also attributed some blame to NATO for its expansion to the Eastern territories of Europe and the lack of respect for Russia's place in the global order. Responding to Harvey, Derek Hall (2022) and Elizabeth Dunn (2022) pointed out that the lack of consideration of the Ukrainian perspective in Harvey's piece was unacceptable. They also objected to the ‘NATO expansion’ narrative, noting that it neglects the agency of the Central and Eastern European states who willingly applied to become members of the pact.

Indeed, the tone and the timing of Harvey's piece could not have been worse. At a time when millions of people in Ukraine were under attack, when many of Harvey's readers in Central and Eastern Europe were directly involved in humanitarian efforts while also worrying if the war would spill to their home countries, Harvey opted to centre his piece on the suffering and insecurities of Russia. As Patty Gray (2022) noted, the time for such pieces was past long before the war started, when there was still time and space for conflict prevention. Such pieces might have some value in the future, but in February 2022 they sounded discordant, like an attempt to soothe the bruised ego of the bully.

At around the same time, the EASA Executive Committee issued a very strong statement against the Russian invasion. The statement condemned the war as unprovoked, illegal and imperialistic. It clearly sided with Ukrainian people. Yet it also included a sentence which identified the roots of the war not only in Russian imperial ambitions but also in ‘NATO expansion into the Eastern European territory’. As documented by Martin Fotta (2022), this sentence sparked strong controversy among mostly Central and Eastern European scholars who, through email, requested that the Executive Committee take it out. Within a few days the sentence was gone.

What followed were strings of formal and informal conversations in which tensions were high and accusations of West-plaining, Euro- or Russian-centrism, NATO-philia or phobia, Putin-apologetics or paranoid nationalisms were frequently weaponised (Artiukh 2022; De Lauri 2022; Dunn 2022; Focaalblog 2022; Fotta 2022; Gray 2022; Hall 2022; Hann 2022; Harvey 2022; Kalb 2022; Ries et al 2022; Shtyrkov 2022). Each side accused their opponents of ignorance.

Perhaps ignorance of Ukraine and Russia and their troubled relationship, as well as of the wider regional history and current political landscape, is the key problem here. Several scholars pointed out that the reason why in the earliest stages of the war so much attention was given to the ‘Russian perspective’ was simply a reflection of the ways in which studies of Eastern Europe have always been Russian-centric. Similarly, even though in the earliest stages of the war so many anthropologists acted as NATO experts and specialists in international relations, I learned while working on this Forum that finding an anthropologist with actual research-based knowledge of NATO who could provide a contribution regarding Swedish and Finnish accession to the Treaty was quite challenging.

Fredrik Barth (2002) shows that knowledge is central for the functioning of society. As he observes, in order for the members of one society to coexist peacefully, they must share some knowledge to be able to communicate. As the heated debates concerning the war reveal, our own anthropological community clearly needs to do a better job in generating and sharing knowledge directly relevant to the conflict. We cannot afford any blind spots in anthropology of Europe anymore. But we also have to move beyond regional boundaries and echo chambers. As Agnieszka Halemba and Agata Ładykowska rightly argue in this Forum, old hierarchies of knowledge must be revised. But the way the NATO controversy in the EASA statement was handled is not a way forward either. Even if those who initiated the petition achieved their goal of enforcing their view (the attribution of blame to NATO is gone from the EASA statement), they missed an opportunity to meaningfully present and convince others of their perspective, as they opted for forms of communication that prioritise private channels and informal discussions in their own echo chambers over transparent dialogue and public debate.

What the prioritisation of grapevine communication can achieve, though, is the strengthening of presumptions such as those fuelling the East vs West divide in our discipline. Throughout this year, when talking to my Polish colleagues and following Polish media, I frequently heard grievances about ‘the West’ supposedly not caring about the war and Ukraine. But the choice of Sweden and Finland to opt for NATO membership – a process described in this Forum by Ilmari Käihkö – counters such blanket statements. At the same time, as someone who lives in Slovakia, I am deeply aware that even in ‘the East’ views on the war are not homogenous. While Russia might be seen as the key aggressor in Poland, in neighbouring Slovakia the perspective differs. Depending on methodology, recent surveys estimate that between 19 per cent and 32.4 per cent of respondents wish for a Russian victory (Globsec 2022; see also Ako sa máte, Slovensko? 2022; Dlhopolec 2022, Kerekes 2022). Conversely, some estimate that 25.5 per cent to 47 per cent of Slovak respondents want Ukraine to defeat Russia. Significantly, these Slovak surveys reveal quite high levels of indifference, with approximately one third of respondents declaring no interest in the war. The simplistic nature of the East vs West perspective is also problematised by the work of Anastasia Astapova, who in this Forum focuses on Russian speakers in Estonia and the way they justify their predominantly anti-Ukrainian stance by resorting to conspiracy theories. Such a finding might not be surprising. Yet as Astapova reveals, the specific group is not fully isolated in either Estonia or in Europe, as it shares some of its views with local extreme nationalists and other European groups endorsing conspiracy theories regarding the war. This suggests that perhaps, instead of rehearsing old East vs West tropes when analysing this war and its impact on Europe, we should start paying more attention to the new ways in which political and ideological alliances are shaped across the continent.

Just as members of European societies express different views and attitudes towards the war, so do representatives of our profession and members of EASA. That is why the secondary goal of this Forum is to move the discussions concerning the war from the echo chambers to the public space of this journal. I neither believe nor hope that we have to agree on everything within EASA. But we have to communicate with each other and be open to each other's perspectives. As Barth notes, members of one society must differ in some knowledge to give focus to their interactions. According to him, ‘the understanding of the balances of sharing and difference in knowledge that predicate social cooperation should constitute a vital part of any theory of human society’ (2002: 2). That is why this Forum is motivated by the need to create a space where such dialogue can take place. My goal was to create space for a diverse range of views, in the hope that they will contribute to sharing knowledge and perspectives, and will eventually strengthen our capacity to support Ukraine.

I agree with Mariya Ivancheva when she writes in this Forum that anthropology must not be afraid to be political. I also strongly believe that our discipline is at its best when it offers explanations that go beyond the truth of the events themselves and instead foster insights and understandings (see Toren and Pina-Cabral 2011). Yet, as Emma Rimpiläinen (this issue) has noticed, almost every recent analysis and blog post about the war has been haunted by the need to produce authoritative knowledge about the invasion. The need to become arbitrators of truth might be surprising, especially for scholars representing anthropology, a discipline which historically has been mostly concerned with representation, whose objective has not been to show the world as it is but instead to provide understanding about how individual actions and collective illusions are interlinked and how they are loaded with meanings (Hastrup 2004).

But at the same time, this need to explain ‘what is really going on’, what this war is ‘really’ about, is also understandable. At a time of war, when a culturally constructed universe cannot explain the logic and the moral justice of the violent events, people seek theories that can help to make sense of the crisis. If this war is ‘ours’ then ‘our’ anthropological explanations of the current events are not attempts at providing insights into the world of distant ‘Others’ and ‘their’ crisis. It is anthropology at home, an effort to understand the crisis in which ‘we’ – European anthropologists and anthropologists of Europe – are also somehow entangled.

Anthropology at home is not comfortable. It comes with the advantage of insider knowledge, but it also comes with extra responsibilities: the necessity to understand and reflect on one's own positionality, biases and subjectivity. Anthropology at home – anthropology of this war – requires us to actively engage in the process of reflexivity, the self-evaluation of our own positionality and the acknowledgement of how this position might affect the research process and analysis. What do our lives, histories, cultural memories and education, as well as national disciplinary trajectories, mean for us as producers and consumers of knowledge about the invasion? How are we situated in the current conflict? Such reflection is not a limitation, but a possibility to gain an additional tool that can provide a more nuanced, transparent and maybe sometimes even more radically honest debate.

The insider–outsider dichotomy is hard to sustain when conducting research at home; it is perhaps impossible to maintain when analysing a war that can directly impact researchers’ lives. Of course, the stakes are not the same for everyone, but precisely because they differ, they should be reflected on in the process of building analysis as well as in the process of considering the sensibilities of audiences or the perspective of opponents. One of the great values of our discipline is the principle of compassion, an openness to diverse views and perspectives. If as anthropologists we can offer such concessions when studying controversial topics or radical and violent movements, we should also be able to offer similar accommodations to our colleagues.

While as anthropologists we might differ in the ways in which we identify the mechanisms that led to the invasion, and while we might not share perspectives on how and if the war could have been prevented, I am certain that we all want this war to end. Yet I also assume that when the peace talks eventually start, we might also differ in our views on the particularities of the conflict resolution. But I do hope that when that time comes, we can apply a more reflexive and more nuanced approach to our discussions regarding the end of conflict than we did regarding its origins.

The Forum is divided into two parts. The first part – dedicated directly to the war – starts with a discussion of the wounded Ukrainian landscape, painted by Nataliya Tchermalykh. We then move to a discussion of security and border regimes in Europe, with pieces by Karolina Follis, Volodymyr Artiukh and Ilmari Käihkö. Next, Olena Fedyuk, Emma Rimpiläinen and Anastasiya Astapova analyse war-related displacement and diverse responses to migrants in Hungary, Finland and Estonia. This first part of the Forum ends with pieces by Elżbieta Drążkiewicz, Elizabeth Dunn and Iwona Kaliszewska, who analyse factors that facilitated the effectiveness of the early humanitarian response in Poland and ask broader questions about the implications of the current war on the humanitarian industry. The second part of the Forum, while directly triggered by the war and anthropological debates surrounding it, turns attention towards our discipline and asks about the impact of the current crisis on anthropology of and in Europe. Here Agnieszka Halemba with Agata Ładykowska, as well as Mariya Ivancheva, discuss hierarchies of knowledge in our discipline and follow up on the discussions concerning the ‘NATO controversy’ in the EASA statement concerning the Russian invasion.

This Forum took much longer to put together than the situation would necessitate. But perhaps this delay is not a bad thing. When we are facing the risk that ‘Ukraine fatigue’ is creeping in and anti-immigration attitudes are increasingly surfacing across Europe, we must make sure that Ukraine and its people are not forgotten.

Wounded Landscapes

Documenting Destructions, Witnessing Crimes

The first shift concerns the relationship between the state, the monuments (and their ruins) and the citizens. A few days after the war began, the Ukrainian state created an online register dedicated to the destruction of its cultural heritage.¹ This platform is not only for experts. Everyone who documents the destruction (for instance, with their mobile phone) can access and contribute to its database. Among the multitude of catalogued and verified images are aerial photos of craters left by bombing in historic districts, bullet marks on church walls, hundreds of burnt and semi-collapsed buildings. Subjectively, the act of photographing the ruins of the places where one grew up can be seen as a form of mourning for one's past life, shattered by the experience of war. But also, potentially, it can be seen as a collective preparation for the future: documenting destruction today means building up a body of evidence for the trial against the Russian state in an international court of law, which recognises the destruction of culture – both tangible and intangible – as a war crime. Such a distributed, citizen-driven process of proof-gathering that relies on immediate visual documentation suggests a more horizontal and responsible relation to existing monuments. At the same time, it decentres the previous, rigidly top-down state-to-citizen model of cultural heritage, in which the definition of what counts as a monument belonged exclusively to the state.

From Anti-Soviet Iconoclasm to Creative Conservation

The second shift relates to the role of iconoclasm – the destruction of socially relevant symbols – in Ukrainian society. Long before the war began, Ukrainians had a complex and passionate relationship with their monuments. One still remembers the ‘Leninopad’, a post-Maidan wave of destruction of statues of Vladimir Lenin. This popular fury, directed at the monuments, was based on a deep belief that by dismantling the stone, one could get rid of the unbearable past, and perhaps change the course of the future. This popular sentiment was also enshrined in law, banning communist symbolism² on the same footing as Nazi symbolism. As a result of this de-sovietisation of the public sphere, championed by the Ukrainian state, hundreds of streets have been renamed and hundreds of Soviet-era monuments have disappeared. This move raised the opprobrium of intellectuals, who consider Soviet, Russian and Ukrainian cultural heritage to be interconnected. They tried to negotiate with the state for a space for preservation of Soviet-Ukrainian heritage, which became controversial. Then, the Russian intervention interfered, sometimes resolving the controversy. For example, the monumental coloured mosaics at Chernihiv airport (Balashova et al 2017), which were defended by intellectuals and local communities from ‘de-sovietisation’, alongside those remaining at the Lviv fish market,³ Vinnitsa technical school⁴ or Kyiv metro stations⁵ were permanently destroyed by Russian bombing during winter 2022.

Writing about revolutionary iconoclasm, French historian Emmanuel Fureix noted that ‘By instituting a new symbolic order and a new imaginary, revolutions turn iconoclasm into a creative destruction, according to a dialectic that each revolutionary moment negotiates in a singular way. … Chosen targets may vary, but they all point to an order that has become intolerable in the temporal breach opened up by the revolution’ (2014: 15). Similar processes have surely been documented in post-Maidan Ukraine, yet the breach opened up by the war seems to point towards a diametrically opposite shift – that of creative conservation of meaningful monuments and images, and hyper-semanticisation of those that can be related, in any way, to the suffering of the war.

It seems that since the beginning of the war, post-Soviet iconoclasm has been replaced, at least partially, by a no less passionate conservationist logic. In large cities, in anticipation of Russian air raids, statues of historical importance – the statue of Volodymyr, who baptised the Kyivan Rus, of Duke Richelieu, the founder of Odessa, or Princess Olga of Kyiv – are preventively wrapped in cloth and protected by rows of sandbags, according to the technique developed during the Second World War. This new, fragile appearance appeals to passers-by, who, between two sirens, take pictures in front of these monuments, perhaps to emphasise the transformative experiences of war endured on an equal footing by monuments and humans – and their shared vulnerability.

Redefining Monumentality

The third shift relates to the redefinition of monumentality in the context of the ongoing war and ruination, when the initiative of active monument-making (that for a long time remained a prerogative of state agents) has been, however temporarily, taken over by ordinary Ukrainians.

In March 2022, once the offence against the Kyiv region ceased, mass graves hastily dug along the roadsides were revealed in the surrounding areas of Irpin, Borodianka and Butcha. ‘We buried a lot of people in the vegetable garden’, recalls a resident of the city of Makariv in the Kyiv region, ‘The cemetery was bombed, we were afraid to go there.’⁶ A blue-and-yellow flag, a few flowers and candles, a first name scrawled in pencil, sometimes food, to honour those who died of hunger. These micro-monuments, that by a subtle human intervention transform what is commonly referred as a ‘mass grave’ into a ‘cemetery’, indicate the transformation of the very idea of what a monument means and stands for, driven by the human capacity to create and share symbols, as well as to provide them new meanings even in (or perhaps, especially in) the face of the violence of war.

Some new war monuments are not human-made material objects, but macro- monuments: inscriptions or traces in the landscape. In May 2022, the Ukrainian National Agency of Information (UNIAN) published an aerial photograph of a piece of land near Kharkiv, riddled with missiles. The author, a journalist-turned-soldier Oleksandr Makhov, lost his life in a battle in the Kharkiv region several days later. ‘There isn't a whole spot on my soul – that is why I am putting this image, indefinitely, as my profile picture’, wrote one of my Ukrainian friends on her Facebook page. ‘I continuously felt and thought that the land is wounded’, confessed Asia Bazdyreva, a Ukrainian intellectual, in an online diary,⁷ inspired by this image. These reactions suggest a profoundly meaningful resonance between the representation of a wounded landscape and the subjective urge to translate inconceivable violence symbolically, given that the essence of this experience seems to lie beyond words.

Here, the wounded landscape itself has been reconceptualised as a monument to the ongoing war, a monument that embodies a totalising experience of ruination. These short acts of monument-making carried out at the verge of humanness unveil the very essence of what a monument is, stripped from historical or ideological superimpositions. The war makes us realise that a monument is also a material object serving as an inscription of human suffering or loss – actual or past – in a certain landscape.

Ukrainian Refugees in the EU

Acknowledgement

This contribution is based on fieldwork conducted within an ERC-funded project ‘Emptiness: Living Capitalism and Democracy under (Post-)Socialism’ (emptiness.eu) hosted by the University of Oxford's Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society and School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography.

A Tale of Two Borders

Explaining the Finnish – and Swedish – Ascent to NATO

On 17 December 2021, amid a build-up of troops that would two months later invade Ukraine, the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov put forward a list of demands that included ‘a legally binding guarantee that NATO would give up any military activity in Eastern Europe and Ukraine’ (Tétrault-Farber and Balmforth 2021).

The Russian demands essentially meant halting and rolling back NATO expansion through an establishment of a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. This concerned even Finland, a small Nordic country that had balanced between the East and the West following its independence from Russia in 1917.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Finland had increasingly oriented towards the West politically but remained neutral militarily. Absent security guarantees, Finland had continued compulsory male conscription and possessed a large, relatively well-equipped and well-motivated reserve. No less than 68 per cent of those Finns polled in September–October 2021 stated that they were prepared to defend Finland by arms even in a situation where the outcome was uncertain. Simultaneously, 51 per cent opposed Finnish NATO membership, with 24 per cent supporting and 24 per cent uncertain (The Advisory Board of Defence Information 2021: 19, 22).

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 changed these figures. In the next poll conducted in April–early May 2022, 68 per cent were in favour of Finnish membership in NATO. Only 15 per cent opposed. In addition, 83 per cent were prepared to defend Finland by arms if necessary (The Advisory Board of Defence Information 2022: 15–18). On 17 May, Finland applied for NATO membership.

What explains this radical change and how did it happen?

One might intuitively think that the Finnish government persuaded Finns about the necessity of NATO in a time of deepening tensions. This is not what happened, at least in Finland. On the eve of the Russian invasion, the Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin stated equivocally that Finland was not applying for NATO membership (Näveri and Bjurström 2022). This echoed the Swedish Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist's November 2021 assertion that he would ‘never participate in a Swedish NATO application’ (Dahlström 2022: np).

A deep-rooted perception of Russia in the Finnish society offers a better explanation for the reversal of Finnish military nonalignment. After the devastating civil war of 1918, it became politically convenient for both the victors and the losers to ascribe domestic strife to an external cause – Russia (Karesmaa 2006).

The idea that Russia constitutes an eternal and an external enemy was subsequently strengthened by the 1939 Soviet invasion, the unsuccessful Finnish revanche to reclaim lost lands alongside Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941–1944, and finally Finlandisation –the period when Finland's sovereignty was limited in the Soviet sphere of influence during the Cold War.

As one Finnish Ministry of Defence official told me in October 2022, the Finns who had been in favour of NATO before February 2022 had been so because of the Russian threat. Paradoxically, the same perception of Russia as a threat also explained opposition to NATO. The Russian invasion of another of its militarily unallied neighbours simply made the latter group join the first in seeking security guarantees.

In my discussions with Finns, the Russian invasion often triggered personal memories of the 1939 Winter War, where Finland was invaded after refusing territorial concessions to the Soviet Union. On the one hand, security was sought from NATO. On the other hand, many saw Ukraine's situation as history repeating itself. Thus, many felt that supporting Ukraine and Ukrainians was a deeply personal responsibility. The Finnish politicians had little choice but to follow suit.

Finnish politicians, however, felt that it was also in the national interest to apply to NATO together with Sweden. Unlike in Finland, where neutrality was a consequence of defeat in the Second World War and the subsequent price of belonging to Russia's sphere of influence, in Sweden neutrality had been a choice (Stenbäck 2022). On hearing about the Finnish decision to seek membership, Swedish Social Democrat Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson proclaimed ‘damn Finland, now we might have to join too’ (Strömberg and Nilsson 2022: np). Despite initial resistance, Hultqvist later explained that after the Finnish decision it was in Swedish interests to follow (Dahlström 2022). There would be political and security risks to staying outside the Western alliance once Finland joined, not least because Sweden would become the only non- allied country in the region. The government was also facing parliamentary elections, where the right-wing opposition alliance was guaranteed to turn NATO membership into an electoral issue.

After the Swedish government had made up its mind, the final thing remaining was convincing Swedes of the merits of this decision. This task was somewhat more complicated in Sweden than in Finland. As in Finland, in Sweden Russia constitutes a formative ‘other’. Yet Sweden also has its second ‘other’, the United States. As NATO is frequently deemed the long arm of the United States, parts of the Swedish electorate required some persuading. The threat of Russia and the Finnish ascent towards NATO had nevertheless shifted Swedish perceptions of the military alliance. In the end Sweden applied for membership on 16 May, a day before Finland.

While the Russian war in Ukraine continues at the time of writing with an undecided outcome, one thing is certain. If Putin sought to halt NATO from expanding, his decision to invade Ukraine instead accelerated the process. Ultimately, the eventual doubling of NATO's border with Russia is the outcome of Russian military weakness against dogged Ukrainian resistance. Russia has diminished both as a military power and as an international actor. The country's resort to increasingly brute force can be interpreted as weakness, as Russia seems to have little to offer in terms of soft power. At the same time, Russia's status as the ‘other’, and the opponent of the ‘West’, seems like a recipe for long-term polarisation.

This polarisation poses a challenge for policymakers in Finland and Sweden, many of whom seem surprised about the belligerent and polarised public discourse about Russia. While this might counter what Elżbieta Drążkiewicz calls ‘Ukraine fatigue’ in her introduction (this issue), the flipside of the coin is that whereas NATO might offer security guarantees to its members, Russia is unlikely to disappear. While relations with Russia will never be the same because of its invasion of Ukraine, policymakers worry that belligerent politics do not help with long-term strategic thinking.

Polarisation and politicisation have historically also had adverse consequences for academic freedom – and hence inevitably even for the utility of social inquiry (Joas 2003; Price 2008). These consequences may especially affect anthropology. According to Thomas Hylland Eriksen, anthropology ‘searches for patterns and similarities, but . . . is fundamentally critical of quick solutions and simple answers to complex questions’ (2004: 6). After breaking with its colonial roots, one of the main strengths of anthropology has exactly been its ability to return ambiguity to polarised and politicised situations (Käihkö forthcoming). Despite troubled times, we would do well to not lose sight of what unites rather than divides us.

Networks that Catch

Acknowledgement

This text was supported by a project funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 893032.

Housing Preferences of Temporary Protection Seekers in Finland

Since February 2022, over 50,000 people from Ukraine have arrived in Finland to seek temporary protection (Finnish Immigration Service 2023). Unlike in the case of asylum seekers from Africa, Asia or the Middle East, the majority of newcomers from Ukraine have been housed in private accommodation with friends, relatives or even previously unfamiliar volunteers rather than in reception centres. According to a survey conducted among displaced Ukrainians in Finland in summer 2022, less than a third of the respondents lived in reception centres (Svynarenko and Koptsuykh 2022). While asylum seekers from other countries are also technically speaking entitled to arrange their own accommodation, in practice the majority of them have been accommodated in reception centres while their applications are processed. Temporary protection applications for Ukrainians are processed very quickly, typically within one or two weeks. Even after receiving a decision, people granted temporary protection have the right to reside in reception centres, but many Ukrainians try to avoid this option if possible.

The observations I make here are based on discussions with representatives from the reception system and displaced Ukrainians in the Helsinki region between April and September 2022, when I worked as an adviser with the Finnish Refugee Council. In my work, I came into contact with displaced Ukrainians seeking advice about a variety of issues, from healthcare to language courses, but finding private accommodation or getting out of reception centre housing were the most popular queries. This did not come as a surprise to me, as I had previously conducted fieldwork in Ukraine and Russia among people displaced by the war in Donbas, Eastern Ukraine. During this research period in 2018–19, housing was one of the main issues preoccupying former residents of Donbas, bringing especially internally displaced people in Ukraine together in collective action.

It is fair to say that Finnish society, just like most others in the European Union, has reacted to Ukrainians more positively than to other groups of asylum seekers (see, for example, Cantat 2022; Dzenovska 2022). Still, preferential treatment of Ukrainians by the migration system is not the only explanation for their untypical housing situation – if anything, Finnish authorities have been taken aback by Ukrainians’ desire to avoid reception centres. I argue that the determination of Ukrainians to find private accommodation is a concatenation of two factors: the role that housing plays in managing aid for forced displaced populations generally and the meanings attached to housing and homeownership in Ukraine in particular.

On the first point, housing is one of the most urgent issues to resolve in all displacement situations. Displacement as a social condition can be understood as both literal and existential homelessness, a loss of connection to one's homeplace (Höjdestrand 2009; Humphrey 2002; Stephenson 2006). Strengthening one's sense of security after surviving war is crucial, and the role of the living environment is particularly important in this. However, refugee camps or accommodation in refugee reception centres are the usual solutions to meet the housing needs of displaced people. Living in identical, austerely decorated rooms in institutions separated from the rest of society hardly increases residents’ sense of control over their own lives, which have recently been upended by war. Indeed, my own and other scholars’ (e.g. Dunn 2017) research into this topic confirms the view that the main motivations for housing displaced people in camps or collective housing are the ease of delivering aid and governing mobile populations, rather than providing a living environment suitable for rebuilding lives in a meaningful way. The notorious Irish direct provision system is a case in point (Hewson 2022).

With regard to the meaning of housing, it is hard to overstate the importance of homeownership in Ukraine. While renting is common in countries like Sweden or Germany, independent Ukraine has essentially been a society of homeowners. After the destruction wrought by the Second World War, Soviet Ukraine urbanised rapidly, and in 1957 Nikita Khrushchev initiated a campaign to ‘house every Soviet family in a separate apartment within twelve years’ (Zavisca 2012: 23). Although the Soviet authorities failed to live up to the promise of providing an apartment for every family, late-Soviet housing policies established a powerful expectation of ‘normal living’ among Ukrainians: that every family should have their own separate apartment with secure residence rights. The collapse of the Soviet Union signified changes to the state's role in the production and distribution of housing, but not a fundamental shift in the housing situations of ordinary people, many of whom resided in the very same housing units before, during and after the political upheaval of the early 1990s. In 1992, laws initiating housing privatisation were passed, as the state was keen to rid itself of the responsibility of maintaining Ukraine's aging housing stock (Liasheva 2019). Citizens in Ukraine (and some other postsocialist countries) could privatise the dwellings they legally occupied for free. As a result, before the Russian invasion in 2022, more than 90 per cent of the Ukrainian population lived in a housing unit owned by themselves or a relative (Liasheva 2019; State Statistics Service of Ukraine 2018). Since independence, privately owned housing has also become a key site for stability and meaning-making practices, as the home has often been the main permanent feature of life in the midst of economic crises and, more recently, war.

How important homeownership is for Ukrainians is reflected in their choices to stay or leave the areas at risk. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, some of my informants (who had already lost their homes once in the Donbas war around 2014) have been particularly reluctant to escape the current Russian attack if they had succeeded in buying a new flat. For example, an elderly couple who escaped war in the Donetsk region in 2014 had bought a small flat in Irpin, northwest from Kyiv, just a few months before the invasion. As the Russian army drew closer, they delayed leaving until the very last moment out of fear that their flat would be lost to raiders or new occupiers if they abandoned it. They rejected my suggestions to flee abroad due to their lack of language skills and networks outside of Ukraine. In the end, the couple evacuated to Western Ukraine for a few months before deciding to go back to liberated Irpin, as their flat had been spared physical damage. This should act as a reminder that the most vulnerable people may not leave, even when the risks of staying increase, due to their material and affective investment in their homes (see also Artiukh's contribution in this issue about the typical profiles of leavers versus stayers). The meaning of home also explains why so many Ukrainians are eager to return to their own homes as soon as possible, even if it is not yet completely safe to do so, or why others – those who decided to leave – have been so determined to effectively resist placements in reception centres.

Perhaps the real question is not why many newcomers from Ukraine wish to avoid reception centres, but why other refugees fleeing other wars do not seem to have the option to choose. Reception service providers in Finland do not disagree with their Ukrainian clients when it comes to assessing the shortcomings of the system. One employee, responding to complaints from displaced Ukrainians about their living conditions, commented that reception centres are not, and are not meant to be, a home-like environment. The mobilisation of empathy towards people fleeing the war in Ukraine has created societal awareness about the bureaucratic absurdities and bleak living conditions faced by asylum seekers in Finland, inspiring hope that the immigration system might be seen less as a given and more as a result of conscious policy choices. This also shows that the repercussions of Russia's invasion are not limited to Ukraine, but reverberate globally.

Humanitarian Compassion

‘We Created the Largest NGO in the World: the Polish People’

Russophones’ Attitudes Towards Ukrainian Refugees in Estonia

Russian speakers, mainly Soviet-time migrants or their descendants, comprise about 30 per cent of the Estonian population. Despite decades of coexistence, Russian-speaking and Estonian-speaking populations have remained segregated: by language and often by values (Vihalemm and Masso 2007). The war has heightened the divisions.

While 84 per cent of Estonian speakers support the welcoming of Ukrainian refugees, only 53 per cent of ‘other nationalities’, which essentially encompasses Russian speakers, do so (ERR 2022). Even more telling than the statistics are the Facebook groups of Russian speakers in Estonia (e.g. Russkie v Estonii [‘Russians in Estonia'] or Tallintsy [‘Residents of Tallinn']). Here, group members frequently discuss the influx of Ukrainian refugees in highly negative terms. Even though, to prevent radicalisation and cyberattacks, Estonian police monitor social media for instances of Putin and war glorification, many users do not hesitate to condemn the Estonian government for aiding refugees and are blaming ‘the West’ for expanding NATO and ‘provoking’ Russia. Scathing rumours about Ukrainians are frequently spread on those groups. For instance, refugees’ children who attend Russian schools are often accused of stealing from their Russian classmates.

So, what may be the reasons for such negative attitudes?

The most obvious answer is that Russians of Estonia live in the Russian Federation's information space. The opinion polls cited above show that while 73 per cent of Estonians follow Estonian news portals, only 44 per cent of Russians do. Even though the Estonian government has banned Russian propaganda TV channels in 2022, this hardly helped, as Russian speakers found an easy way to access them via the Internet Protocol Television services. Following Russian Federation media makes Russian speakers more susceptible to war propaganda, fake news and Kremlin-induced conspiracy theories.

Yet, one should not overestimate the Kremlin's impact. Russians residing in Estonia gravitate towards the Russian Federation media not simply due to pull factors that keep them connected with Russia, but also because of push factors that have made integration in Estonia difficult long before the invasion of Ukraine started. The vicious circle of ethnic divisions starts with segregation in the primary education system and clear division between Russian and Estonian schools. It continues in the labour market, residential preferences, leisure activities, consumption patterns and inter-ethnic marriage (see overview in Astapova 2022). As a result, unlike other countries with a large migrant population, in Estonia, migrants’ children do not experience a considerable increase in education and well-being compared to their parents (Lindemann and Saar 2012). Much poorer, Russian speakers have also been at greater risk of economic hardship caused by COVID- and war-induced financial crisis. Their economic vulnerability manifests in fear of losing otherwise scattered resources to Ukrainian migrants. Due to ethnic segregation, the Estonian government is mainly comprised of ethnic Estonians and is frequently accused of ignoring, if not worsening, the problems of Russian speakers.

However, the current situation in Estonia and the war-caused tensions cannot be simply reduced to being the result of ethnic divisions: migrants vs citizens, or Russophones vs Estonians. While it may seem that Russophones in Estonia stand out from the majority population, they have a lot in common with some niche Estonian groups. For instance, Estonian right-wing politicians, primarily the Conservative People's Party of Estonia (known as EKRE), oppose receiving Ukrainian migrants. To support their stand, EKRE members frequently use scaremongering tactics. For instance, they argue that Ukrainian migrants are likely to engage in prostitution and spread sexually transmitted diseases in Estonia. At the time of writing this article in March 2023, just before the parliamentary election, EKRE was the second most popular political party in Estonia, supported by about 22 per cent of the population. EKRE's narratives are illustrative of the rhetoric taking place elsewhere in EU countries, where populism has been on the rise. Yet, it is hard not to notice that EKRE's rhetoric has parallels with that of the Kremlin for justifying the war in Ukraine because of the need to protect ‘traditional family values’.

Finally, the attitudes of Russian speakers towards Ukrainian migrants and the war are also influenced by other – more global – phenomena, such as internationally renowned conspiracy theories, for example, those about biolabs in Ukraine, the Great Reset and secret societies causing the crisis (Astapova 2023). Paradoxically then, even though Russian speakers in Estonia are standing against the majority of Europe supporting Ukraine, they are simultaneously strongly connected with certain like-minded Estonians and broadly Europeans who also endorse similar world views and values.

This generates a lot of tension in the country. Fearing potential provocations by Russian speakers, Estonian politicians have rushed to solve the ‘Russian’ problem by tearing Soviet monuments down or by refusing to issue new visas and residence permits to Russian citizens, many of whom are still in Estonia. These actions, however, have fuelled more conflict. The tensions are already moving from social media into the offline space. Cars with Ukrainian plates have been vandalised and Ukrainians have been insulted in public spaces. Of course, the vandals and bullies have not always turned out to be Russian speakers. It is important to avoid quick generalisation, as many Russian speakers have been helping Ukrainians. Yet, the potency for conflicts, violence and all sorts of sabotage in Estonia cannot be underestimated: even though the war takes place more than a thousand kilometres away, some front lines are also located at the Baltic Sea.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Estonian Research Council grant PSG729 ‘COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories: Contents, Channels, and Target Groups’.

On Hierarchies of Knowledge

The War between Us

In early December 2013 at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM, in Vienna, an institution until recently known for promoting post- and anti-communist liberal intellectuals, Timothy Snyder – a historian of Stalinism – gave a lecture on Karl Marx. He declared Marx's ‘anthropological’ (as opposed to ‘political economic’) texts crucial for social scientists to understand the world in 2013. He praised the rising New Left in Eastern Europe (or rather some Left-Liberal groups in Poland and Ukraine he met) for rediscovering Marxian values despite witnessing the collapse of the former socialist world. As a Bulgarian who is part of this tiny New Left movement and positions herself further on the Left than most groups Snyder was referring to, I was perplexed: was this a signal of an ideological shift, or yet another asymmetric negotiation attempt between a Goliath (the (neo)liberals) and David (Eastern European leftists)? Were the liberals recognising, in the aftermath of the 2008 subprime crisis, amid rising anti-austerity social movements in the region and beyond, that their transition had gone wrong, and Marxism and ‘really existing’ socialism had some lessons to teach?

Days after this lecture, the EuroMaidan movement escalated, bringing millions to the streets of Ukraine under the banner of pro-EU and anti-Russian/Eurasian turn in Ukrainian economic policy, and eventually ended tragically in a wave of political violence, success for a liberal-right-extreme coalition in power in Ukraine, and the Russian invasion of Crimea and Donbas. The temporary liminal moment and spontaneous comunitas between liberals and the New Left melted into thin air. The liberals – those who since the 1980s championed tirelessly the dogmas of the free-market and European and Euro-Atlantic dependent development in the region – saw EuroMaidan as a reinforcement of their 1990s ideals: the ideals on which they have built their academic, think-tank and political careers, such as ‘the end of history’ and ‘There Is No Alternative’ (TINA). A Europe driven by free market ‘values’ was still worth fighting for. Liberal media and political commentators, many of whom were based at academic institutions focusing on the region such as IWM, selectively chose a group of ‘the people’ on Kyiv's streets to stand with: university-educated middle classes with aspirations to be part of the ‘civilised’ capitalist Euro-West. For their audiences, this was what EuroMaidan stood for.

This process silenced and marginalised even further the voices of the tiny New Left. For its members, the ultimate goal was not the accession of Ukraine in the EU and NATO through a potentially catastrophic free-trade agreement and militarisation, but instead the improvement of the dire condition of the people in the country, for whom EU membership enabled working abroad. This was a necessity enforced by the hopeless coercive economic conditions at home, which a generation of anthropologists and social scientists working in and on the region, including colleagues associated with the New Left in Ukraine such as Volodymyr Ishchenko, Oksana Dutchak, Anastasia Riabchuk, Denys Gorbach, Aliona Lyasheva, Volodymyr Artiukh and others, have provided evidence and commentary on for over a decade.¹ This perspective was largely ignored, as were all indications of the tiny but strong nationalist core that gradually overtook the EuroMaidan framing and – among other activities – harassed the handful of leftists, including those championed by T. Snyder. The violent end of EuroMaidan brought the right extreme into coalition governments with free-market democrats, added fuel to the war fire ignited by Putin in 2014 and detonated eight years later.

Since then, the Eastern European New Left has plateaued and lost steam, but so too has the ever-more politically irrelevant liberal intellectual NGO-party complex. An increasingly violent, transnationally-organised extreme right consolidated and became particularly strong in Eastern Europe – as we saw with the fight against the Istanbul Convention which Left and Liberals faced mostly powerless and disorganised. Unlike the former group, however, the (neo)liberal elites of Ukraine and Europe systematically failed to recognise the rising fascism at home until it appeared embodied by Putin as an external enemy. Then they ‘helpfully’ re-ascribed it to remnants of the communist past rather than the capitalist present, and prescribed the old remedy: TINA and the military-industrial complex. When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014 and when he waged a full-fledged war on it in 2022, his atrocities merely presented a new opportunity to rehash Cold War imaginaries of an evil totalitarian Eurasian East in struggle with the noble democratic West. Such flawed Manichean logic resonated with European and broader publics force-fed with narratives equating neoliberal autocrat Putin either to a communist, or to a barbaric feudal overlord, neglecting the severe crisis of social reproduction in which the neoliberal dogma plunged Europe's Eastern margins post-1989.

The New Left struggled to counter this simplified rhetoric of fake binary opposites and to propose an alternative historically nuanced perspective on the conflict. This perspective includes (but is not limited to) the consideration of NATO's role in the region. It brings to the discussion the Euro-Atlantic military-industrial complex, packaged together with the Washington Consensus and European integration policies. This perspective is critical of the EU-driven years dismantling infrastructure, industry, agriculture, services and welfare, and sending millions in forced labour migration from Ukraine and the region in the last 30 years. Ukrainian migration into Europe before the war presented a key case in this process, with an acute crisis of social reproduction and a destitute job market at home. In Europe, many were treated as second-class citizens, racialised and exploited. Colonisation at its best. A similar colonial dependency proposed by Russia through the Eurasian Union promised nothing better. Eight years since EuroMaidan and many months since the war began, Ukrainians remain scapegoats of this deadlock, now hugely traumatised, mourning thousands of victims and destroyed homes.

Since the war started, the space for such argument, however, has been lost. As an academic from Eastern Europe, working in the West but engaged in political activism in the East, I find myself in a perpetual deadlock, betwixt and between liberal militarisation and the glorification of NATO and the currently much more incipient and complicit and yet not more divisive pro-Putin ‘multipolar world’ position, shared by the right extreme and the unreformed Left.

In academia – and as the pressure to change EASA's position on the war and the following debate² showed, especially in Eastern Europe – liberal social scientists supporting NATO, called by Don Kalb ‘NATO anthropologists’,³ are still numerous, visible and noisy. The voices of those anthropologists and social scientists, trying to introduce nuance and complexity, and to challenge the fake dichotomies of the liberal narrative, are pushed even further to the margin as many of them have had to leave their home institutions and homes and to take economically precarious positions at Western institutions even before, but ever more since, the beginning of the war. Out in the streets of Kyiv, as in Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia and other Eastern European cities and in the institutions of power across the region, however, the liberals are outnumbered and outshouted by the dangerous monster they helped to produce.⁴ The rising far-right movements have garnered significant support, expressed in parliament and government representation. They conceal their volatile motivations behind promises of redistributive practices benefiting their respective chosen (white, nationally dominant ethnic) majorities. And we are, in anthropology, and academia, still pushed into fighting the battle between two tiny factions – the liberals and the Left. The former are significantly better positioned in access to secure positions and public platforms, but both are politically insignificant in their public impact beyond academia.

Ukraine has been given no choice but to fight. Who is next, and who will be there when they come for ‘us’, I wonder. Or when do we confess to ourselves, finally, that this ‘us’ is an illusion: that class struggle is ripe in our ranks and reconciliatory gestures like that of T. Snyder only stick a plaster on a pus-filled wound. Anthropology (and academia) will need to show stamina and commitment to provide a platform to amplify the voices of, and offer institutional stability to, those scholars in precarious positions who offer research-based discussion of the effects of economic dispossession and crises of social reproduction that dates from before the war, but that the war has escalated beyond proportion. We will either have to politicise our discipline to really act as a tool that can be used by those dispossessed by capitalism and its ongoing wars, or our discipline will have to die from its own historical irrelevance.