@ymatusik
Journalist writing about politics, culture, migration and society in Central Asia and Eurasia more broadly | PhD candidate in Anthropology at CUNY GC | en-ru-fr-de | кыргызча сүйлөйм Words in @economist.com, @foreignpolicy.com, @eurasianet.bsky.social
Back to the USSR: Demand for pagers, walkie-talkies, and paper maps has surged in Moscow due to constant problems with mobile communications.
● Report by Kremlin friendky newspaper RBC, citing data from the press services of Wildberries and Russ (RWB).
good to finally see the faces of the imbeciles who destroyed American research funding, including my own PhD research grant (yes this is personal)
Sloviansk, a city just 13km from the front line, is a scene of daily Russian terror. Yet finding a rental apartment can take weeks. We explain why
Kind of incredible that Putin's former MFA interpreter is now a Senior Advisor to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and attended a Needs Assessment Mission to Hungary ahead of their parliamentary elections.
Although, maybe I shouldn't be so surprised
www.falter.at/zeitung/2026...
One thing I've learnt about conflict investigation in this age of open source evidence is you always see the same lies, just dressed in different uniforms. "It can't be my side that blew up the mosque/hospital/school it's a false flag/errant munition from the other side" with scant evidence produced
Kurdish residents of northeast Syria warned Iran's Kurds against aligning with the U.S. to fight the Iranian government, citing their own experience in Syria in recent months as evidence their Iranian counterparts would be "abandoned." -- Reuters
reut.rs/4d9KwWk
boy in retrospect, really shouldn’t have elected the worst person in the entire country president. that, it appears, was less than wise
Great piece from Peter Leonard on the incessant rumors surrounding Kazakhstan's Kassym-Jomart Tokayev alleged plan to become UN Secretary-General
havli.substack.com/p/the-politi...
I'm out of words here
Reminder that much of this would not be happening if cowardly/greedy states and institutions had frozen or seized the assets of a few key people several years ago.
For anyone based in Vienna, the Dialogbüro is organizing a wonderful animation workshop with the incredibly talented Ukrainian animation director Polina Poddubni. Her latest film "My grandmother is a skydiver" premiered at Cannes last year.
Sign up here:
dialogbuero-vienna.at/tpost/animat...
I think there’s a desire to paint Israelis as irredeemably and ontologically evil. It’s easier to think of them as monsters than human beings. Hearing more and more of it, even from those who should know that a system of oppression cannot be reduced to a people
Ron Arad’s widow calls for an end to operations risking IDF soldiers in search for his remains
www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_ent...
This is a fucking travesty.
“In just three days of fighting in the Middle East, more than 800 Patriot missiles were used — more than Ukraine has received throughout the entire Russian full-scale invasion.”
(A year’s worth of production or more, btw)
kyivindependent.com/over-800-pat...
Btw, the constitutional right to public protest has been suspended since the pandemic in Kyrgyzstan—and there are no signs of any changes to that policy
I attended the 2023 and 2024 women’s marches in Bishkek—and they were always peaceful and really well attended. It was the only officially sanctioned feminist demonstration of its kind in all of Central Asia.
City authorities have not granted permission for this year’s Women’s March to take place in Bishkek. It was the one public protest that had always been permitted in Kyrgyzstan albeit under quite a bit of surveillance in recent years
"We must be willing to criticize Israel as though antisemitism does not exist, and we must be willing to name and fight antisemitism as though the state of Israel does not exist." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Why is Iron Fist capitalized? So far we’ve got: Roaring Lion, Epic Fury, True Promise IV and now Azerbaijan’s Iron Fist?
I hate all of it, I hate it so much
The ripple effects of war in the Middle East have been almost instantaneous: the municipal car-sharing program in Leipzig just sent an email warning of price increases
Could all that "New Kazakhstan" rhetoric have just been *gasp* a smokescreen? Looks like the good old Nazarbayev days to me.
Sure, a random resident of Shymkent has a ready-made speech on the new constitution's benefits to science, education, and digital rights. Totally believable and natural.
With the upcoming constitutional referendum, Kazakh state media has reverted to the most blatant and unpolished kind of propaganda. Take a look at this supposed "vox pop" and tell me it's not staged. They're really not trying very hard.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuKK...
After initially playing a careful game of ambiguity on Ukraine, Kazakh authorities have in recent months started to more closely cooperate with Russian security services. We're seeing extraditions and arrests of Russians exiled in Kazakhstan––something Kazakhstan had largely refrained from doing
Lukpan Akhmediyarov, a popular independent Kazakh journalist, was briefly detained and questioned, along with his crew, in Astana after returning from a reporting trip to Ukraine.
Fits into a pattern of increasing pressure within Kazakhstan on anybody openly supporting Ukraine
t.me/Zanamiviehal...
Russia's Federal Antimonopoly Service has declared that advertisements in Telegram and Youtube in Russia are essentially illegal as RosKomNadzor is limiting access to them. This will kill the revenue of most Russian content creators and telegram channels.
World Cup in a few months, co-hosted by a country bombing an enemy whose key aim is to cause it vast economic damage. Hope someone’s doing a risk assessment on that.
Luis Suarez (left of Trump) - now is the moment you choose to stop biting people?
The reason the category of settler colonialism is so vital to the Palestine/Israel discussion is that you simply cannot understand contemporary Israeli policies without it, e.g. in West Bank. Otherwise people resort to talking about the problem as one of "fanatics" - and that's just unconvincing.
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