Below is an articles reading list culled from various sources that has helped inform our Transform Defence project understanding of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. No particular order of preference
1. Questions to be asking: LSE Prof Lloyd Gruber
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2022/03/04/russias-war-with-ukraine-asking-the-right-questions/
2. Heartbreaking – why the disabled are shunned in the effort to escape the invasion
https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/the-disabled-ukrainians-doing-what-the-un-cant-or-wont/
3. IPCC report march 2022 Russian and Ukraine delegates together
In the closing session of the recent IPCC meeting, Svitlana Krakovska of the Ukrainian delegation stated: “We will not surrender in Ukraine, and we hope the world will not surrender in building a climate resilient future. Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots – fossil fuels – and our dependence on them.”
Krakovska expressed her sadness that after years of meticulous work by scientists around the world, the IPCC’s findings would now have to “compete for media space with war” This is probably the first time the links between war, fossil fuels and climate change have been made in an official IPCC meeting.
4. Anatole Lieven is Russian by heritage. January 2022
5. Africa-wide context by David McNair, One Campaign
6. Duncan Green senior strategist Oxfam /LSE- his reading list includes Lieven and Gruber and more
https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/what-to-read-on-ukraine/
7. Nuclear Risk
Even in the face of Putin’s strategic nuclear saber rattling and concerns about Russia’s use of tactical nuclear weapons, however, the arms control framework has held sufficiently firm to preserve strategic stability. U.S. nuclear commanders have criticized Putin’s moves but have not sought to match them. They do not see evidence that Putin has taken steps to escalate the situation, like placing non-strategic nuclear warheads on airplanes or ships or sending nuclear-armed submarines to sea.
So far, arms control has played its intended role of limiting the scope and violence in Ukraine, keeping a lid on a conflict that otherwise could become a world war.
8. The Far Right – a white jihad?
2014 Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/azov-far-right-fighters-ukraine-neo-nazis
2022 NY Times
Instability in Ukraine offers white supremacy extremists the same training opportunities that instability in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria has offered jihadist militants for years,” said Ali Soufan, who heads The Soufan Group, which has been documenting for several years how the conflict in eastern Ukraine has emerged as an international hub of white supremacy.
10. View from India
https://thewire.in/world/ten-theses-on-the-war-in-ukraine-and-the-challenge-for-india
11. Yasha Levine: A Russian Anti-War blog
https://yasha.substack.com/p/a-russian-antiwar-view-on-things?s=r
12. Henry Kissinger, Jeffrey Sachs, Stephen Cohen – the inciting incident as they describe it in Hollywood script-development
13. Adam Tooze: Troubled Birth of Ukraine
https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-96-brest-litovsk-imperial?s=r
14. David Adler: Why the global south isn’t taking sides
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/10/russia-ukraine-west-global-south-sanctions-war