Origins of the War

Last September, a new conservative movement made itself highly visible in Russia. Known as Russkaya obshchina, or Russian Community (RO), the group has engaged in anti-migrant vigilantism and enjoyed public support from parts of the Russian security apparatus.

In the center of Mariupol, at 28 Engels Street, one can find the opulent gaucherie of the RICH restaurant. It was built on the ground floor of a destroyed block of flats, a shiny pedestal on a gruesome grave.

Late autumn used to be the season for revolutions in Kyiv. Since last year, this has changed, and in July 2025 there was the first mass protest since martial law was instituted in 2022. It was dubbed “the cardboard Maidan,” though it was not on the Maidan, not on Kyiv’s Independence Square exactly, but on a square not far from.

Georgia’s politicians may be used to politics as a blood sport, but leaders and members of non-governmental organizations inhabit a different world. Many of them are volunteers and are paid little or nothing. And yet, despite mass arrests, police violence, and a series of laws restricting freedom of expression and assembly, civil society continues to function in Georgia.  

Aliaksandr Lukashenka has spent three decades in power, leaving some observers with the impression that he still has a real choice between Moscow and the West. Since 2020, that choice has grown far harder to sustain.

Arriving in Tbilisi in early March, I was looking forward to meeting friends and colleagues and to interviewing a number of Georgians. They could help me understand what I knew from several previous trips to Georgia was a rapidly deteriorating political situation. I had a long list of politicians, academics, journalists, and civil society advocates to speak with.   

Two directors — one a Kremlin loyalist, one a lone dissenter — bound to power in a decades-long drama. These two towering cultural figures seem to embody radically opposing responses to power.

It is hard to stay put during a war for several reasons. In wartime, even people with limited mobility, if they want to survive, are forced to become "mobile.”

Today, dissatisfaction with the war, frustration with the authorities, and a desire for peace are concentrated primarily in the regions, while Moscow now stands apart for its markedly more statist and militaristic attitudes.

New Drama began about a decade after the fall of Soviet Union. It used the stage to speak directly about social issues, which state-sponsored media in Russia would not cover. One of the movement’s main formal qualities of the movement was its reliance on docudrama.