Stories and ideas

At the age of 36, Vladimir Miketa retains few memories of the war and his past. However, what bothers him most is people’s attitude towards the environment in his area and how authorities manage waste in the region. As a passionate mountaineer and nature lover, he often explores the surrounding area during his hikes. It was during one of these excursions that he discovered a road leading to the village of Lončari.

Before the war in Croatia between 1991 and 1995, the small village of Lončari, situated in the central part of the country and belonging to Zadar County, was home to approximately 120 people, primarily of Serbian nationality. After they fled in 1995 following the military operation “Storm”, during which the Croatian army liberated a significant portion of territory previously under the control of Serbian rebels, the homes inhabited by Serbians remained abandoned for years. Many of these homes were used as stables by local residents, who kept goats and sheep in them.

Bosnia and Herzegovina's ambition to join the European Union faces a complex reality despite optimistic declarations from Brussels. The author and political scientist Jasmin Mujanović believes that the deeply entrenched ethnic and political divisions within Bosnia and Herzegovina are too often overlooked by the West. His latest book The Bosniaks: Nationhood after Genocide, gives greater insight into this complex history.

Bosnia and Herzegovina is keen to join the European Union. In Brussels the feeling is mutual. “Your place is in our European family,” said EU Council President Charles Michel on Twitter/X late last March. The post was much ado about nothing, though, warns Jasmin Mujanović. “Banal sloganeering about EU membership is completely divorced from the political realities of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” the political scientist writes in The Bosniaks: Nationhood After Genocide.

According to data from 2020, about 225,000 people live in the territory of Abkhazia. Of these, 47,000 are ethnic Georgians and most of them, about 45,000, live in the Gali region. Yet, as of today, no Georgian-language school is functioning in occupied Abkhazia.

Since the beginning of the past school year, teaching in Georgian in Georgian-language schools in Gali (in occupied Abkhazia) has been stopped, and education will now be conducted in Russian. Seventeen-year-old Natia K. is an 11th grade student of one of the schools in the low-lying area of Gali. Since September 1st, she has been taught Georgian as a foreign language at school.

The war in Abkhazia began in August 1992 and lasted for 13 months. By the end of the war, Georgia had 300,000 internally displaced people. Today, Abkhazia is recognized as occupied and the Russian occupation army is stationed there. The people living on both sides of the de facto dividing line are friends and relatives, but now they cannot meet or rarely manage to see each other, as Eliso Shamatava explains through her experiences.

“Eighty-five families live in the village of Khurcha. At least one person from almost each household has emigrated. My son is also gone. He took a gap year at the university and left to work in Poland. We, women living along the dividing line, work. But when we want to sell produce at the Zugdidi market, we are not allowed to take it with us on the municipal bus. We have to hire a taxi. This is how we live here,” says 52-year-old Eliso Shamatava from Khurcha in Georgia, who tells us about the specifics of living along the administrative boundary line.

Two recent disappeared person cases in North Macedonia could not have looked more different at first glance. However, further investigations have brought to light connections to an obscure pro-Russian network in the country. Such a shocking turn of events only further shows Moscow’s influence during a time of heightened uncertainty across the region.

North Macedonia, a nation with a rich history and vibrant culture, has, unfortunately, experienced its fair share of distressing incidents, including public shootings, criminal clashes, and cases of femicide over the years. But rarely has Macedonian society been so shaken to its very core as after the double murder of Vanja Gjorchevska, a 14-year-old teenager from Skopje, and Pance Zhezhovski, a 74-year-old retired barber from the town of Veles. What makes this crime particularly horrifying is the unprecedented cruelty inflicted upon a minor and an elderly citizen.

The second winter of Russia’s war against Ukraine is much harsher than the last, with temperatures sometimes nearing minus 20 degrees centigrade. Yet, the low temperatures do not change the intensity of the combat. The Russians waited for the deep cold and the ground to solidify to launch new offensives, including in Avdiivka, where volunteer combat medics attempt to evacuate and save the lives of wounded Ukrainian soldiers.

In Donetsk Oblast, the purplish-blue flashing lights of an armoured 4x4 turned ambulance tear through the thickness of the night. On the battered asphalt, fires sketch reddish stains. Fog covers the ground, and Oleh Kyrsa, 32, the ambulance driver, presses on the accelerator. The night is calm and the vehicle, noiselessly, makes its way up the M030 road connecting the Bakhmut sector to the city of Sloviansk. Earlier in the day, Ukrainian forces had stopped a new Russian assault. "It's just another day," Oleh smiles, without taking his eyes off the road.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, around a million Russians left the country and moved abroad, fearing mobilization or in protest against the war. While most of the new exiles are involved in different types of political or social activism, a small minority has decided to take up arms against their own people. They have organized into battalions fighting on the side of Ukraine.

In mid-March this year, Russians in the Belgorod and Kursk regions took to the polls to vote for their president to the tune of shots and explosions. Just days before the election, the two regions bordering Ukraine fell under relentless attack from Ukraine-based Russian military units. This was the third time that Russian citizens fighting under the command of GUR – Ukraine’s military intelligence unit – had made an incursion into their homeland following the Bryansk and Belgorod raids in March and May last year, respectively.

Today, all of Ukraine’s communities are fighting to protect the country from Russian aggression. This includes the Roma, an ethnic group that faces particular challenges in relation to their place in society. The integration of Roma, both now and after the end of the war, will be a key test regarding the success of a new Ukraine.

Ukraine is home to more than 100 national minorities and communities. Members of these communities are victims of Russia’s full-scale aggression just as much as the members of the majority population. The communities in Ukraine also participate in defending Ukraine against the Russian aggressors. Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Hungarians, Roma, Koreans, Romanians, Moldavians, and individuals from various other communities are fighting on the frontline. They often stand together with Jews and Muslims, who are defending the country alongside their Christian and Atheist neighbours.

: The collapse of the Soviet Union meant more than just the fall of a government. For many, it also brought about the end of a way of life. This includes the artist Murivat Beknazarov, who through his work fought to defend the memories of Soviet Tajikistan’s unique cultural life.

When I went to meet Murivat Beknazarov in his studio in Dushanbe for the first time, on a warm autumn day in 2018, he explained to me the location by phone. Since street names are rarely known due to frequent renaming, he told me to find the so-called “artists’ house” in the north of the city. “Just ask around, everyone knows this place,” he said. That was probably the case in Soviet times, but not anymore. As it turned out, no one knew where this place was, not even people living in neighbouring buildings.

Serbian film director Vladimir Perišić seems perfectly content belonging to a tradition of cinema that operates outside of the mainstream. There are no big budgets or huge audiences. But he is okay with that and can still find a cult audience across Europe that appreciates his work. “I like to work with small crews and non-actors and being in this marginal position allows me to have this artistic freedom,” he admits.

Vladimir Perišić is not intentionally trying to sound like Vladimir Putin. But the Serbian director is deadly serious when he says that “the break-up of Yugoslavia was a huge historical mistake.” He claims the six ex-Yugoslav republics – Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia (including the regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina) – are today “all obsessed with their national histories, most of which are a total fantasy”.

Ukraine has the second-largest HIV epidemic in Europe after Russia. Those refugees who fled the full-scale invasion to Poland with HIV have been forced to seek treatment and adjust to different approaches to the disease. In the end, the experience can provide lessons on how to better help those afflicted with the disease.

When Anna Aryabinska fled from Kyiv in March 2022 with her ex-partner’s children, she had little idea that she would end up supporting not only his family, but many HIV-positive Ukrainians in Poland. Until Russia’s full-scale invasion, Aryabinska had been an activist for the Ukrainian organisation Positive Women, supporting women with HIV. Now she is one of a group of volunteers assisting fellow Ukrainian refugees to keep taking medication for HIV, as well as integrate into healthcare systems in European countries which have very different epidemic profiles and standards of treatment.