Surplus Produce

One important development in last night’s events around the illegal Azov prison for deserters and draft dodgers, which also served to extort ransoms and provoked a massive riot on Kiev’s outskirts, is the use of Azov paramilitaries to suppress the protesters. Researchers like @kooleksiy predicted long ago that they would be used against anti-conscription riots. This adds a new, characteristically fascist nuance to the events. Otherwise, the events manifest the same escalating dynamics of post-Soviet disintegration in Ukraine’s state and society, to which the maidan deficient revolutions greatly contributed and which the war did not resolve but only escalated. One amusing feature is the use of Russian by almost everyone involved: Budanov, the head of the presidential administration, police, soldiers, protesters from the neighborhood. In such situations, the veil of superficial Ukrainianization falls away and people return to the Russian-speaking norm of post-Soviet Kiev, in which Ukrainian was really expected only in official settings, some education, and narrow “civil society” contexts.