Embedded Files
Ukraine is at the centre of world events today, and understanding the country’s politics, history and culture has never been more important. The Ukraine Shelf is a podcast where Uilleam Blacker and I chat with leading authors, intellectuals, scholars and journalists about what we should be reading to understand Ukraine and its place in the world.
The podcast is hosted by the UCL Institute for European Studies and produced in collaboration with the Ukrainian Institute London and UCL SSEES, with support from the British Academy.
Episode 1: Crimea
Episode 1: Crimea
with Elmaz Asan and Rory Finnin
with Elmaz Asan and Rory Finnin
Russia’s aggression against Ukraine began not in 2022, but in 2014, with the invasion and occupation of Crimea. This episode explores Crimea’s significance as a strategically important nexus between east and west, between Europe, Russia and the Middle East, and as an integral part of Ukraine historically, politically and culturally. The focus of our discussion is Rory Finnin’s book Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (University of Toronto Press, 2022).
Episode 2: Identity and culture under attack
Episode 2: Identity and culture under attack
with Sasha Dovzhyk and Eugene Finkel
with Sasha Dovzhyk and Eugene Finkel
Russia has attempted to repress and destroy Ukrainian statehood and identity over two centuries. In this episode, we trace the historical roots of Russia’s current aggression to imperial myths from the early 19th century, and look at how these myths have resurfaced repeatedly over time. We explore the most recent wave of violence through the tragic story of Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian writer who was killed in a Russian missile attack in 2023. The books under discussion are Eugene Finkel’s Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two Hundred Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024) and Victoria Amelina’s Looking at Women Looking at War (Harper Collins, 2025).
Episode 3: Eastern Ukraine
Episode 3: Eastern Ukraine
with Olena Stiazhkina and Victoria Donovan
with Olena Stiazhkina and Victoria Donovan
In this episode, we explore the industrial regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. From 2014 until 2022, this was where Russia focused its war of aggression against Ukraine, killing and uprooting thousands of people. Russia claimed these regions were culturally and historically Russian, but history, and the people of these regions themselves, tell a different story: the majority consider themselves Ukrainian, and they overwhelmingly voted for Ukrainian independence in 1991. To get a better understanding of this region’s complex identities and its history as a resource-rich region on the edge of empire, we spoke to Professor Victoria Donovan of the University of St Andrews about her book Life in Spite of Everything (Daunt Books, 2025) and to historian and novelist Olena Stiazhkina about her novel Cecil the Lion Had to Die (Harvard, 2024).
Episode 4: writing war and trauma
Episode 4: writing war and trauma
with Yuliya Musakovska and Maria Tumarkin
with Yuliya Musakovska and Maria Tumarkin
How can we speak and write about war? What role does silence play in this process? What does it mean for people and places to survive war? We discussed these questions and more with two brilliant writers, Maria Tumarkin and Yuliya Musakovska, whose works have interrogated war and trauma in uncompromisingly honest and perceptive ways. This episode of The Ukraine Shelf was recorded in front of a live audience at Dim Zvuku in Lviv in collaboration with the INDEX Institute for Documentation and Exchange.
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