̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Rory Finnin

̽��ֱ��Crimean Tatar who wants freedom for Ukraine to sing again

lw355 — Thu, 18 May 2023 08:30:09 +0000

Displaced journalist and scholar Elmaz Asan arrived in Cambridge from Ukraine in October 2022. She sees her research as a chance to fight back against the Russian invasion of her homeland, “to make a difference, no matter how small”.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� launches package of support for displaced Ukrainian students and academics

sb726 — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 05:53:31 +0000

Comprehensive new support package will help those who have been forced to leave Ukraine or are unable to return, as well as those who have remained.

Opinion: ̽��ֱ��West must beware the language of appeasement

fpjl2 — Thu, 28 Apr 2022 11:52:03 +0000

Words shape our world. We must see Russia's war on Ukraine for what it is and stop appeasing Putin with our words, write Dr Rory Finnin and Dr Thomas Grant.

Ukraine needs solidarity not ‘Crimnesia'

ta385 — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 08:00:00 +0000

Cambridge's associate professor of Ukrainian studies places the country's current crisis in historical and regional context, offering chilling warnings and surprising sources of hope from the aftermath of Stalin’s “Crimean atrocity”

Bringing Ukraine to the screen

sjr81 — Fri, 06 Nov 2015 10:16:14 +0000

Today and tomorrow (November 6/7), the Annual Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film once again offers UK audiences a unique opportunity to experience some of the best of Ukrainian cinema. Free and open to the public, the event is organised by Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, an academic centre in the Department of Slavonic Studies at Cambridge.

Since 2008 the Festival has premiered prize-winning new releases as well as provocative forgotten masterpieces; invigorated silent classics with live piano accompaniments; made world headlines with a documentary about Stalin’s man-made famine of 1932-33; and hosted contemporary Ukrainian filmmakers, film scholars, preservationists and musicians who have educated and engaged with well over a thousand attendees.

This year Cambridge Ukrainian Studies is partnering with the Docudays UA International Documentary Human Rights Film Festival to bring six powerful new documentaries to local audiences. DocuDays UA was launched in Kyiv in 2003 as a non-profit organisation dedicated to the development of documentary cinema and to the flourishing of democratic civil society in Ukraine.

Many of the films in the Festival programme confront the tumult of revolution and war in today’s Ukraine with an uncommon honesty, sensitivity and maturity. They avail the viewer of the perspectives of the volunteer doctor, the wounded veteran, the soldier preparing to leave home for war. Other films in the programme meditate upon the passing of generations in a Ukraine very far from today’s headlines: the village and countryside.

“We are very proud and very honoured to collaborate with DocuDays UA in this year’s Cambridge Film Festival of Ukrainian Film”, said Dr Rory Finnin, Head of the Department of Slavonic Studies and Director of the Cambridge Ukrainian Studies programme. “We share their passion for documentary cinema and their belief in its ability to foster an open dialogue about human rights and social justice in Ukraine and around the world.”

“For the Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film we have chosen both full-length and short documentaries produced during the last two years,” explained Darya Bassel, Docudays Programme Coordinator. “With these screenings we hope to bring Ukraine and its documentary scene closer to international audiences and to create space for a discussion of problems relevant not only for Ukraine but for the whole world.”

Admission to the Eighth Annual Cambridge Festival of Ukrainian Film on 6-7 November 2015 is free and open to the public, but online registration is required. ̽��ֱ��screenings of Maidan Is Everywhere; ̽��ֱ��Medic Leaves Last; Living Fire; Post Maidan; This Place We Call Home; and Twilight take place in the Winstanley Theatre of Trinity College, Cambridge. Wine receptions follow both the November 6 and 7 screenings.

Over the past eight years, the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has become Britain’s pre-eminent showcase for documentary and feature films from and about Ukraine.

Documentary cinema fosters an open dialogue about human rights and social justice in Ukraine and around the world.

Rory Finnin

Still image from the Ukrainian documentary 'Twilight'

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Don’t call it a civil war – Ukraine’s conflict is an act of Russian aggression

cjb250 — Mon, 24 Aug 2015 15:52:36 +0000

̽��ֱ��war in Ukraine, we are often told, is a “civil war” involving “rebels” fighting the central government in Kiev. Such restrictive, inaccurate terms greatly misrepresent the conflict, which has already killed over 6,500 and displaced at least 1.4m Ukrainians. Too often, the crisis is talked about as if it’s entirely internal to Ukraine, a domestic affair presumably brought on by language politics, identity clashes and historical grievances. Best, therefore, to leave it alone.

Wrong. Ukraine is waging a war of self-defence against an international aggressor – the Russian Federation – whose conduct threatens our collective security. This war is now 18 months old, and we should know better by now.

Face facts

It’s not as if the signs aren’t clear. Recent weeks have seen another intense spike in fighting in eastern Ukraine. Given all the prior sabre-rattling, nuclear threats and general rhetorical brinksmanship, it takes little imagination to see the conflict expanding beyond Ukraine’s borders into EU member states.

Labelling such a crisis a “civil war” serves no purpose of diplomacy or journalistic balance. It is a failure to serve the public interest. ̽��ֱ��war needs to be described as it really is.

Fundamentally, this conflict was started and is sustained by Russia’s armed intervention, not a Ukrainian civic collapse. In nearly a quarter century of independence, the Ukrainian public’s support for national unity has been stronger than in many long-established states, among them Spain, Belgium and Canada. As Vladimir Putin has since proudly admitted, it was Russian troops in the spring of 2014 who seized Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea.

̽��ֱ��Russian military presence has not gone away. In August 2015, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitors again encountered personnel in eastern Ukraine openly identifying as Russian regular military. These forces continue to lead, train, equip and fight alongside militants advancing Russian neo-imperial and ultra-nationalist ideologies against a government in Kiev espousing respect for democracy, transparency and the rule of law.

To tiptoe around the Kremlin’s armed intervention in Ukraine falls short of the basic standards of war reportage. And it’s absurd to call the Donetsk and Luhansk authorities “rebel” administrations when they would not have come into being and would not continue to function without Russian backing.

We do not talk about a Manchukuo “rebel” administration in 1930s China without mentioning that Japan had invaded it; scarcely anybody pays lip service to the myth of an organic, independent separatist movement in 1930s Manchuria. Nobody should credit Russia’s fiction about “rebel” administrations in today’s Ukraine.

Political art in Crimea: the caption reads ‘ours’. Reuters/Pavel Rebrov

Lest we forget, the purported “rebels” in eastern Ukraine agree. Here is Igor Girkin-Strelkov, a Russian national associated with Russian military intelligence who helped lead the “rebel” movement in eastern Ukraine, speaking only weeks ago: “You are making an idiot or fool of yourself if you think that [the Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples’ Republics] were formed by themselves.”

An important conclusion follows from these facts: the Russian Federation is an aggressor and should be characterised as such whenever we talk about areas of Ukraine that have fallen under the Kremlin’s effective military and political control.

There is no need to report aggression in inverted commas. Since early 2014, the Russian Federation has carried out a host of acts of aggression against Ukraine as defined in Article 3 of the UN General Assembly’s definition of aggression. Russia has invaded Ukrainian territory – Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk so far – and attacked Ukrainian forces without a shred of plausible legal justification; bombarded Ukrainian territory and killed Ukrainian citizens; and seized territory that belongs within the internationally recognised borders of Ukraine, declaring it part of Russia. These are nothing less than acts of aggression under international law.

Nor do the sham referenda in Crimea in March 2014 or in Donetsk and Luhansk in May 2014 offer any legal wiggle room, since these “Potemkin plebiscites” resulted directly from an invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation.

As far as the referendums go, the UN General Assembly, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and the President of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly all agree they were unlawful and illegitimate. To argue or imply that there has been an act of “self-determination” in any part of Ukraine that calls into question Ukraine’s sovereignty over its recognised territory contradicts the highest available organised expressions of international law.

If editors and journalists are substituting their own judgement of the situation, then they must explain why.

A spade’s a spade

Then there’s the matter of Ukraine’s right to self-defence, which of course is a right of all states. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is just about the only case where a UN member state has seized and in effect sliced off whole regions of another UN member state.

In its official statements the Kremlin goes further still, repeatedly calling into question the right of Ukraine to continue in its current form, invoking a so-called “New Russia” across vast, strategic tracts of the country, and even threatening nuclear action in the wider context of the conflict.

This is not garden-variety geopolitical grandstanding. When Iraq attacked Kuwait in 1990, it was universally condemned, and Kuwait’s right of self-defence was affirmed. There is no principled reason for responding to Russia’s aggression in eastern Ukraine with different rhetoric or a different description.

It’s time to face reality. ̽��ֱ��continued escalation of the war in Ukraine poses a serious challenge to international public order. Journalists have risked everything to report events from this war, and we need to stop watering down their reports with euphemism and understatement. We need to call this what it is: a war of self-defence against an international aggressor.

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

As Ukraine marks 24 years since its independence from the Soviet Union, it is embroiled in the most dangerous armed conflict in Europe – against the Russian Federation. ̽��ֱ��stakes are incredibly high, and yet the war is still being discussed in euphemisms, write Dr Rory Finnin (Department of Slavonic Studies) and Dr Thomas D Grant (Faculty of Law).

UNICEF Ukraine

Destroyed building, Slovyansk

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Past as Prelude: An International Conference on Polish-Ukrainian Relations

th288 — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 15:48:07 +0000

‘Past as Prelude: Polish-Ukrainian Relations for the Twenty-First Century’ is held in partnership with Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, an academic centre in the Department of Slavonic Studies.

̽��ֱ��conference will bring together scholars, politicians and public intellectuals from Poland, Ukraine and beyond.

It seeks to develop new directions for the complex relationship between Poland and Ukraine, which has become more important than ever in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine.

Speakers will include Michał Boni, Norman Davies, Ola Hnatiuk, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Paweł Kowal, Serhii Plokhii, Mykola Riabchuk, Sławomir Sierakowski, Frank Sysyn, and Karolina Wigura, among others.

̽��ֱ��conference is free and open to the public, but online registration is required at www.PolandUkraineconference.org

̽��ֱ��history shared by Poland and Ukraine has seen devastating wars as well as the ethnic cleansing and mass deportations of civilian populations.

It has also witnessed many productive periods of cooperation and solidarity.

In fact, over the course of recent decades, Poland and Ukraine have developed a constructive relationship that may stand as one of the most remarkable political and social achievements of European diplomatic history.

̽��ֱ��future of this relationship is still bound up with difficult discussions of the past. ̽��ֱ��conference ‘Past as Prelude’ is intended to enrich these discussions and to propose new paradigms for the future.

̽��ֱ��event will be open to the broader public through roundtable panels that will be livestreamed around the globe. It will also interact with audiences on Twitter via the hashtag #PolandUkraineConference.

‘By engaging eminent thinkers from Poland and Ukraine in dialogue,’ said Dr Stanley Bill, Lecturer in Polish Studies, ‘we hope to cultivate an open exchange of ideas that will yield fresh pathways for the positive development of Polish-Ukrainian relations in circumstances of increasing regional instability.’

̽��ֱ��conference marks another productive collaboration between Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, a permanent programme in the Department of Slavonic Studies since 2010, and Cambridge Polish Studies, a pilot initiative launched in the Slavonic Department in September 2014.

Dr Rory Finnin, Head of the Department of Slavonic Studies, said: ‘Our new programme in Polish Studies is quickly becoming the most dynamic initiative of its kind in Europe. It is not only cultivating new ground in the study of Poland but also engendering fresh comparative research into the cultures and societies of Eastern Europe, which is a critical objective for the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.’

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Polish Studies initiative – which is sponsored by the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP), the M. B. Grabowski Fund, Trinity College’s Zdanowich Fund, and the School of Arts and Humanities – combines undergraduate education in Polish literature and language with a rich cycle of special events, including guest speakers, public debates, film screenings, and academic conferences.

̽��ֱ��initiative aims to make Cambridge a key centre for the study of Poland in the UK and beyond.

̽��ֱ��Embassy of the Republic of Poland in London, ̽��ֱ��Oxford Noble Foundation, and ̽��ֱ��Polish Cultural Institute in London have partnered with Cambridge Polish Studies and the Department of Slavonic Studies to make the ‘Past as Prelude’ conference possible.

On June 30 and 1 July 2015, the new Polish Studies programme at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge will host an international conference on the future of Polish-Ukrainian relations at Sidney Sussex College.

Our new programme in Polish Studies is quickly becoming the most dynamic initiative of its kind in Europe.

Dr Rory Finnin

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̽��ֱ��Crimean Tatar Sürgün: Past and Present

fpjl2 — Tue, 20 May 2014 11:11:19 +0000

On 18 May 1944 a young Crimean Tatar poet named Idris Asanin began a torturous journey to Central Asia at the gunpoint of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD. Along with hundreds of thousands of other Crimean Tatars, a Turkic-speaking Sunni Muslim people indigenous to Crimea, Asanin’s family endured an ordeal of mass death and brutal dispossession that claimed the lives of at least thirty percent of the entire population, mainly women, children and the elderly. Thirty percent – that is thirty times the percentage of the British population killed in the Second World War.

̽��ֱ��deportation is known as Sürgün ( ̽��ֱ��Exile) in the Crimean Tatar language. Asanin’s mother and father did not survive it. In Soviet Uzbekistan, where he was forced into a ‘special settlement camp’, the young poet channelled his grief into verse. ‘Menim antım’ (My Pledge, 1944), one of the first literary works in the Crimean Tatar language to confront the deportation, is a defiant scream into darkness. Its stanzas – which would be later cited by Soviet authorities in a trial that sentenced Asanin to twenty-five years in prison – are a catalogue of abuse and alienation: Crimean Tatar funerals are mocked by onlookers, their sacred prayers are interrupted, their dead are forgotten. His lyrical persona cries out and asks, ‘How can I bear it all without succumbing to rage?’

This week, as we mark seventy years since the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, Asanin’s question resounds with a tragic new relevance. After struggling for generations to return to and resettle on the Black Sea peninsula, the Crimean Tatars are now under new threat from ‘local authorities’ under the nominal jurisdiction of the Russian Federation, which illegally occupied and annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March. Many have fled to mainland Ukraine since the annexation, becoming the largest community of IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) in the country. And only days ago, the Crimean Tatars were even forbidden by decree to gather in public and commemorate the deportation and its victims.

On 18 May 2014, they had to break the law to mourn and honour their dead.

̽��ֱ��Crimean Tatars defied the prohibition without – somehow – succumbing to rage. Disavowing religious and political extremism, they have engaged for decades in a committed practice of non-violent resistance against state injustice and oppression. In the late 1980s they prevailed over the Soviet system and won the right to return to Crimea. (In the post-Soviet period, this return from exile was financed by the Ukrainian state. In 1999 alone, for instance, Kyiv allocated twenty million hryven – approximately five million US dollars – to fund Crimean Tatar resettlement programs and attendant infrastructure projects.) Today’s prohibitions and provocations are nothing the Crimean Tatars cannot overcome.

But the resilient dignity of the Crimean Tatar people should not exempt us from outrage. In Britain our public understanding of the present war between Russia and Ukraine – and make no mistake, it is a war – has been clouded by a relentless Kremlin propaganda campaign and by Western media ignorance of a complex ‘theatre’ of conflict. A casual observer seeking to make sense of the diplomatic recriminations, ubiquitous balaclavas, and proxy violence at this point may be tempted to throw her hands up in exasperation and confusion. To navigate between rhetoric and reality and understand what is generally happening along the eastern border of the EU, simply look to the case of the Crimean Tatars since the Russian annexation.

̽��ֱ��reality is that Crimean Tatar civil society and identity are under cruel assault, while the rhetoric from the Kremlin would have us believe otherwise. Only days ago, on Friday 16 May, Vladimir Putin sat down with selected Crimean Tatars in Sochi to mark the anniversary of the ‘inhuman’ (beschelovechnaia) deportation, announcing that the new ‘local authorities [in Crimea] are ready to work’ with them. At that very moment, these ‘local authorities’ in Crimea did exactly the opposite. Sergei Aksenov, the new ‘head’ of the Crimean government known as ‘Goblin’ in the criminal underworld, outlawed all public demonstrations in the entire territory of Crimea until 6 June. ̽��ֱ��purported reason was fear of potential ‘provocations’ from ‘extremists’ tied to the violence in ‘Ukraine’s south-east’. Keep in mind that the interim Ukrainian government in Kyiv – which has actual cause to fear mass gatherings at the moment – has issued no such kind of blanket prohibition on public assembly. In fact, over the weekend of 17-18 May, the Ukrainian capital and other Ukrainian cities were host to a series of solemn public events commemorating the seventy years since the Crimean Tatar Sürgün.

̽��ֱ��real reason for Aksenov’s decree was fear of the content, form and number of the commemorative events being organized by the Crimean Tatar community in Simferopol, Bakhchisarai and beyond. These demonstrations were a powerful refutation of the neo-Soviet pageantry resurgent in Crimea and the Russian Federation. They recalled the atrocities of Stalinism and restored many of the names, faces and stories of its victims. ̽��ֱ��demonstrations also sounded a note of Ukrainian national pride and gave lie to the ‘Potemkin referendum’ that hastily preceded the March annexation. There is a saying: naibilshymy ukraintsiamy v Krymu ie krymski tatary. ‘ ̽��ֱ��greatest Ukrainians in Crimea are the Crimean Tatars.’ ̽��ֱ��vast majority of Crimean Tatars, who comprise more than 12% of the population, recognise Crimea as a part of independent, sovereign Ukraine. They identify overwhelmingly with the Ukrainian national project. And on Sunday, 18 May they made ubiquitous the national flag, the kök bayraq, which evokes the Ukrainian yellow and blue.

On this day in Bakhchisarai, the ancient capital of the Crimean Tatar khanate, two Russian military helicopters flew directly over the crowds of Crimean Tatars who defied the protest ban. Among the assembled, many of whom were schoolchildren, there was an initial moment of quiet terror as the first aircraft passed overhead. ̽��ֱ��sound was deafening. Those speaking via microphones to the crowds could not be heard. But then the crowds shouted in unison at the skies: ‘Qırım Vatan Millet!’ ‘Crimea, Motherland, Nation!’

Undaunted in the face of such intimidation, they also chanted ‘Mustafa! Mustafa!’ They were calling for the man who has prominently represented them for many decades, the seventy year-old Mustafa Dzhemiliev (Mustafa Cemiloğlu, aka Mustafa Abdülcemil Qırımoğlu). He was in Kyiv on this solemn day, and not by choice. Dzhemiliev is presently not allowed to set foot in Crimea. ̽��ֱ��Kremlin’s ‘authorities’ are in effect subjecting him to a new exile.

Although physically diminutive, Dzhemiliev is a giant. As a child, he survived the deportation; as a young man, he survived the Gulag, enduring a 303-day hunger strike in the mid-1970s that garnered headlines around the world. In 1989 he made an emotional return to the ancestral homeland that he fought his entire life to see.

To separate this man from his home today is an extreme injustice, yet it is Dzhemiliev and his compatriots who must fend off accusations of ‘extremism’. On 3 May, when Dzhemiliev attempted to cross at Armiansk from mainland Ukraine into Crimea, many hundreds of Crimean Tatars pushed past Russian troops to meet him. ̽��ֱ��new Prosecutor-General of Crimea characterized this abortive encounter at the border as an ‘extremist action’ and threatened to dissolve the Crimean Tatar parliament, the Mejlis, in recompense. ̽��ֱ��Kremlin’s ‘local authorities’ then made a more targeted threat against Dzhemiliev as well: last week his residence was among a number of Crimean Tatar houses searched by the Russian Security Service (FSB) for evidence of ‘terrorism’. ̽��ֱ��incident led to the hospitalization of his wife, Safinar Dzhemilieva.

In war, wrote Carl von Clausewitz, ‘all action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight.’ Information is elusive and unreliable, suspended between recessive daylight and an encroaching darkness of ignorance, confusion and deception. In Crimea, this darkness has lifted; in Donbas, it has grown. What we now see is that the Kremlin’s presumed gains on the Black Sea peninsula have already meant very real losses for the long-suffering indigenous people of the Black Sea peninsula. Seventy years after Sürgün, the question returns: how to bear it all?

In this article, originally published on the CRASSH website, Dr Rory Finnin - ̽��ֱ�� Lecturer and Director of the Cambridge Ukrainian Studies programme - addresses the banning by Russia of the public commemoration of the deportation of the Tatars in illegally annexed Crimea.

̽��ֱ��vast majority of Crimean Tatars, who comprise more than 12% of the population, recognise Crimea as a part of independent, sovereign Ukraine. They identify overwhelmingly with the Ukrainian national project

Rory Finnin

Jordi Bernabeu Farrús

A woman walks along a railway crossing near Ukrainian tanks on freight cars before their departure from Crimea -- now annexed by Russia -- to other regions of Ukraine in the settlement of Gvardeiskoye near the Crimean city of Simferopol

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