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Recent Posts
- More Exciting than a Thriller
- A Hundred Years Ago, someone kept his New Year’s Resolutions, but didn’t care about the Lives of Others – February 1921: Winston Churchill
- “The Impostor” by Javier Cercas
- Mauthausen
- A Postcard from Las Vegas
- A Postcard from Paris
- A Postcard from New York
- The Danger of Digits and Digitalization
- A Postcard from the Mount of Beatitudes
- A Hundred Years Ago, Ships still had Cats, and Planes did not only disappear in the Bermuda Triangle – January 1921: Carroll A. Deering
Category Archives: Ukraine
“Sovietistan” and “The Border” by Erika Fatland
Hier gibt es diese Rezension auf Deutsch. Do you also have so many travel guides at home for countries you never made it to? I still got a Lonely Planet guidebook for Central Asia, which I bought in 2007. Apparently, … Continue reading
Posted in Abkhazia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Books, China, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, North Korea, Norway, Poland, Ukraine
Tagged Finland, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, MacLehose, Mongolia, Pegasus, Soviet Union, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan
11 Comments
Remembrance with Kebab: Babi Yar
I don’t know what exactly I expected when I went to the site of the largest mass shooting in the Holocaust, but this I didn’t expect. Continue reading
Posted in Germany, History, Holocaust, Photography, Travel, Ukraine, World War II
Tagged Kyiv, Soviet Union
13 Comments
Wait, when was World War II again?
Zur deutschen Fassung dieses Artikels. A strange questions, it seems, especially coming from someone studying history. But the more you travel in the post-Soviet world, i.e. in the countries that became independent after the end of the Soviet Union, the … Continue reading
Posted in Abkhazia, History, Military, Photography, Russia, Ukraine, World War II
Tagged Soviet Union
14 Comments
Two Night Trains to the East
Zur deutschen Fassung dieses Artikels. I am calling them night trains on purpose, not sleeper trains, because when I booked the tickets, I couldn’t discern if there would be a bed, maybe even a shower, or with how many people … Continue reading
How Climate Change will end
Many big issues are at their heart debates between optimists and pessimists – with some pretentious self-declared realists thrown into the mix. This is also true about climate change. Will we develop carbon-neutral technologies? Or can we capture the carbon … Continue reading
Posted in Belarus, Economics, Technology, Ukraine
Tagged Chernobyl, climate change, Soviet Union
12 Comments
Now, Christmas is really over
Most readers of this blog probably live in the Western churches’ (both reformed and unreformed) as well as the Gregorian calendar’s sphere of influence, where the three magicians already put an end to Christmas two weeks ago. But here, in … Continue reading
Uman: Communism or Cheesy Story?
There is really no reason to visit Uman. It is a small city like hundreds of others in Ukraine. But because it lies halfway between Kyiv and Odessa, I decided to break the journey and to spend a day and … Continue reading
“East West Street” by Philippe Sands
As a lawyer and budding historian, I found Philippe Sands‘ idea of telling the story of international criminal law through the biographies of Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin interesting. But the book East West Street is overloaded with the irrelevant … Continue reading
Posted in Books, History, Holocaust, Human Rights, Law, Ukraine
Tagged international law, Nazis
1 Comment
Kyiv – Day 21/21 – Train Station
And the three weeks are over. Too bad. On the other hand, I like going to Kyiv’s main train station because it shows the way that train stations everywhere should aspire to: large, majestic, comfortable, open around the clock, and … Continue reading
Kyiv – Day 20/21
Yesterday was such a beautiful day that I went for a long walk. That long (and aimless), in fact, that I apparently walked far beyond the city limits of Kyiv. Because suddenly, it looked rather rural. And pretty. The whole … Continue reading
