Section: Global Voices (The Netherlands)
Meet ‘VKgoeswild,’ Ukraine’s Classical Pianist-Turned Rocker
Source: YouTube. By the time she was in kindergarten, Viktoriya Yermolyeva’s parents knew she had a rare talent. Recognizing her perfect pitch and prodigious skill on the piano, they quickly enrolled her in a a special school to be trained as a classical pianist and signed her up for countless competitions and concerts. But over time, the...
Mapping the Smells of Kyiv
Image: Kate McLean On Christmas Day in Britain, people sat down with their families and friends to eat dinner, open gifts, and muster a little holiday spirit. Over the break, artist and designer Kate McLean traveled to Kyiv, planning some innocent sightseeing in Ukraine’s scenic capital. She didn’t know it at the time, but Kyiv would...
Website That Published ‘Yanukovych Blog’ Says It Was Fake
Source: Thierry Ehrmann, Flickr. Little more than two weeks after first appearing on the news website Korrespondent, a blog purportedly written by former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych has been deleted by the publication’s editors. Maxim Minin, the editor-in-chief of Korrespondent.net, told RuNet Echo in an e-mail that the...
Ukraine Bans Russia’s One Independent TV Station
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in Dozhd’s studios. Source: Kremlin.ru On Thursday, Ukraine’s National Council on Television and Radio Broadcasting voted unanimously to remove Russian independent TV station Dozhd from its list of approved foreign broadcasters, giving television providers one month to remove the station from...
How Russia’s Conservative Movement Broke Through Online
Pixabay We’ve come a long way since the days when Russian Internet users could be expected to fill their blogs with praise for democracy, freedom, and an end to the Putin regime in Russia. In the last few years, we witnessed a conservative renaissance on the RuNet, though it’s unclear where the community goes from here. Whatever...
American Hockey Through Ukrainian Eyes: ‘Like Interrupted Sex’
Photo: Andrew Ivakhov From time to time, we at Global Voices translate texts that appear on the Russian Internet, when writers capture something peculiar about the world, as seen by the denizens of the RuNet. Most of our content has to do with politics and social issues, but that’s not a rule, and today’s installment concerns the wild...
Russian Ambassador to Turkey’s Assassination: A Bullet from Aleppo?
Ankara panorama. Creative commons. The assassination December 19 of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey Andrei Karlov as captured in photographs from inside Ankara’s contemporary art museum had a haunting aesthetic. Turkish and Russian envoys will meet today to discuss Syria, day after killing of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey....
A Decades-Long ‘Conversation’ Between Yugoslav and Polish Rockers
The Gdańsk shipyard, a springboard for democratic changes in then-Communist Poland of the 1980s. A 2016 photo by Filip Stojanovski, CC BY. Even though cultural ties between countries that formed ex-Yugoslavia and Poland are not too frequent, there’s one form of communication that has been an exception. Over the last four decades, rock music...
Mixed Reactions to Kyiv’s New ‘Theater on Podil’
Source: Aleksandr Kozachenko, YouTube. On Tuesday, construction workers unveiled the new “Kyiv Dramatic Theater on Podil” on Andriyivskyy Descent, one of the oldest streets in the city. Onlookers greeted the reconstructed theater, which had been fallen into disrepair over the last two decades, with mixed reactions: some applauded and cheered the...
Internet Freedom Declines in Russia, Ukraine, Improves in Belarus
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. Source: Wikimedia Commons Freedom House’s annual “Freedom on the Net” report, released this month, paints a worrying picture of declining internet freedom in Russian-speaking parts of the world. Russia, Belarus and Central Asian states including Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were rated as “not free” in...
