In this edition of the Gagarin podcast, we talk with Per Nyholm, a seasoned journalist whose multiple visits to Ukraine’s front line provide stark, first-hand insights, critical of Trump’s bullish intervention. The Danish reporter also holds strong views on the US President’s land-grabbing plans for Greenland.
How has Ukraine’s position shifted over the last three years since Russia’s full-scale invasion? What will change now that the new US administration is intervening, blaming Ukraine for the escalation of war? And how seriously should we take Trump’s bid to buy or invade Greenland?
81-year-old reporter Per Nyholm, who writes for leading Danish newspaper Jylland-Posten, once covered the collapse of communism in East and Central Europe, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Prague and the Christmas uprising in Bucharest in 1989, as well as the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the years that followed. Now he visits the Ukrainian front line regularly – once a war reporter, always a war reporter.
Published 19 February 2025
Original in English
First published by Eurozine
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Ex-USSR youth pioneer camps – once heavily supervised yet remembered surprisingly positively – have become sites of trauma, where Ukrainian children are being deported en masse, incarcerated and re-educated. The complex legacy that Russia is exploiting encompasses infrastructure, ideology and personal memory, raising questions about the role of individuals in implementing state policy.
Cultural humanitarian aid risks diminishing the complexity of creative work to ethnic kitsch: well-meaning initiatives rate nationality over content. And when the work does receive critical attention, only art that portrays trauma cuts it. Soon thereafter, Western interest fades. Could answers for meaningfully decolonizing Ukraine lie with other formerly colonized communities?
