From Nicolai Petro, 12/19/25

You may have heard that the EU Commission has imposed personal sanctions against Col. Jacques Baud, a former Swiss intelligence analyst. Baud has also served as Policy Chief for United Nations Peace Operations, where he led the first multidimensional UN intelligence unit in the Sudan. Within NATO he followed the 2014 Ukrainian crisis and was later asked to participate in programs to assist Ukraine.He is accused of “disruptive activities against the EU and the partner states” as a “mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda.” How one gets put on this list, and how one might be removed is not clear. Former President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Dr. Jur. Hans-Georg Maaßen, has provided an illuminating legal analysis (in German) of the troubling implications of this action: https://youtu.be/9PCVRBzJR90?si=qNm86arGiuki-G-4. 

Baud is currently under a travel ban, his bank accounts are frozen, and his property confiscated. No one is allowed to have business relations with him, including the publishers of his books.

Journalist Patrik Baab and several others intend to file a public appeal on his behalf. The draft text of this appeal is attached below. If you wish to add your name to the list, please contact him directly at: patrikbaab@posteo.de

Thank you very much for your time. 

Sincerely,

Nicolai Petro, Professor of Political Science, University of Rhode Island (USA)

By Volodymyr Ishchenko, Marta Havryshko, Tarik Cyril Amar, Milica Popović and Almut Rochowanski, New Global Politics, 12/10/25

The following is a response to the editors of the Review of Democracy (RevDem), the online journal of the Democracy Institute at the Central European University, who suspended an event that they agreed to host on December 11, 2025: “Men in the Vans, Women on the Streets: Gender, Resistance, and Forced Mobilization in Ukraine and Ex-Yugoslavia.” Its authors are the panelists who were scheduled to speak at the event.

This case illustrates how academic freedom and open debate are eroding in Western institutions, including those that publicly position themselves against authoritarian trends. Concerns about “balance” and “public responsibility” in discussions of the Russia–Ukraine war are applied in a highly selective way, effectively excluding scholars who are among the very few conducting empirical research and publishing on silenced and inconvenient topics. While calls for “balance” are rarely voiced when events reproduce dominant narratives about the war, they are used to delegitimize discussions that highlight phenomena—such as mass draft dodging and forced mobilization—that expose growing tensions between hegemonic discourse and social realities in Ukraine and sit uneasily with the current climate of European remilitarization. Invoking “responsibility” has, in practice, meant devaluing and silencing the lived experiences of large numbers of people suffering and resisting serious human rights abuses, whose perspectives the suspended panel was explicitly designed to bring into the conversation.

We are profoundly shocked and saddened by the statement issued by the Review of Democracy (RevDem) and the CEU Democracy Institute, which we consider an attack on our academic freedom and our academic and professional integrity. We feel compelled to respond to this deplatforming, which is nothing less than an act of political censorship.

Our panel was scheduled to address the phenomenon of “busification” (forced mobilization in Ukraine). We were to examine its relationship to gender and nationalism, as well as the resistance and civil society responses it has provoked. The panel also planned to place these issues in a comparative context, exploring forced mobilization in Ukraine alongside similar practices during the Yugoslav wars. The event was proposed and organized with the utmost care to ensure the rigor of academic debate and to reflect the urgency of the human rights abuses on the ground. We proposed the speakers and the topic to the RevDem team on November 15, responding to all questions about structure, specific themes, and format by late November. The event was subsequently announced on the evening of December 3 and shared on RevDem and Democracy Institute social media on the afternoon of December 4. As we were proceeding with preparations, on the evening of December 5 we received an email announcing the event’s suspension. We later discovered that the RevDem team and the Democracy Institute had simultaneously issued a public statement on the suspension.

The statement claimed that the decision followed “careful consideration of concerns raised by colleagues, faculty, and students across the university, particularly members of CEU’s Ukrainian community.” However, RevDem and the Democracy Institute did not ask us, the speakers and organizers of the panel, to comment on these concerns while making the decision, giving us no possibility to respond and leaving us entirely excluded from the process. Nevertheless, the statement on the suspension plainly declared that “the current format of the event does not meet the standards required for an academically balanced and contextually grounded discussion of this subject” and, moreover, that the event does not seem to be structured in ways “that uphold academic integrity, provide appropriate expertise, and acknowledge the lived experiences of those directly affected.”

In the private email we received about the cancellation, we were informed that “the issues raised included: the need for a clearer contextualization of forced mobilization within the ongoing full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine; questions about the appropriateness of comparisons with the Yugoslav conflicts; the absence of scholars who have conducted direct research on forced mobilization or on civil society responses in Ukraine, and worries that the current setup may not be able to sustain the kind of balanced, rigorous academic debate that the topic requires and CEU stands for.” Essentially, the suggestion was that our proposal was not grounded in scholarly rigor and appropriate expertise, nor sensitive to the wider impact it may have on communities directly affected by the war. The statement promised “thoughtful reassessment” of the “event’s format, scope, and potential future iteration”; however, it called into question our academic integrity and research expertise as well as the lived experiences of some of the speakers before any proper reassessment was conducted.

The panel was organized by scholars who have been conducting direct research on forced mobilization and/or on civil society responses in Ukraine, as well as in the former Yugoslavia. Weare among the few academics to have published on these topics.

Volodymyr Ishchenko has co-authored the essay “Why is Ukraine struggling to mobilize its citizens to fight?”, which is based, in particular, on recent empirical research, including interviews with Ukrainian volunteers and draft dodgers. This forms part of a large-scale cross-national research project he has been co-leading with the support of the Alameda Institute, which also included a representative survey commissioned this year in Ukraine exploring, among other questions, attitudes towards draft dodging.

Tarik Cyril Amar published the most comprehensive article to date focused on forced mobilization in Ukraine: “The Nation and Busification: Forced Mobilization in Wartime Ukraine,” published by the Institute for New Global Politics, a think tank founded by a network of  scholars at Stanford, UC-Berkeley, and elsewhere.

Marta Havryshko has published extensively on forced mobilization and gender specifically, including: “Mobilisation et résistance à la mobilization: le coût social de l’effort de guerre ukrainien” (Postface à l’édition française du “Le Massacre du Maidan – La tuerie de masse qui changea le monde” du prof. Ivan Katchanovski, à paraître en novembre 2025 aux éditions Perspectives Libres, Paris) ; “Müde vom Ukrainekrieg: Warum ukrainische Soldaten von der Front fliehen,” in Berliner Zeitung, October 26, 2025 ; “Der Krieg der Armen : Wie Klasse, Macht und Korruption den Krieg in der Ukraine prägen,” in Berliner Zeitung, June 9, 2025 ; and “Feinde im Inneren ? –‘Krieg’ gegen Rekrutierungsmaßnahmen in der Ukraine eskaliert,” in Berliner Zeitung, February 15, 2025.

Milica Popović is currently leading an extensive empirically-rooted project on desertion and forced mobilization during the Yugoslav wars at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Her project “The Silence of Saying No: (Un)Remembering Deserters from the Yugoslav Wars” has received funding from the FWF (Austrian Science Fund) based on international peer-review evaluation, and she has delivered several academic lectures on the topic.

Almut Rochowanski has decades-long experience supporting women’s civil society groups in Eastern Europe. She has worked on Ukraine and women, particularly women activists, since 2014, notably with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an international women’s peace organization founded in 1915, which has consistently worked on anti-militarism, including by defending conscientious objectors and deserters.

The above-mentioned publications are not yet in peer-reviewed journals precisely because careful empirical research of a new and silenced phenomenon requires time. It should be noted that academics routinely speak on issues on which they have not yet published peer-reviewed papers—as numerous events, panels, and podcasts at the Democracy Institute and CEU itself demonstrate.

We find the claimed “inappropriateness” of comparing the Russia-Ukraine and Yugoslav wars to be without serious grounds. We are aware of each other’s studies on forced mobilization in Ukraine and across ex-Yugoslav states: we find important convergences, and divergences, that help us see each case in comparative context. Furthermore, the Invisible University for Ukraine—one of CEU’s own projects—apparently finds such comparisons entirely appropriate, as it offers two courses: “Protests, Social Transformations and the EU: Rethinking the Balkans for Ukraine” (course co-directors: Marija Mandić, University of Belgrade, and Olesia Marković, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy); and “Facing the Legacy of the Yugoslav Wars” (course co-directors: Vladimir Petrović, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam and Miloš Hrnjaz, University of Belgrade).

We are scholars and practitioners with deep expertise on the proposed topic of discussion and a long record of books and articles on directly related aspects of Ukrainian and (post-)Yugoslav societies and histories, including wars, nationalism, gender, violence, protests, and civil society. We are fully competent to contextualize forced mobilization appropriately—that was precisely the goal of our discussion.

We are able to sustain the balanced and rigorous academic debate that any serious topic requires, and we have proven this through our academic work and its recognition—unless “contextualization” and “balancing” means that we should, in effect, justify and legitimize the large-scale and serious human rights abuse that forced conscription represents.

Further accusing us of a lack of sensibility “to the wider impact that it may have on communities directly affected by the war” is particularly insulting, given that two of the panelists are Ukrainian citizens (Marta Havryshko and Volodymyr Ishchenko); and one of the panelists lived through the Yugoslav wars (Milica Popović). Acknowledging the experience of our close relatives and friends who have become victims of forced mobilization, had to become deserters, or hid from mobilization for years was one of our primary motivations for initiating an academic discussion on this topic.

We believe that RevDem and the Democracy Institute’s handling of the situation with our panel was unprofessional and unethical. The public allegations made about our integrity, expertise, and experiences before conducting any proper review are unacceptable.

We also believe that the real reason for this cancellation is our public stance and political views—in particular, critical views on the Russia-Ukraine war and nationalism—as well as the lack of readiness by the RevDem and the Democracy Institute to address the inconvenient complexities of wars not suitable for the dominant political discourses in the current atmosphere of Europe-wide militarization. Such cancellation practices stand as a warning to the rapidly deteriorating conditions of academic freedom and freedom of scholarship, as well as freedom of speech in the European Union, even by institutions which otherwise claim to fight against such authoritarian tendencies.

Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist from Ukraine currently affiliated with the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, and author of Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War.

Marta Havryshko is Dr. Thomas Zand Visiting Assistant Professor in Holocaust Pedagogy and Antisemitism Studies, Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University.

Tarik Cyril Amar (@TarikCyrilAmar), is an historian from Germany currently at Koç University, Istanbul, and author of The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv. A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists.

Milica Popović is a political scientist, and currently, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Culture Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, where she leads her project,”The Silence of Saying No: (Un)Remembering Deserters from the Yugoslav Wars.” Her first monograph, The Last Pioneers: Deconstructing Yugonostalgia and (post-)Yugoslavism, will be published with Amsterdam University Press in 2026.

Almut Rochowanski has been an activist for women’s rights and peace in countries of the former Soviet Union and is currently a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Russia Matters, 12/19/25

EU leaders have abandoned a plan to fund Ukraine with €210 billion in frozen Russian assets, which the leaders of France, Germany and some other “Old Europe” countries have been pushing for months, thus failing what the New York Times described as an EU unity test. The decision not to tap the Kremlin’s frozen wealth is a big setback for Kyiv and its supporters in Europe, some of whom described this week as a “break or take” one, while advocating for the use of Russian assets. Instead of using these frozen assets, which European support[er]s have argued was essential for Ukraine to sustain its defense against Russia, the EU agreed to provide Kyiv with €90 billion ($101 billion), largely in loans, through 2027, financed by joint borrowing on capital markets backed by the EU budget.²The deal—without which Ukraine was likely to default as early as next spring—provides a critical two-year financial lifeline. However, in practical terms, that still leaves Kyiv needing around $50 billion per year in additional outside support simply to keep the state functioning, as well as to finance the procurement of drones, drone components and other military equipment. It is crucial to underscore that this is a loan, not a transfer of frozen Russian assets. As such, it adds to Ukraine’s already heavy debt burden rather than easing it, allowing the country to struggle on rather than stabilizing its finances. As reported above, the broader initiative Volodymyr Zelenskyy had been pressing—backed by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron, among others—to mobilize frozen Russian assets has, for now, failed. Opposition to using the frozen Russian funds in such a way has come from Belgium’s Bart De Wever, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Slovakia’s Robert Fico among others. In its preview of a vote by EU leaders this week on whether to use Russian funds for funding Ukraine, The New York Times wrote that this vote could “Unify the European Bloc — or Splinter It.”

Russia Matters (from Levada Center), 12/12/25

Finnish President Alexander Stubb claimed peace is closer for Ukraine now than at any time early 2022. “We’re quite close” to an agreement, Stubb said on Dec. 9. The Russian public seemed to share Stubb’s desire for peace. A Levada Center survey (November 2025) showed a record 65% now favor moving to peace talks (+4 points since October), while only 26% want to continue fighting (the lowest share on record).

By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter, 12/9/25

With Netflix’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount’s hostile offer for Warner Bros., a report from the Roosevelt Institute calls urgent attention to the way in which media consolidation and deregulation has impacted freedom of the press.

The Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, contends that the press clause in the First Amendment has all but disappeared. Instead, it is now widely accepted in government that the First Amendment defines the “freedom of private entities to operate without public accountability, rather than the right to know—citizens’ affirmative right to freely accessible, trustworthy, and democratically essential information.”

“The Political Economy of the US Media System” [PDF] was authored by Victor Pickard, a media professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Bilal Baydoun and Shahrzad Shams of the Roosevelt Institute, whose work for the Roosevelt Institute focuses on defending democracy.  

As the authors outline, “[T]he structure of our laissez-faire media system—touted as a bulwark against the tyranny of state-run media—has not protected against threats from the state. Both public and commercial media outlets today face serious threats from the Trump administration beyond regulatory action alone, as it has pursued lawsuits widely believed to be ideologically motivated against the BBC, CBS, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal and defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

“The administration has launched what amounts to a systematic campaign against press freedom, combining legal harassment, access restrictions, funding cuts, and rhetorical attacks to undermine independent journalism. While Trump himself has long delegitimized the press as ‘fake news,’ the current assault, backed by the power of the federal government and all the resources at its disposal, is an escalation that threatens the institutional foundations of American journalism.”

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The authors maintain that part of this escalation involves “rule by deal over rule of law,” where “commercial logics that animate our media system” subject media companies to “political jawboning, threats, and attacks.”

In 2004, media scholar and media reform advocate Robert McChesney declared, “Unique problems accompany constitutional protection of a free press.” He pointed out that these problems “tend to be shunted aside when the discussion is framed solely in terms of free speech.” That serves market capitalism, however, the report addresses how this is inconsistent with “both the intent of the framers and the history of the US press system.” 

The authors focus their attention on the U.S. Supreme Court. Justices have time and time again nested press rights under the speech clause or failed to even grapple with the state of press freedom.  

Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has “interpreted the Speech Clause not as a tool for empowering everyday people to speak their mind and enjoy access to a diversity of viewpoints, but as a vehicle for advancing deregulatory, corporate causes.”

A prime example is the lawsuit brought by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Co-filed by then-Representative J.D Vance, according to the Lever News emphasizes, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argues “party-coordinated contribution limits violate their free speech rights.”

“Precluding coordination by parties and their candidates undermines the availability and accuracy of electoral communication,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce declared. “In this way, free association, free expression, and free enterprise are deeply intertwined.”

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To the report’s authors, this represents a negative approach to the First Amendment that fails to fully protect press rights. This approach serves powerful corporate interests by declining to affirm any government obligation to enact policies that would “foster a speech environment or press system that supports a vibrant and inclusive democratic society.”

“In prioritizing the expressive rights of corporations over the informational rights of citizens, viewing the press as functionally the same as an individual speaker, the court has entrenched a deregulatory logic that structurally favors concentrated media power and commercial gatekeeping,” the report additionally states. 

This dynamic fuels pressure on media organizations and makes companies vulnerable to threats from FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who has weaponized regulatory action to suppress journalism and silence those who speak out against the Trump administration. 

It was the “neoliberal revolution” that by the 1980s led the FCC to allow “market forces” to effectively determine what was in the public interest. FCC Chair Mark Fowler referred to a television as nothing more than a “toaster with pictures” and “recast the media audience from citizens fulfilling the role of self-government to consumers of a good like any other.” All of which was backed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 brought about one of the most intense periods of media consolidation in the history of the telecommunications industry. That set the stage for the corporate libertarian policies promoted by Trump’s FCC.

But in the era of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the FCC actually had the “Mayflower rule” that “prohibited broadcasters from engaging in political or partisan editorializing.” There were “structural limits on ownership and contracts” that were aimed at ensuring the media played a constructive role in democracy. Media ownership rules weren’t a tool for extracting political favors, and the Supreme Court even upheld such public interest regulation in NBC v. United States in 1943.

Anti-communism hysteria combined with corporate libertarianism, as Congress and the FBI scrutinized members of the FCC. “The leading progressive at the FCC, Clifford Durr, effectively resigned from the agency in 1948 in protest over President Harry S. Truman’s loyalty oath order.”

The Mayflower rule was replaced in 1949 after political attacks. The new rule was known as the “Fairness Doctrine.” It was imperfect, yet much like public broadcasting in the United States it was relentlessly opposed by a right-wing conservative faction until Reagan eliminated it entirely.

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Trump proudly defunded public media, particularly the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR). It’s a predictable outcome, given how Republicans waged a decades-long culture war to discredit and curtail public service broadcasting.

As McChesney outlined in 1997, “[T]he attack on public service broadcasting is part and parcel of the current attack on all non-commercial, public service institutions and values.”

“Neoliberalism is not merely a set of economic principles; rather, it is implicitly a theory of democracy. And the democratic system that works best with a market-driven economy is one where there exists widespread public cynicism and depoliticization, and where the mainstream political parties barely debate the fundamental issues.”

“Or, as the Financial Times has put it, the best political system is one in which the capitalist control of society is ‘depoliticised,’” McChesney further asserted. 

Media oligarchs have wildly succeeded in expanding their dominance and power in a manner that threatens the stability of the press and media system. Just look at what private equity has done to destroy local journalism in communities throughout the country.

Already in 2025, media oligarchs Larry Ellison and David Ellison took control of Paramount Global when their company Skydance merged with Paramount. There should be some call from within the FCC against the Ellison family’s attempt to own even more of the media system, but the opposite is happening. (The Associated Press reported that “an investment firm run by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner” is pushing for the deal.)

The history and analysis laid out by the Roosevelt Institute is a worthwhile plea for a radical shift that enables “a truly democratic information ecosystem”—one where corporate capture of media is as alarming as the potential for state control to erode liberties.