From the Frontier to the Frontline: Colonial Imaginaries and the Steppes of Ukraine

• In Event: Thinking with the Steppes as an Environmental, Socio-Political, and Epistemic Space

Abstract

The steppes of Ukraine, covering the south and the east of the country, have often been narrated through colonial imaginaries of the frontier and the breadbasket, and most recently they have been at the very heart of the Russian neo-imperial invasion. The image of terra nullius occurs in these imaginaries through material and symbolic erasures of communities that had inhabited the steppes before the Russian imperial colonization, as well as the narrativization of the steppe as an empty land. Moreover, today the Russian military strives to materially inscribe the terra nullius imaginary onto the lands of the south and the east of Ukraine by devastating steppe communities and more-than-human socialities through occupation, shelling, flooding, poisoning, fires, and all forms of contamination, including landmines. In this paper, I focus on the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the steppes, such as the threat of extinction of multiple endemic species, while also linking the current destruction to longer histories of colonization and extraction of the south and east of Ukraine.

Author

• Darya Tsymbalyuk, U of Chicago