Welcome to my page!

Thank you for visiting this site!

Here I report on recent events and keep materials that I find important to share with you!

Announcements:

• It was an honor and a pleasure to visit the University of Pittsburgh for two public events that brought together philosophy, international affairs, and the dilemmas of our present moment.
  • On April 17, I delivered the lecture “Philosophy in the USSR and Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine, 1950–2010” at the Cathedral of Learning, hosted by the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies and partner units.
  • On April 16, I also spoke on the panel “When the World Must Act: Why Multilateralism Matters in Preventing Genocide,” where we examined why global commitments to prevent mass atrocities so often fail and what this reveals about the condition of multilateralism today.
• Happy to inform that my article “The Absent Sovereign and the Invisible Foundation: Political Liberalism’s Aporias in Theorizing Constituent Power” was published in the Philosophy and Social Criticism Journal.
• I am deeply grateful to Prof. Mark Stenberg for his deep and thick reading of “Post-Soviet Human” in the Studies of East European Thought.

News:

Recent academic reports and publications:

• We’re pleased to announce Issue 28(2) of Ideology and Politics Journal: “Colonialism, Anticolonialism, and Decolonization: Theory, History, and Contemporary Practices,” guest-edited by Denys Kiryukhin and Per Anders Rudling. This special issue examines the fourth wave of decolonization as it unfolds from a regional concern into a transformative global force reshaping politics, culture, and knowledge production. In this issue two my texts are published:
  • research article: “Theoretical Reproduction in Shadows of Dual Coloniality: Decolonial Theory in Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia“, Ideology and Politics Journal 28(2): 23–48.
  • review essay: “Truth, Meontology, and Democracy. A Polemical Engagement with Arvydas Grišinas’s The Western Crisis of Truth in the Early 21st Century“, Ideology and Politics Journal 28(2): 158–167.
• A roundtable discussion of Post-Soviet Man and His Time with historians Sergei Erlikh and Yurii Latysh, philosopher Andrei Baumeister, and political scientist Vasilii Zharkov—convened by Istoricheskaya Expertiza—is now available for viewing.
• Andrei Baumeister and I discuss the merits and blind spots of PhiloMag’s recent ranking of the ten most important living philosophers, probing what such lists reveal about contemporary philosophy’s self-understanding—a conversation now available in video form.
• The second part of my study (in German) of how German Classical Philosophy was studied in late Soviet Union and post-Soviet Belarus, Russia and Ukraine was published in the FORUM für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte. 
• It was a pleasure to cooperate with Dmytro Vovk on our report on Ukraine’s constitutional porcess in 2024 that led ot the following publication: Minakov, M., & Vovk, D. (2025). Ukraine: Constitutional Amendments in 2024”. In: Barroso, Luis Roberto and Albert, Richard (Eds). The 2024 International Review of Constitutional Reform (pp. 473–476). Published by the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin in collaboration with the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism 2024. Http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5706743  
• This September, I had the honor of contributing with my lecture “Civil Society in Post-Soviet Patronal Politics” to MOST—Memorial Open Society Talks—a remarkable summer school in Palermo organized by Memorial Italia.
• Exciting news: the German translation of my book on post-Soviet humanity is now available from ibidem Verlag as Der post-sowjetische Mensch. Philosophische Überlegungen zur postsowjetischen Geschichte. It’s wonderful to see these ideas reach a broader audience.
• I’m delighted to continue my DAAD-Gastprofessur at European University Viadrina for the winter semester 2025-26. This semester, I’m looking forward to diving into three fascinating courses with students: Political Epistemology, Contemporary Studies of Ideology, and the History of Modernity in Eastern Europe.
• My paper “Freedom and Progress at the Dawn of the Age of Will: The Struggle of Two Enlightenments in the Current Euro-Atlantic Debate” was published in the new issue of The Ideology and Politics Journal on July 6, 2025.
• Russian version of my article “Engineers of New Souls. Post-Soviet Caesura and the Design of New Social Worlds in the Philosophy and Literature of Ukraine and Russia in the 1990s” is now published in Palladium Journal. Its German version is accepted for publication in the FORUM für osteuropäische Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte, for the issues of 2025-2026.
• It was a pleasure to particiapte in the conference “Utopian Imagination and Dystopian Practices” and report on “Utopian Imagination, Revolutionary Event, and Their Temporalities” (presentation; video 4.25.27-4.44.16).
• My new article “BALANCING COERCION AND EXTORTION: CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN UKRAINIAN STATEHOOD” was published at the Journal “Nuovi Autoritarismi e Democrazie: Diritto, Istituzioni, Società (NAD-DIS)” on May 6, 2025. 
• Glad to share good news: Ibidem Verlag published my new book “From Servant to Leader. Chronicles of Ukraine under the Zelensky’s Presidency, 2019–2024“.
• My article “Kantian studies in contemporary Ukraine” was published at the Studies in East European Thought Journal.
• My chapter “Postsowjetische De-facto Staaten: Die politischen Systeme Abchasiens und Transnitriens in vergleichender Perspektive” was published in: Priebus, S., Beichelt, T. (Hrsg.). (2025). Die politischen Systeme im östlichen Europa. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2025, 365–390. Thank you the editors and kudos to the co-authors!
• Happy to share the news that my new article “Engineers of New Souls. Post-Soviet Caesura and the Design of New Social Worlds in the Philosophy and Literature of Ukraine and Russia in the 1990s” (so far in Ukrainian; the German and Ukrainian versions will come out soon too) was published. I am grateful to the KIU Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukrainian Studies for supporting my research. Alas, the fellowship ended on January 15, 2025.
• My studies on the Kantian research in Ukraine in the 1970s – 2020s was published in Ukrainian and Russian at The Kοινὴ  Almanac.
• It was a pleasure to deliver two lectures on post-Soviet peoples’ history at the Sorbonne – Paris 1 University on March 18-19, 2025. 
• It was an honour to co-author an article on core concepts and methodological approaches in contemporary archeology — The Structure of Archaeological Knowledge and the Concept of Archaeological Culture: The Perspective of Actor-Network Theory (in Ukr.). Archeologia 4 (2024): 104–124. https://doi.org/10.15407/arheologia2024.04.104 
• My new article was published in Argentina: “Eurasian Middle Powers in Changing Interstate System: The Cases of Turkey and Kazakhstan”, Global Affairs 1 (2024): 353–365.
• Happy to see my new article was published in Argentina: “Potencias medias euroasiáticas en un sistema interestatal en cambio: los casos de Turquía y Kazajistán.” Revista Anual Asuntos Globales 1 (2024): 367–380.

Recent non-academic publications and interviews:

• I started publishing philosophical essays on my Substack:
  • The Cunning of History: What Thirty-Five Years of Eastern European Politics Taught Us About Political Creativity
  • Roots in More than One Soil
  • Gazing at the Sun: Caesura, the Female Gaze, and the Historiography of Wounds in Masha Schilinski’s “In die Sonne schauen/The Sound of Falling”
  • Exhausted Universals. Modernity at the Threshold of Its Internal Limit
  • The Prophet and the Algorithm: Why We Cannot Stop Imagining the End
  • After Philia. Misosophy and the Loss of Love for Wisdom
  • Between Kingdoms: What Malmö Taught Me
• What a privilege to share the stage with Ivo Josipović—former President of Croatia (2010-2015) and Professor of International Law—at the ValUEs Forum “STATE (IN)STABILITY AND EU FOREIGN POLICY” in Zagreb this past October. We didn’t always see eye to eye on Europe’s path forward, but that’s exactly what made our exchange so valuable. Despite our different perspectives, we found common ground in something essential: the future of Europe is worth fighting for.
• I recently took a group of Viadrina students to Gdansk to explore the European Solidarity Centre. The city’s history of resistance and hope left a deep impression on all of us. You can read my reflections on what we discovered during our visit “The Palimpsest City: A Philosophical Journey Through Gdańsk.”
• I am thankful to Sergei Erlich and Yurii Latysh for conversation in the frameworks of Istoricheskaya Expertiza debates. It looks like dialogue of historians and philosophers may indeed be deep and mutually enriching. The video (in Russian) of our conversation is availible here. The text of interview is availible on the Istoricheskaia expertiza.
• It was a pleasure to work with the students of the Key Generation School in Kyiv, Ukraine, and to give them two lectures (in Ukrainian) on “The Birth of the States” and “Introduction to Post-Soviet Politics: Public Policy and Patronage.”
• I was happy to present my new book — The Post-Soviet Human — to the audience at Wilson Center in Washington, DC, on November 19, 2024. The video of the presentation can be seen HERE.
• My column “Writing a Chronicle of Zelensky’s Ukraine” was published at the Focus Ukraine on February 12, 2025.
• My column “Ukraine at War Must Deal with the Threat of Strategic Corruption” was published at the Focus Ukraine on November 13, 2024.

If you are interested in my academic projects and publications, please visit Research&Publications

You may find interesting materials on the Public Events page where I post my attempts of discussing philosophical ideas with the wider audiences or apply scholarly methods for the analysis of the reality we live in.

There are two pages where I share information on my teaching to students and political leaders.

Since it’s a personal web site, I added a page with my biography and a page dedicated to my hobby, photography.

 I am grateful

to Nadiya Kravets for the idea of creating this web site and

to Mykhailo Koltsov who turned it into reality.