Okay, so hello everybody.

We welcome you to our roundtable or panel discussion on decolonization as a political

reality and as a research paradigm.

Welcome to my colleagues in Germany, the United States, and elsewhere.

And the warmest welcome goes to our colleagues in Ukraine, especially Kharkiv, who have to

live under constant Russian shelling and who are suffering from this bloody war, a bloody

war in a double sense, and from the cold.

It's great that you can be here with us right now.

I saw that quite a few of the Ukrainian colleagues are present in spite of frequent blackouts

in Ukraine.

Welcome also to those colleagues from Ukraine who are now in Poland or Germany or other

countries because of the war.

The Russian full-scale invasion in Ukraine on February 24 this year is perceived as a

historical watershed in Ukraine, in Europe, and beyond.

It has fueled a transnational public and scholarly debate on the decolonization of the imperial

space created by Russia.

In the new realities of war, historians argue about the past and present of the Russian

Empire and the Soviet Union, highlighting aspects of colonial repression, political

and cultural russification, and military and physical violence.

Some academics call for a decolonization of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies,

as they seem to be based in many respects on Russian imperial assumptions.

And today we want to shed some light on this broad discussion, and we have invited four

rather young, I dare to say, scholars who are interested in the questions of imperialism

and colonialism and who all vote in favor of decolonization.

Let's find out more about how they understand it, how they understand decolonization.

But before we start, let me briefly explain how we like to proceed.

I will introduce one by one today's speakers, whom I will give three minutes each for an

initial introductory statement.

And after that, we will have two rounds with my questions and their answers.

And after that, I will open the floor for everybody for comments and questions.

I will also use the chat to give you some publication titles, so watch out for the chat

as well.

The first I want to introduce is Denis Zhuraviov from Kharkiv.

He's a lecturer at the Chair of the History of Ukraine at Kharkiv National Karazin University.

He holds a PhD since 2003, and the title of his dissertation is The Military and the Slobodan

Cossack Regiments in the Second Half of the 17th and in the 18th Centuries.

He's the author of several books on Ukrainian history, especially of the early modern period.

And he's also a political activist and has participated in the Kharkiv Maidan.

So Denis, please tell us a bit about your motivation to participate in this debate.

Thank you, Julia.

Well, I'm a bit sorry for my voice, because we have very harsh conditions here, so I have

a bit of a forced voice here.

Well, about the motivations and about the topic of my talk about decolonization.

You know, the main motivation for taking part in this discussion is the war itself.

The war unexpected, the war that came to Ukraine on the 24th of February, 2022.

So we have to live with it now.

And I think that it's made us to think more about such things like the self-identification,

like those, what are the Ukrainian nation itself.

So ironically, but the worst thing Putin could have done to further preserve the respectful

or at least the neutral attitude of Ukraine towards the Russian cultural and historical