Jacobin Radio: Four Years of War in Ukraine w/ Oleksandr Kyselov

Jacobin Radio

Jacobin

Politics, History, News

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2026

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Suzi speaks to Ukrainian socialist Oleksandr Kyselov, who says the current “peace process” is a dangerous illusion. Russia’s goal, he argues, is not compromise but subjugation — and any ceasefire that doesn’t confront that reality only postpones the next war. We discuss the Witkoff-Dmitriev 28-point plan (critics call it the “DimWit plan”), exhaustion inside Ukraine, and why calls from the Western left for immediate, unconditional ceasefire, without a single protest outside a Russian embassy, are, as Kyselov puts it, “beyond naive.”

Ksenia Kagarlitskaya then joins us from her exile in Montenegro. Her father, Marxist sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky, has now spent two years in Penal Colony No. 4 for opposing Putin’s war. She discusses her father’s imprisonment and the explosion of political prisoners inside Russia since 2022. Ksenia runs Freedom Zone, an organization that raises funds and organizes events globally to support political prisoners and their families. Ksenia reminds us that political prisoners don’t appear in any of the current peace negotiations, because Russia doesn't acknowledge that they exist.

Jacobin Radio with Suzi Weissman features conversations with leading thinkers and activists, with a focus on labor, the economy, and protest movements.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Jacobin Radio. I'm Susie Wiseman.
0:11.8	Four years ago, on February 24, 2022, Russia, incredibly, launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
0:21.6	Four years of devastating war, mass displacement, destruction, death, cities without heat or
0:27.6	electricity this winter as Russia destroys energy infrastructure and fierce Ukrainian resistance.
0:34.6	Four years that have also transformed Europe and exposed deep fault lines
0:38.9	within the international left. We are recording this program on February 20th, just days
0:44.6	after the latest round of U.S. mediated talks in Geneva, talks that Russia described as very tense,
0:51.4	and that ended without any breakthrough. Critics are calling this the Dimwit
0:56.8	plan named for Russian negotiator Dmitriev and U.S. negotiator Witkoff. The so-called peace
1:04.1	process is in full swing and yet peace, as my guest, Alexander Kislov has written, cannot come. Not with this Russia. Today also
1:13.7	marks another anniversary. Two years ago this month, Boris Kagalitsky, renowned Russian Marxist
1:19.5	sociologist, a critic of Putin and his war on Ukraine, also my friend, whose voice we have
1:25.1	heard on this program for more than 30 years, was taken
1:28.5	from a Moscow courtroom directly into custody to begin a five-year sentence in a penal colony.
1:34.6	He is one of thousands of Russians imprisoned for opposing Putin's war on Ukraine.
1:39.9	Three days after Kagalitsky was whisked into prison, Alexei Navalny was murdered in his Arctic
1:45.5	penal colony with an exotic poison. Kagolitsky's daughter Ksenia joins us in our second
1:51.3	segment from Montenegro, where she lives in exile. But we begin in Ukraine. Alexander
1:57.3	Kisilov, a left activist and research fellow at Uppsala University, joins us.
2:03.2	He's just published a very good analysis called The Peace That Cannot Come.
2:08.7	He's originally from Danyetsk, and he knows firsthand what's at stake.
2:13.3	All this, when our program returns, in just a moment.
	...

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