Last week saw 1000 days since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.  As the Russian war grinds on well into its third year, and additionally in the context of horrors elsewhere, it’s all too easy to forget the ongoing need to support and celebrate Ukraine and its people.  Thankfully, support and celebration do continue, and yesterday saw the inaugural meeting of BASU, the British Association for the Study of Ukraine.  It brought together academics from across the UK and across disciplines, as well as others, including a couple of us from the library sector.

Its inaugural meeting’s many attendees approved BASU’s draft constitution before breaking into online groups to discuss co-operation in more detail.  The group I joined focused on humanities subjects, and it was fantastic to hear how people across UK institutions were working to keep the spotlight on Ukraine.

The three BASU co-chairs are well represented in the UL’s collections, as the samples below show.

• Manchester’s Olga Onuch
  • The Zelensky effect (2023), co-written with Henry E. Hale
  • Mapping mass mobilization : understanding revolutionary moments in Argentina (2001) and Ukraine (2004) (2014)
• Cambridge’s Rory Finnin
  • Blood of others : Stalin’s Crimean atrocity and the poetics of solidarity (2022)
  • Remembering Katyn (2012), with 6 other authors
• UCL SSEES’ Andrew Wilson
  • Political technology : the globalisation of political manipulation (2024)
  • Various editions of his The Ukrainians including the fifth from 2022

A question that came up yesterday concerned how BASU might share knowledge about Ukraine beyond universities.  There is a lot of food for thought there, including for us in the UL – how might we better share our Ukraine resources with non-Ukrainian and Ukrainian communities?  It was super to see the head of the Ukrainian Institute London at BASU, and a reminder of the fantastic outreach work they already do, much of which is freely available to the public.  Do look at their site: https://ukrainianinstitute.org.uk/.

Mel Bach