Putin’s behavior is obviously beyond the pale, but what do you do from this vantage? Some lose themselves in the catastrophe porn pouring out of the besieged country in recent weeks. Others suddenly develop a deep interest in transliterations from the Cyrillic and take up policing those who find it immaterial whether you spell it Kiev or Kyiv. Either way, neither the one nor the other took any interest in the beleaguered capital before last month. Hard to believe our transliteration choices on Instagram and Twitter will impact the morale of the refugees streaming west. But it s a free country.
In the end, perhaps you can argue that one costless gesture is as good as any other. Maybe so. You get to feel slightly less passive while alas changing little or nothing for the good people of Ukraine. My personal tastes don’t really run to these symbolic gestures, but I share a need to do something germane, even knowing it won t make any immediate difference. First up, books, of course. Here is a reading list as many have requested, to go deeper on the history of the region. And second, what follows is my attempt to actually contribute new analysis to the conversation about Russia and the former Soviet republics stuck in its orbit: a closer look at what 21st-century genomics can add to our understanding of the last millennium or so of human history across Russia, Ukraine and their neighbors.
Visualization of between-population genetic distance (Fst)
