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This article delves into the complex evolution of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, focusing on the dynamics of the political, economic and institutional situation in the Russian-occupied territories during the Donbas War (2014-2022) and their far-reaching implications for Russia and Ukraine. All attempts to reintegrate those territories with Ukraine through the Minsk Process failed. By 2022, the occupied Donbas territories were de-facto economically, politically, culturally, and institutionally integrated with Russia. As a result, Russia found itself trapped in a perplexing predicament. It could not de-jure integrate the Donbas territories without significant reputational and economic losses. Yet it was equally unable to relinquish them, even as it became clear that they would not help to establish Russian control over Ukraine. As a result, Russia found itself in a situation in which attacking seemed like a viable option to overcome a deadlock.

"Passportization" is an extraterritorial coercive state practice and a form of forced "naturalization by application." Forced naturalization in annexed territories is essentially territorial, as Russia claims the annexed territories as its own and automatically considers all residents as Russian citizens ("automatic naturalization"). Distinguishing between the two different institutional frameworks of occupation and annexation and the degree of coercion, this analysis identifies four modi of passportization and forced naturalization of Ukrainians for the period 2014-2023 in which individuals' potential for agency and choice in acquiring or rejecting Russian citizenship - and thus their responsibility and, by extension, potential criminal liability - has differed markedly. Ukrainian political debates among elites and the views of the population show that it remains controversial how to respond to Russia's policy of forced naturalization. This analysis argues that the starting point for tailoring transitional justice measures in the area of citizenship should be these different degrees of agency.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has been pursuing a comprehensive campaign to incorporate the new territories that it has occupied into the Russian Federation's economic, administrative and legal space. With the front line largely static during 2023, Russia has used the time to seize Ukrainian businesses and redistribute assets to loyal locals or Russian business groups. Russia is also pouring billions of dollars into a reconstruction campaign, centred on Mariupol. Russia hopes to use these economic levers to consolidate political and economic control over the territories, making it increasingly difficult for Ukraine to regain and reintegrate these lands in the future.

Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine is the first interstate war in human history in which civilian nuclear facilities have been attacked. The article discusses the situation at Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe's largest NPP, which was occupied by Russia in March 2022. The six-unit plant is now a theatre of war and a test case for nuclear safety under wartime conditions. The safety issues analysed in this report are also representative for the operating nuclear reactors in Ukraine which are under Ukrainian control. Numerous abnormal operating situations have occurred at Zaporizhzhia as a result of the war. The staff have to ensure the safety of the plant under the terror of the occupying forces. So far, emergency situations have been managed without severe damage to the nuclear installations. However, there is concern that a major nuclear accident could occur in Zaporizhzhia. The fear of such an accident is also itself an instrument of hybrid warfare.

Im Laufe des Krieges in der Ukraine haben die russischen Streitkräfte zahlreiche Grundsätze der rechtmäßigen Kriegsführung verletzt. Nach dem Ende des Krieges werden sich vor allem zwei Fragen stellen: 1) Wie können normale diplomatische und wirtschaftliche Beziehungen zu Russland wiederhergestellt werden? und 2) Wie können die Schuldigen für Kriegsverbrechen und Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit zur Rechenschaft gezogen werden? Die Literatur zur Übergangsjustiz ist in Bezug auf beide Fragen aufschlussreich. Wir schlagen in diesem Artikel vor, wie die Grundsätze der Übergangsjustiz im Nachkriegsrussland angewendet werden könnten, indem wir uns auf die Anwendung von Grundsätzen der Übergangsjustiz im Zuge der Konfliktbewältigung in einschlägigen historischen Fallbeispielen stützen.

Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism, we argue that it has missed out on the ethico-political function of UGC as testimonials of lives-at-risk. If we wish to recognize and act on UGC as techno-social practices of witnessing human pain and death, we propose, then we need to push further the conceptual and analytical boundaries of the field. In this paper, we do this by introducing a view of UGC as flesh witnessing, that is as embodied and mobile testimonies of vulnerable others that, enabled by smartphones, enter global news environments as appeals to attention and action. Drawing on examples from the Syrian conflict, we provide an analysis of the narrative strategies through which flesh witnessing acquires truth-telling authority and we reflect on what is gained and lost in the process. western story-telling, we conclude, strategically co-opts the affective dimension of flesh witnessing – its focus on child innocence, heroic martyrdom or the data aesthetics of destruction – and selectively minimizes its urgency by downplaying or effacing the bodies of non-western witnesses. This preoccupation with verification should not be subject to geopolitical formulations and needs to be combined with an explicit acknowledgement of the embodied voices of conflict as testimonies of the flesh whose often mortal vulnerability is, in fact, the very condition of possibility upon which western broadcasting rests.

The outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020 led to substantial upheaval in the EU's trade policy. Over the course of a year, EU Trade Policy as a field witnessed the launch of hitherto unthinkable ideas; the proliferation of a range of new buzzwords such as resilience, autonomy, and reshoring; and ultimately the arrival of a new consensus in the Trade Policy Review of February 2021. This article uses a discourse-theoretical approach (PDT) to retrace the political process that unfolded throughout this year, from the start of the COVID-19 crisis, to a fundamental dislocation of EU trade politics, and ultimately to the consolidation of a partial, temporary, and frail new hegemony within the policy field. Our goal is to explain the trajectory and the dynamics of this process by studying the discourses, the framings, and the political strategies that comprised the hegemonic struggle underlying it.