Maria Popova 🇨🇦 (@PopovaProf) / X

Maria Popova 🇨🇦

35.9K posts

Maria Popova 🇨🇦

@PopovaProf

🇨🇦⚜️ polisci prof @mcgillu, Director Jean Monnet Centre Montreal; Rule of law, anticorruption, democracy; Book on Ru-Ukraine War: tinyurl.com/4zuhk9wr

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Joined May 2013

Pinned
Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
Jan 13, 2024
Our book isn't straightforwardly about "war and peace", but about the regime and identity divergence between Ru and Ukraine, which Ru refuses to accept. We'll take the "hot new releases" label, though! Thanks, Amazon. @OxanaShevel @politybooks
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Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
Mar 26, 2025
Now this is a good, accurate headline
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Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
May 28, 2022
War fatigue in the West? What are we tired of? The Ukrainians are doing all the fighting themselves.
Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
May 10, 2022
After failing to take Kyiv, the Russian army now appears to be abandoning Kharkiv too. The claim that Putin sees loss in Ukraine as an existential threat loses a bit of credibility with each retreat.
Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
Oct 4, 2025
Every time I see a Westerner praising the Eastern European communist dictatorships, I cringe so hard because I remember scenes like these. Humiliation on top of deprivation.
Brave Romania
@brave_romania
Oct 3, 2025
In the ’80s, when Ceaușescu visited stores, shelves were staged and workers clapped from fear, not joy. Applause was the language of survival.
00:00
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Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
Sep 27, 2024
Zelensky has nerves of steel. His ability to maintain composure in the most awful of circumstances--being hunted to be murdered, seeing sites of unspeakable crimes, standing next to awful individuals who patronize him and prepare to sell out his country-- should be studied.
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Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
Aug 1, 2022
Calling the war a « senseless conflict » has become shorthand for undermining the legitimacy of Ukrainian resistance and diminishing the role of Russian imperialism. This war is chock-full of sense— national survival for Ukraine and imperial revival for Russia.
Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
Feb 5, 2022
Many American progressives seem deeply confused on Russia. Someone please explain to them that the Russian government opposes every single cause they care about.
Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
Jul 2, 2022
Bulgarian govt alleges that numerous pundits, journalists, pollsters, and public figures received regular payments from the Russian embassy (~2K euro per month) to present Russian narratives in the media as independent analysis...
Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
Jun 24, 2023
Why is Western media reporting Kremlin's PR spin as fact? No, neither Prigozhin, nor Pu, nor anybody else in this standoff is trying to avoid bloodshed or be cool headed. No, a powerless vassal like Lukashenka cannot mediate anything. No, _this_ (whatever it is) is far from over.
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Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
Apr 17, 2022
Instead of telling him to surrender, the Left should be celebrating Zelensky as the anti-imperialist hero he is. Not only is he defeating one empire militarily, but, through soft power, he has forced Western empires to take him seriously and adjust their policies.
Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
Jun 3, 2022
The "Russia-backed Donbas separatists" term is misleading because most understand it to imply a backwards sequence, i.e. Donbas separatists existed, challenged Kyiv, and then Russia decided to back them. In reality, Russia intervened, recruited locally, and then challenged Kyiv.
Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
Jul 10, 2022
Finland and Sweden’s unproblematic NATO accession glaringly demonstrates Mearsheimer’s delusion that Russia hated and feared NATO coming closer to it. It actually hated EEurope moving away.
Maria Popova 🇨🇦
@PopovaProf
Mar 6, 2024
Claiming Russia only wants Ukraine to be neutral is like claiming the Taliban only want women to be modest.
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