‘If You Can’t Name the Threat Correctly, How Can You Design Any Defense Against It?’
Voices of the Fight No. 7: Maksym Eristavi, chronicler of resistance to russian imperialism
MAKSYM ERISTAVI spent years studying what empire had tried to erase. Then, days before the full-scale invasion, he posted "the mother of all Russian colonialism tweets"—a thread that became Russian Colonialism 101, an award-winning illustrated guide to 48 Russian invasions.
He is also the founder of Volya Hub, a cognitive defense agency reprogramming how foreign audiences understand this war.
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Welcome to Voices of the Fight—a Saturday Q&A series featuring the warriors, innovators, advocates, and volunteers standing under fire for freedom.
1 | Who are you, and what’s your mission?
I’m Maksym Eristavi, an award-winning writer, cognitive strategist, and russian colonialism storyteller-in-chief.
I grew up in the Zaporizhzhia region, the birthplace of the Ukrainian anti-colonial resistance and part of Ukraine that russian imperialism devastated the most. Raised russian-speaking in a Ukrainian-speaking family, knowing more about russian culture and history than the history of my own village or my family—that’s just a small peek into my own struggle with colonial identity erasure.
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Two decades in journalism and civil society leadership safeguarding democracy across Ukraine and beyond. Then in 2014 russia invaded my home country, and in 2022 russians stole my ancestral home. So all of it stopped being “work” and became a personal mission.
Helping defence-tech builders turn their innovations into russian imperial regret
For the last decade, I’ve been mapping russia’s colonial warfare playbook so the world understands we’re not dealing with one bad ruler or one bad regime—we’re dealing with serial imperial violence, five centuries in the making. That research became the award-winning guidebook Russian Colonialism 101—the first systematic attempt to document this in language that doesn’t require an extra degree to follow. It expanded into Volya Hub, an agency building cognitive defences against imperial narratives. After years of fundraising for Ukrainian defenders, recently I also started helping defencetech builders turn their innovations into russian imperial regret, too.
My mission is to get us all to name the russian threat correctly. Because if you can’t even do that, then how can you design any defence against it? I’m reprogramming how foreign audiences understand this war—not as a regional dispute between neighbours, but as a colonial war between the oldest surviving empire and a people who refused to disappear.
My book opens with “Partitioned, disarmed, and decolonised russia is the only peace plan that works.” That’s not radical thinking. I just learned my imperial history well.
I hoped the war would stop at some invisible line. That russia had taken what it came for and would give it a rest.
I was, of course, wrong. They came for more.
They came for my house.
2 | Tell us one powerful story from your experience in war, as you would tell someone over a drink.
2014. The Maidan Revolution had just ended—the second pro-democratic revolution I’d participated in, after the Orange Revolution in 2004. Because apparently, once wasn’t enough for a lifespan of a Ukrainian. russia had taken Crimea. russian tanks were moving into eastern Ukraine.
Not a fun story over a drink. But as the times are, so are the stories we tell.
I had friends and colleagues—Ukrainians who’d fled the occupation—telling me what they’d seen. I listened. I empathised. I’d go to the frontline and watch russian imperialism in action, myself. And then, privately, I hoped the war would stop at some invisible line. That russia had taken what it came for and would give it a rest.
I was, of course, wrong. They came for more. They came for my house.
Because that’s what empires do. Expansion isn’t a choice for them—it’s a structural necessity. The empire expands, or it dies. And it will keep expanding until someone makes it too expensive to continue.
Always listen to the people closest to the fire.
I spent years after 2014 watching the warnings of fellow Ukrainians I’d dismissed come true, one by one. The full-scale invasion didn’t surprise me intellectually. I’d studied the pattern too many times. What surprised me was how long I’d let fear masquerade as objective analysis.
I don’t make that mistake anymore. And I’d rather the rest of you in the Free World didn’t have to make it at all.
Not a fun story over a drink. But as the times are, so are the stories we tell.
3 | What decision, habit, or principle has mattered the most for you for surviving or staying effective under pressure?
Always listen to the people closest to the fire.
Here’s what I mean in one example. The Ukrainian defence-tech revolution that everyone abroad is suddenly discovering? It didn’t appear out of nowhere in 2022. Years earlier, Ukrainian civil society volunteers were already fundraising for consumer drones, and Ukrainian tech engineers were spending their days off in fields with servicemen, testing DIY solutions held together with ingenuity and, occasionally, actual duct tape. Mainstream foreign journalists weren’t writing about this. It wasn’t in Western think-tank briefings.
But if you’d listened—and learned Ukrainian history—you’d have expected exactly this kind of innovation to emerge. Not just because of the russian invasion. It happened because of 400 years of Ukrainian anti-colonial resistance that the invasion simply made visible.
Ukrainians have been building parallel survival structures outside imperial control for centuries. Every time russia erased the language, underground publishing networks appeared. Every time it strangled the culture, decentralised preservation filled the gap. The pattern in defence is identical: one where the drone pilot’s feedback reaches the engineer directly, where the person closest to the problem has the power to fix it, and where merit replaces hierarchical patronage.
So the principle isn’t just “listen to lived experience” as a moral signalling. It’s that lived experience under sustained imperial pressure that produces a specific kind of knowledge that nothing outside can engineer. Every time I’ve trusted this operational principle, I’ve been ahead of the story.
Learn from the nations that survived russian imperialism—Ukraine above all, as the most effective ongoing example of pushing back against it. You’ll understand exactly why Ukrainian innovation works. And you’ll understand why extracting the ‘magic tech’ without integrating the people and the culture guarantees you’ll get the hardware without the thing that makes it an imperial regret.
4 | How can people support your work?
Read Russian Colonialism 101, as a physical book and as an accompanying newsletter. Share this work. Seriously. Before I became a bestselling and award-winning author, we had to crowdfund to print the book in wartime Ukraine—no Western publisher wanted to touch it and wouldn’t consider it as a serious topic. I have built my audience outside of mainstream platforms. Against the establishment scepticism. Just because when something landed, people would forward it to someone who needed it.
Above all, support the resistance of the Ukrainian Armed Forces—the only effective opposition to the growing global tide of resurgent imperialism. I am here just because they defend my right to live and speak up.
5 | Where can people follow you?
SUBSTACK: Russian Colonialism 101.
LINKEDIN: where I translate my imperial warfare insights into something useful for the modern defence crowd.
For cognitive battlefield orientation: maksymeristavi.com
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What else we’re watching today:
A joint U.S.–Israeli strike has hit Iran’s key Natanz nuclear facility, according to Iran’s atomic energy organization. Officials say there was no radioactive leakage and no immediate danger to the immediate surroundings of the facility.
Iran has sharply escalated tensions in the widening Middle East conflict by launching two intermediate-range ballistic missiles toward the strategic U.S.-U.K. base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. According to U.S. officials, neither missile hit its target: one failed mid-flight, while a U.S. Navy warship attempted to intercept the other, though the outcome remains unclear. The attempted strike is notable less for its immediate damage than for what it signals, as Diego Garcia lies roughly 4,000 km from Iran, suggesting Tehran’s missile capabilities extend far beyond previously stated limits.
Diego Garcia is part the Chagos Islands British territory that Sir Keir Starmer’s government is willing to cede to an ally of China in a deal that would require the UK then to lease the island back from Mauritius in order to keep its joint US-UK base there.In a revealing glimpse into ongoing U.S.–Russia backchannel diplomacy, Moscow reportedly proposed a sweeping quid pro quo: It would halt intelligence-sharing with Iran, including data used to target U.S. assets, if Washington stopped providing intelligence support to Ukraine.
The offer, presented by Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev to Trump allies Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, was firmly rejected by the U.S., but its very existence has alarmed European officials, who see it as a ploy to sideline Europe and fracture transatlantic unity at a critical moment.
The episode underscores a broader strategic pattern: Russia leveraging its growing military and intelligence ties with Iran as bargaining chips, while simultaneously testing whether Washington might trade support for Ukraine for concessions elsewhere—fears heightened by Trump’s increasingly hostile rhetoric toward NATO allies and signs of strain in Western coordination over both Ukraine and the Middle East.A previously underreported series of drone incursions has raised alarm at one of the United States’ most sensitive military installations, with internal documents revealing that between March 9–15, Barksdale Air Force Base, home to nuclear-capable B-52 bombers, was repeatedly penetrated by coordinated waves of 12–15 unauthorized drones.
Far from a one-off, the drones operated for hours each day, maneuvering deliberately across restricted zones such as flight lines, using non-commercial signals, long-range control links, and even showing resistance to jamming, suggesting advanced, possibly state-level capabilities.
Officials believe the patterns indicate intentional probing of U.S. defenses, with drone lights potentially used to test response times, while the inability to identify operators underscores a growing vulnerability: even the most strategic American bases are increasingly exposed to sophisticated, hard-to-detect unmanned threats.Ukraine’s formidable defense tech ecosystem is continuing its rapid international expansion, as Ukrainian integrator Ukrainska Bavovna and Czech firm Pavetra Aerospace have agreed to jointly produce the Shuhay UAV and the LS-T200 interceptor drone through a new venture in the Czech Republic. The companies have already signed a memorandum of understanding and finalized the legal groundwork, with combat trials of both systems expected soon, signaling a swift transition from partnership to battlefield deployment.
Side note on the firm’s name, Ukrainska Bavovna: Bavovna means “cotton” in Ukrainian — leading to a wartime meme. In Russian, the word khlopok means both “cotton” and “pop”or “clap,” and Kremlin media used khlopok as a euphemism for “explosion.” When machine translation rendered it into Ukrainian, it spat out “bavovna”—and Ukrainians have been using “cotton” as cheery word for successful Ukrainian strikes on Russian invaders ever since, sometimes marking a success by posting nothing more than a photo of a cotton sprig.
In a striking illustration of Ukraine’s evolving drone warfare, fighters from the 59th Assault Brigade used a fibre-optic FPV drone, General Cherry’s OPTIX, to successfully strike a Russian Ka-52 “Alligator” attack helicopter in the Donetsk region, a platform worth roughly $16 million.
Operated by the “Baltika” crew, the drone leveraged fibre-optic guidance, effectively immune to Russian electronic warfare, to maintain control over distances of up to 35 km, underscoring a growing shift toward hard-to-jam systems.
The incident highlights a defining asymmetry of the war: relatively low-cost, adaptable Ukrainian drones increasingly neutralizing some of Russia’s most advanced and expensive aerial assets, reinforcing how battlefield innovation—not just firepower—is shaping the conflict’s trajectory.Ukraine’s Tencore Robotics has presented its TerMIT CASEVAC ground drone, designed to remove wounded soldiers from the battlefield without exposing medics to fire. In its CASEVAC configuration, the platform features enhanced armor protection and expanded cargo capacity to safely transport injured personnel from frontline positions to rear medical points.
Built for rough terrain and active combat zones, the system allows units to maintain evacuation capabilities even under intense fire, addressing one of the most dangerous gaps in frontline operations. More broadly, TerMIT illustrates how Ukraine is extending robotics beyond combat roles into life-saving support functions, reducing casualties not just through firepower, but by fundamentally changing how wounded soldiers are rescued in high-risk environments.Russia has significantly increased its offensive efforts across the entire front, signaling that preparations for its anticipated spring–summer 2026 offensive are entering a more active phase, according to the Institute for the Study of War.
Since mid-March, Russian forces have launched a of company- and platoon-level attacks in key areas including Kupyansk, Lyman, Pokrovsk, and the Dnipropetrovsk axis, while simultaneously intensifying artillery strikes, drone operations, and efforts to disrupt Ukrainian logistics by targeting infrastructure such as dams and supply routes.
Analysts believe the Kremlin is likely preparing for a broader campaign focused on heavily fortified cities in Donetsk Oblast, such as Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, though the offensive is expected to rely less on large armored breakthroughs and more on localized, grinding assaults due to equipment shortages and the pervasive threat of Ukrainian drones.
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I am honored to get featured. Thanks for amplifying the right voices at the right time 🙏🏼🪆🪓
It's not time for invasions, It's time for system implosions, War is a business, but this not is not enough for an irreversible financial situation for biggest economic blocks.