vitalii atanasov

I investigate how war captures infrastructure — digital and physical.

work

Networks, surveillance, infrastructure — 2013–2025

Attacks on Ukrainian networks and state and corporate surveillance, a decade before the capture of infrastructure became an instrument of occupation. From early reporting on intrusions and interception, through the political economy of platforms, to the routing geopolitics of occupied territory.

Land, water, and the archive — 2016–2025

The physical half of the same subject: a landscape shaped by Soviet engineering and now broken by war. Made for exhibition rather than publication — film, installation, a commissioned wall text.

  • The environmental impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine — opening episode of Ukraine the Possible, on the ecological damage of the full-scale invasion and, in particular, the ecocide following the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant. Commons Journal, 2023
  • Desalinate A Sea, Build A City, Blow Up The Sun — video installation, 15’12”, 2023. Assembled from Soviet newsreels, archival Ukrainian television and found footage: earthworks at continental scale, intensive water use and rising energy consumption as the forces that remake a society and erase the line between the artificial and the natural. Former collective-farm workers speak; non-human presences mark the same ground. The work holds the utopian ideology and the ecological reality of the USSR against the managerialism and extractive capitalism that inherited them, and against the war now waged by a fossil-fuel empire. Main exhibition of the Kyiv Biennial, curated by Serge Klymko, Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer. Augarten Contemporary and partner venues, Vienna, 17 October – 17 December 2023
  • Velykyi Luh: A Landscape on the Brink — exhibition wall text on the Great Meadow, the floodplain landscape submerged by the Kakhovka reservoir and exposed again after the 2023 dam destruction, drawing on an interview with Mykhailo Mulenko, acting head of the nature protection department at Oleshky Sands National Nature Park. Written at the invitation of artist Zhanna Kadyrova for The Forest, her IHME Helsinki Commission 2025. Steam Power Plant, Power Station Museum, Helsinki, 24 August – 2 October 2025
  • Museum of the City of Svitlograd — exhibition on the unrealised urban agglomeration of Lysychansk, Sievierodonetsk and Rubizhne, and on the chemical industry that made and unmade it. Curated by the DE NE DE initiative. Showed Museum of Miners’ Glory, a video work shot in Lysychansk in 2015 during preparation for the exhibition. Lysychansk Local History Museum, 2017
  • Sentsov’s Camera — group exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art (GfZK), Leipzig, 2016
Displacement, refugees, borders — 2012–2018

Who is allowed to move, who is made to move, and what meets them at the other end — from asylum procedure inside Ukraine to the militarised edge of the EU.

Labour, from the plant floor to the platform — 2011–2021

Who owns the work, and who counts as a worker — from the closure of Soviet-era plants to platform labour and AI as a management tool. The symposium and union teaching on the same subject are under Convening and teaching.

  • How the war affects Ukraine’s economy — episode of Ukraine the Possible on the wartime economy: labour markets, production capacity, and who bears the cost. Commons Journal, 2023
  • The Mineral Deal: The Price of Partnership in the Trump Era — episode of Ukraine the Possible on the resource-extraction agreement between Ukraine and the United States, read as political economy rather than diplomacy. Commons Journal, 2025
  • Anthropogen — a podcast on digital capitalism: platform labour, the difference between work and labour online, and artificial intelligence as a force of production. Draws on Inhuman Power (Pluto Press, 2019) among other sources. 2021
  • Digital Capitalism and Internet Utopias — edited collection on the political economy of the internet and social networks. Opening essay by the editor; translations of Christian Fuchs, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Evgeny Morozov. Center for Social and Labor Research, Kyiv, 2020 (PDF)
  • Undermined: how the state is selling out Ukraine’s coal workers — mine closures in Lysychansk and Novovolynsk, and the long shadow of 1990s “restructuring”. openDemocracy, 2016
  • Kryvyi Rih needs an alternative — openDemocracy, 2016
  • Kherson Machine-building Plant — documentary film built on archival material and interviews with the workers who took over the plant in 2009. Co-directed with sociologist Anastasiia Ryabchuk. Premiered in the parallel programme of Labour Show, an exhibition at the Visual Culture Research Center (NaUKMA), and distributed on DVD with Commons no. 4: Class Exploitation and Class Struggle. Kyiv, 25 November 2011
  • Кінопоїзд на ХМЗ — notes on the video documentation of worker protests at the Kherson Machine-building Plant, and on Medvedkin’s cine-trains as a method. Co-written with Anastasiya Ryabchuk. Commons, no. 4: Class Exploitation and Class Struggle, 2012
  • Праця і робітничий рух в Україні: архів і дослідження (Labour and the Labour Movement in Ukraine: Archive and Research) — research project made with Anastasiia Ryabchuk, collecting material on the condition of Ukraine’s working class since the break-up of the Soviet Union — miners, street vendors, freelancers, transport workers, labour migrants. Public programme included a lecture by David Ost (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) on the defeat of Solidarity and the politics of anger in post-communist Europe, and a lecture by Daniel J. Walkowitz (New York University) on the Donbas miners’ movement of 1989–91, held with the Department of History and Theory of Sociology at Lviv University. Kyiv and Lviv, 2011–2013
  • Свободный профсоюз Южной дороги, Акция 16 января, Экскурсия. Пригородный поезд Киев-Шепетовка, Ночная смена, Укрзалізниця. Что происходит? — series of five documentary videos on independent unions of the Ukrainian railway and the labour movement in Ukraine, screened with the author present in the series Socially Engaged Culture, initiated by Yermilov Centre and artist Mykola Ridnyi. Yermilov Centre, Kharkiv, 14 November 2013
  • Нечастые союзы — on how Ukrainians might actually win higher wages and better conditions. Focus, 2012
War, occupation, press freedom — 2014–2017

Field reporting from the front line and the grey zone, and the conditions that make it possible: access, accreditation, pressure on journalists. The monitoring was done as Ukrainian correspondent (2016–2019) for Mapping Media Freedom, Index on Censorship’s pan-European project — a database of incidents rather than bylines, with occasional dispatches like the one below.

Writing on art — 2016–2023

Exhibition and film criticism on how art has handled land, extraction, the Soviet inheritance and the war. Two appeared in springerin, the Vienna contemporary art quarterly.

Convening and teaching — 2015–2026

Programmes built for people who do the job, and monitoring done in an institutional capacity. Two of the trainings answered a specific gap: in 2015 Ukrainian journalists were covering displacement, torture and atrocity untrained; two years later the same newsrooms were targets with no operational security.

  • Media and social network monitoring for the OSCE/ODIHR election observation mission for Ukraine’s 2019 presidential election — institutional monitoring work, not published under a byline.
  • Will AI Take Your Job? Artificial Intelligence — a tool for bosses or for workers? — online lecture for Ukrainian trade unionists on automation, workplace surveillance and inequality in the digital economy, moderated by Oksana Dutchak. Organised by COZZ (Central European Organising Center), Warsaw. 11 March 2026
  • «Обчислення в мережі міцелію, плодові тіла як інтерфейс і передача інформації на відстань — кому потрібен Інтернет грибів?» — lecture reading fungal networks as a model of communication and computation: mycelial signalling, fruiting bodies as interface, information at a distance. Part of Seasonal Works III — The Kingdom of Fungi, the third annual workshop staged by the Khashchi venue with the Visual Culture Research Center in the abandoned Petrivska Street. Kyiv, 4–5 September 2021
  • Цифровий капіталізм: (як) користувачі онлайн-платформ працюють, щоб продавати речі самим собі — lecture on how the platform economy turns its users into unpaid labour that sells goods to itself. Invited by curator Hanna Tsyba for the exhibition Fast. Convenient. Dangerous. at Mala Galereia, Mystetskyi Arsenal. Kyiv, 16 November 2021
  • Digital Labor Symposium — four-day symposium on digital labour under Big Data capitalism, on critical theory applied to the internet and social media, and on possible alternatives. Curator and organiser. Digital labour treated as a full chain, not just immaterial work — mineral extraction, assembly lines, outsourced cognitive work, toxic waste — and how that shapes labour relations in the post-Soviet space. Sessions ranged from platform employment in Ukraine and the precarisation of Glovo couriers to affective labour read through ASMR video, plus two afternoons of Holed Futurism, a live action role play on burnout and outsourced affect by the artist group eeefff, and evening screenings of The Cleaners and Unrest. A project of the Center for Social and Labor Research, Kyiv. Koncha-Zaspa sanatorium, near Kyiv, 26–29 September 2019
  • School of Social Reportage — invited trainer across both cohorts of Politychna Krytyka’s training programme for young journalists on the social-reportage genre — writing about social problems and reform from the perspective of those they affect. My lecture, «Як алгоритми, реклама і клікбейт протистоять журналістським стандартам», asked whether journalism still matters in the age of Facebook, Instagram and Telegram, when any user can produce and publish content. Alongside trainers including Nataliya Gumenyuk and Maksym Butkevych. Kyiv, 2020–2021
  • Fundamentals of digital security for journalists, human rights defenders and trade union activists — two-day training, run twice, designed and led with invited data-protection specialists who work with media and civil society and took part in a personal capacity. It opened on threat modelling — what is actually at risk — and ran through spyware and phishing, including targeted attacks, to password practice and managers, two-factor authentication and account recovery, full-disk encryption of laptops, phones and drives, the protection of traffic with HTTPS, VPN and Tor, and finally the interception of mobile communications and the encrypted messengers that answer it. Curator and organiser. Kyiv, first edition 24–25 June 2017, second edition 28–29 October 2017
  • Grammar of Dialogue: covering war and displacement — programme of six trainings for 90 Ukrainian journalists, around fifteen participants each, on covering war, displacement, torture and hate speech, held across Zaporizhzhia, Poltava, Odesa, Ivano-Frankivsk, Dnipro (Dnipropetrovsk at the time) and Kyiv. Curator and organiser. First phase of the project, at the Center for Social and Labor Research, Kyiv. 2015–2016 · announcement
  • Grammar of Dialogue: the challenges of platform capitalism — second phase of the project, on critical approaches to the personalised internet and the corporate policies of platforms: manipulation in social media, cyber-propaganda, internet censorship and the erosion of digital rights. Curator and organiser. Each guest came for two days: a public lecture for reach, a closed workshop for transfer. Katarzyna Szymielewicz of the Panoptykon Foundation, Warsaw, on big data in electoral politics (Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, 1 June 2018), followed by a workshop on how digital rights are defended in the European Union and which of those tactics could work in Ukraine (Budynok Kino, 2 June 2018). Vladan Joler of SHARE Lab on investigating the black boxes of Facebook and other platforms, co-hosted with PinchukArtCentre inside the exhibition Democracy Anew?, with a closed workshop the same day (23 September 2018). Kyiv, 2018
Selected earlier reporting, 2008–2017
  • Mythenbildung: Vom paradoxen Nutzen des Sowjeterbes — essay on the Soviet legacy as political alibi: how blaming the communist past served Ukrainian politicians as a way of deflecting attention from the structural problems of the present and from the failure of reform. Osteuropa 2-4/2010, pp. 461–468 (in German)

Social and cultural reporting from a decade of staff and freelance work, largely in Russian — the working language of most Ukrainian outlets at the time. The hepatitis C epidemic, the failed reform of emergency medicine, the Dnipro river, Soviet-era architecture, LGBT rights and the state of tolerance, hidden political advertising.

Full archive: Focus.ua · openDemocracy · Commons

Interviews with sociologist Michael Burawoy (Focus, 2012), investigative artist Mari Bastashevski (Bird in Flight, 2015) and film director Jakob Preuss (Ukrainska Pravda, 2017). Art criticism from the same years, including a review of a David Chychkan exhibition (Анархия в красках, Cultprostir.ua, 2016 — site discontinued, no longer online).

I started in journalism in 2003, writing about economics, banking and finance before turning to the reporting archived above.