Rivalries between Western, Eastern and domestic forces in the process of capital accumulation and its geopolitical expressions will shape the future of Ukraine and the rest of the post-Soviet states for the years to come. Some got rich by dispossessing others while leading them into a desperate head-to-head clash over the few remaining and mostly non-material treasures: language, ethnicity, religion, and memory. Even with the breakout of the armed conflict, the oligarchs have remained in power while the dispossessed masses earned the privilege of shooting each other near border trenches of the country’s industrial east.

—Yuliya Yurchenko, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict, (London: Pluto Press, 2018).