Ice to Iron: Russian Greed from the Chukchi War to Ukraine

This episode draws a straight, uncomfortable line between Russia’s 18th-century war against the Chukchi people and its modern invasion of Ukraine. Strip away the flags, uniforms, and centuries, and the motive stays the same: territorial greed justified by propaganda. In Siberia, Russia claimed Indigenous land was empty, backward, and in need of control. In Ukraine, the language changes, but the entitlement does not. This episode breaks down how Russian expansion has always worked, how resistance has always been labeled criminal or extremist, and why the Chukchi War wasn’t ancient history but a rehearsal. Same empire. Same excuses. Same blood on the ground.Forsyth, James. A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony 1581–1990. Cambridge University Press, 1992.Wood, Alan. Russia’s Frozen Frontier: A History of Siberia and the Russian Far East 1581–1991. Bloomsbury Academic, 2011.Fisher, Raymond H. The Russian Fur Trade, 1550–1700. University of California Press, 1943.Vakhtin, Nikolai. “Indigenous Peoples of the Russian North.” Cultural Survival Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 2, 2002.Krupnik, Igor. Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia. University Press of New England, 1993.