Dimitry Kochenov

My @mitpress “Citizenship” 📕 is subject of an erudite review in @nybooks, @atossaaraxia taking #statelessness as a starting point BUT: #Citizenship, NOT statelessness is the problem! @eksmo_live @edizionimulino @univgroningen mitpress.mit.edu/books/citizens…

"Let him go!" a child screams as a crowd band together to rescue a man from forced conscription in Lviv.

🔜 Don’t forget to register now and join us on Monday for this lecture by Hanna Suchocka, followed by a discussion with Balazs Trencsenyi, @ProfKochenov, and @BGrabowskaMoroz! ⏰May 18, 10am 📍Budapest Details: 👉 cutt.ly/ltZMJOMK Registration: 👉 cutt.ly/KtZMKwkG

People in Odessa blockade a press gang vehicle and clash with the police. Resistance to mobilisation, including violent, is visibly growing.

The motto of Soviet journalism was “turning your pen into a bayonet”, but Julian Röpcke goes even further by leaving the Bild and joining a drone company he won’t name because it’s too secret. A more honest way of war profiteering than previously, hence laudable.

We have been advocating for a better use of Article 2 TEU all along and yesterday's Commission v. Hungary is most welcome. "EU values ARE law, after all"!! Orbán's regime helped move EU law in the right direction. academic.oup.com/yel/article/do… @CEUDemInst @BGrabowskaMoroz

Good if Ukrainians have somewhere safe to run away to given deportations threats in the US and EU countries leaning towards rejecting asylum for draft-age men.

So it begins: Italy is now rationing jet fuel at four major airports Bologna, Milan Linate, Venice, Treviso through April 9. Priority goes to medical flights, state aircraft, and routes over 3 hours. Everyone else: good luck. This is what European energy dependency looks like in practice. Actual planes, soon grounded or rerouted, because Europe dismantled its energy strategy piece by piece — first the Green Deal rollback, then the LNG pivot, now a supply crunch that hits civilians at the gate. The irony? The Commission is currently selling energy independence as its new banner.

The ethnocidal framing here is to make one feel there is no alternative to forever war, but what’s destroying Ukrainian identity and possibly statehood is the war itself, the longer it goes. Seven million people fled Ukraine already, most of them for good. More will leave when men are allowed to cross the border. The work of many generations - giant industrial hubs, dams, power stations - has been destroyed, real Ukrainian identity is being replaced with an obscurantist far right cargo cult. What will be left of Ukraine when warmongering pundits finally lose their argument?

Welcome a new paper to appear in 🇺🇸💥Brown Journal of World Affiars💥🇺🇸 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… Aristocratic justice is no justice at all!

“Iran’s actions are putting global economic stability at risk.” - just said von der Leyen. Not the US. Not Israel, but Iran. On whose behalf is @vonderleyen Leyen speaking? No EU member state, not even Germany, frames this crisis as Iran’s alone. That’s not a European position. And it makes even less sense when Italy and Spain have denied US forces access to their bases, and most EU governments openly oppose the war. She’s trying to save the transatlantic relationship but there may be nothing left to save.

Kochenov & Veraldi on the Rule of Law and the EU Social Contract, legaltheoryblog.com/2026/03/31/koc… - Dimitry V. Kochenov (CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest; CEU Department of Legal Studies, Vienna) & Jacquelyn D Veraldi (Central European University (CEU) – Democracy Institute) have posted Supremacy Rule of Law in the Service of a Depoliticised Democracy: Pondering the Nature of the EU’s ‘Social Contract’ (ELJ 2026 (forthcoming)) on SSRN.

"We all say we have certain values, but then there is an asterisk: It doesn’t apply to the majority of humans, certainly not those who do not have the right color of passport, which our society has chosen." A timely Q&A with @ProfKochenov: thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/is-citizenship…

How credible is it for the EU Commission to urge Europeans to cut energy consumption after spending months weakening climate obligations, backing new gas imports, and dismantling the very regulatory architecture designed to reduce fossil fuel dependency? A Middle East crisis spiked energy prices by 70%. And suddenly renewables are strategic again. But emergency appeals to work from home and fly less don’t substitute for structural policy. Scaling up non-fossil generation is the only way to durably decouple Europe from fossil fuel shocks. The Commission knew this. It chose otherwise. Now it’s asking citizens to pay for that choice.

“Originalism has been criticized as a methodology designed to achieve politically conservative outcomes. This case, he said, might offer originalist justices a chance to demonstrate otherwise.” nytimes.com/2026/03/30/us/… via @NYTimes

A reminder of Apple's shameful history of collaboration with Putin's censors. Last year it deleted tracks by the legendary antiwar rapper @noize_mc from Apple Music at the request of Russian officials. By muffling antiwar voices, it is complicit in Russia's war against Ukraine.

💥I spoke to The @mitpress Reader discussing some new citizenship and borders research: Aristocracy, already open borders, ICE and "values": thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/is-citizenship… @leonidragozin @RevDem2020 @ApatrideNetwork @AfterTheState

Apple just banned several VPN apps from the Russian App Store — targeting those that helped users bypass Russia’s DPI-based censorship. That’s not cool, Apple. techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privac…

The political system moved. You stayed back.

💥New paper acceted by the NJEL💥 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… @ElenaBasheska & I delve deeper into the shame of Commission v Malta and explain the far-reaching consequences of Court of Justice failing in its only fuction.