Website: http://robertvanvoren.com/
Robert van Voren is a Sovietologist by education, a Honorary Fellow of the British Royal College of Psychiatrists and Honorary Member of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association. He was also Permanent Representative of Ukraine in the Benelux for Humanitarian Affairs in 1994-1997, and in 2005 he was knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for his work as a human rights activist. He is currently Professor of Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas (Lithuania) and Ilia State University in Tbilisi (Georgia).
There are some images that remain engraved in your eyeballs for the rest of your life. For me one of those images dates back to 1991, more than 25 years ago, when I for the first time entered a Soviet psychiatric hospital. It was in Kyiv,...
Imagine your brother decides to marry and needs more space in the flat your deceased mother left behind, in order to be able establish a family. He manages to find a psychiatrist to declare you legally incapable and delivers you to a...
Imagine 2019. President Trump has been around for three years, bogged down by court cases in connection with shady deals with among others Saudi Arabia and Russia, dealing with accusations of sexual abuse, the bankruptcy of some of his...
It is clear the honeymoon days are over. Three years after the start of Maidan, it is evident that many of the hopes that Maidan created did not materialize, and that the process of transforming Ukraine into a democratic society based on...
“Their world is collapsing. Ours is being built”. With these words the chief strategist of French right-wing leader Marianne Le Pen welcomed the news of Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States. Also Dutch right wing...
It was supposed to be an effective public relations move, creating doubt and sowing distrust among the Western European public. Two days before the presentation of the report of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) on the downing of the...
The year 2016 will go down in history as a turning point. Whatever happens during the second half of the year will not alter that fundamentally, it may only make the significance even bigger. A possible further incursion of Russian troops...
It took Moses forty years to lead the Israeli people out of the desert into the Promised Land, enough to let the generation die that grew up in slavery in Egypt. In the end, the people that found their final home were free and hardened by...
Thirty years ago the political landscape on the European continent seemed stable and fixated for decades to come. The continent was divided between the free West and the Eastern Bloc, dominated by the totalitarian Soviet imperium. A new...
One of the results of the Maidan is the transfer of the KGB archives to the National Memory Institute and access to the files for the Ukrainian public. A major step, considering the fact that Ukraine was the second largest Soviet republic,...
The fight for its creation was not easy. President Petro Poroshenko, the author of Ukraine’s judicial reform, resisted the idea till the very last moment. The pressure of society and Ukraine’s western partners made him change his mind....
