I live and report from Kyiv, Ukraine, and much of my work starts here.
Ukraine is my lens for exploring bigger questions about democracy, authoritarianism, and race—because Ukrainians and Black Americans share strikingly similar struggles against oppression. While our histories differ, both communities navigate systems that limit freedom and demand resilience.
Authoritarianism didn’t begin with Donald Trump. It began centuries ago in the U.S. with slavery and Jim Crow, creating a legacy of racial authoritarianism that continues to shape American life today. Yet discussions of foreign policy rarely center this history. Instead, the U.S. is often treated as a finished example of democracy, while emerging democracies are positioned as students to be taught. I argue the opposite: democracy is a co-learning process. A nation of nearly 250 years has only experienced meaningful democracy since the 1970s, post–Civil Rights era. That history of exclusion matters when comparing the U.S. to fragile or new democracies abroad.
Ukraine became independent in 1991, and watching its democratic journey through this lens allows me to explore parallels with the Black American experience—how people resist authoritarian pressures, assert rights, and navigate inequities under formal systems of governance. It’s a perspective rarely considered in mainstream analysis, but one that can reshape how we think about democracy worldwide.
My understanding of these dynamics was shaped long before I moved to Kyiv. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Georgia and later as a Fulbright scholar in Ukraine, I began to rethink how race and power operate globally. Living in the post-Soviet space helped me appreciate Ukrainians and Georgians—whom I once understood primarily through a narrow American racial lens as simply “white”—within their own historical contexts as peoples who experienced oppression under Russian imperial and Soviet colonial rule. Those experiences pushed me to think more deeply about how systems of domination operate across societies and how different histories of oppression can illuminate one another.
I’m a journalist by training, and my reporting from Ukraine appears on my YouTube channel, Terrell J. Starr Official. Here on Substack, I take a step back to dig deeper: exploring racial authoritarianism, democratic struggles, and intersections between race and Ukraine that most readers would never compare. I write about media narratives, cases like the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, and patterns in U.S. foreign policy—examining how American leaders interact differently with authoritarian regimes abroad than with communities of color at home.
Academically, I hold a master’s degree in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, where my research focused on the European Union’s integration of former communist states. I also earned a second master’s degree in Journalism from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I received my bachelor’s degree in English from Philander Smith College. My academic background, combined with years of reporting across Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space, informs how I approach questions of democracy, race, and global politics.
This newsletter is for readers who want a different perspective on Ukraine and foreign policy—one that challenges American innocence, situates racial authoritarianism at home as a lens for understanding fragile democracies abroad, and bridges gaps in global conversations. If you want analysis that connects race, Ukraine, and authoritarianism in ways you’ve never seen before, this is the Substack to follow.
