Kyiv School of Economics

During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, wastewater-based genomic surveillance (WWGS) emerged as an efficient viral surveillance tool that takes into account asymptomatic cases and can identify known and novel mutations and offers the opportunity to assign known virus lineages based on the detected mutations profiles. WWGS can also hint towards novel or cryptic lineages, but it is difficult to clearly identify and define novel lineages from wastewater (WW) alone. While WWGS has significant advantages in monitoring SARS-CoV-2 viral spread, technical challenges remain, including poor sequencing coverage and quality due to viral RNA degradation. As a result, the viral RNAs in wastewater have low concentrations and are often fragmented, making sequencing difficult. WWGS analysis requires advanced computational tools that are yet to be developed and benchmarked. The existing bioinformatics tools used to analyze wastewater sequencing data are often based on previously developed methods for quantifying the expression of transcripts or viral diversity. Those methods were not developed for wastewater sequencing data specifically, and are not optimized to address unique challenges associated with wastewater. While specialized tools for analysis of wastewater sequencing data have also been developed recently, it remains to be seen how they will perform given the ongoing evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and the decline in testing and patient-based genomic surveillance. Here, we discuss opportunities and challenges associated with WWGS, including sample preparation, sequencing technology, and bioinformatics methods.

Sociology has two main strategies in development theory: reflections on contradictions in the current set of empirical findings and reconsideration of historically absorbed conceptions. The essay presents reflections on lack of epistemological novelty of these strategies. If we use already known conceptions and designed according to them empirical studies, the risk of tautological explanations rises. The other supplementary source that could address this risk is the so-called “potential classics”, a set of superseded or forgotten conceptual approaches that could had – but did not – shape the direction of research path due to unfavorable historical circumstances, which were very often far removed from scientific reasons and depended on political and institutional contexts. The history of early Ukrainian sociology is full of such tendencies. Despite this fact, some of superseded approaches are still in use in research, as for example, Serhii Podolynsky’s (1850-1891) theory, which influenced Barcelona school of political ecology and ecological economics. “Potential” classics provide alternative options for theoretical imagination and, in some sense, could be closer to the current challenges of Ukrainian sociology than patterns that originated in the shadow of Soviet past, as it demonstrated by the case of the Ukrainian Sociological Institute functioning as a private research organization in interwar Prague. The essay also emphasizes the importance of another way of looking at the history of early sociology in general and Ukrainian in particular. Early sociology development took place in a period when distinct boundaries between fields were absent, and the formation of sociology was influenced by from domains even beyond science, including culture, arts, literature, and others. Therefore, the author insists that the history of early Ukrainian sociology should be studied rather as the history of culture than as the history of isolated science, as is more common today. In case of “potential” classics, work with theories is similar to anamnesis.

The chapter focuses on the memory of the people killed during the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine called the “Heavenly Hundred” and which has contributed to the sacralization of protests in the country. It argues that this narrative is formed as “post-secular sacred” which allows a sacralized representation of the victims as martyrs without giving them a canonical status of martyrs recognized by the Church. Such sacralization without canonization is possible because the established tradition to represent fighters for national freedom as martyrs and saints serves as a mold for the memory of the Heavenly Hundred. In addition, the present moment of the war shapes this memory as a matter of national security. It provides the memory with the sense of immediacy and urgency in which the questions of canonicity can be ignored.

Background: Ukraine has substantial regional differences in climate, landscape, forest cover, and river networks, which may influence leptospirosis transmission. However, recent monthly oblast-level variation in leptospirosis incidence has not been systematically described. We used newly available surveillance data for 2023-2025 to assess seasonal and regional patterns of leptospirosis and their associations with weather, climatic zone, forest cover, and river network density. Methods: We analyzed surveillance data from 23 Ukrainian oblasts. Incidence was assessed by month, oblast, and climatic zone. Weather data were aggregated monthly; forest cover and river network density were included as predictors. Associations were assessed using correlation, cross-correlation, and Random Forest ML models. Results: Incidence showed a clear seasonal increase, reaching its highest levels in late summer and autumn, approximately one to three months after seasonal peaks in temperature and precipitation. The highest incidence was observed in Zakarpattia, Chernihiv, and Ternopil oblasts, while incidence by climatic zone was highest in the Carpathian group and lowest in the Steppe zone. Among weather variables, average temperature showed the clearest delayed association with leptospirosis incidence. River network density was the leading ecological predictor in the adjusted models. The positive unadjusted association between forest cover and incidence became negative after adjustment for river network density, suggesting that these variables captured overlapping ecological characteristics. In the Random Forest analysis, river network density was the top-ranked predictor, and the best-performing model achieved an AUC of 0.795. Conclusions: Leptospirosis incidence in Ukraine varied substantially by season and region. Delayed temperature effects, river network density, and forest cover were associated with regional risk. Monthly oblast-level surveillance with climatic and ecological data may help monitor leptospirosis risk, but war-related disruption to diagnosis and reporting should be considered.

Based on an analysis of academic studies, analytical reports, journalistic retrospectives, and regulatory documents, the article proposes a social-historical periodization of the development of IT entrepreneurship in Ukraine from 1991 to the early 2020s. The research is grounded in the approach of social history, which makes it possible to consider IT entrepreneurship not only as an economic or technological activity, but as part of broader social transformations. The focus is placed not merely on quantitative indicators of industry growth, but primarily on changes in the organization of labor, professional practices, forms of interaction, and social perceptions. Within the proposed periodization, five main stages are identified, reflecting the sequential evolution of IT entrepreneurship in Ukraine. These stages encompass the transition from isolated initiatives and the first IT firms of the 1990s, which operated under conditions of institutional uncertainty and limited access to markets, to the formation in the 2010s of a structured industry with established organizational models, a developed community infrastructure, and a growing product segment. The study traces a shift in entrepreneurial logic-from service-oriented models to the emergence of companies that create their own technological products and integrate into global value chains. The analytical focus of the article is concentrated on several interrelated dimensions: the evolution of organizational structures of IT companies, the transformation of professional roles and labor models, the formation of an internal culture of the IT sector, as well as the development of external perceptions of IT professionals as a distinct social group. It is shown that the development of IT entrepreneurship in Ukraine was uneven and largely determined by a combination of global market influences and internal social factors, in particular professional self-organization and horizontal ties within the community. The proposed social-historical periodization does not claim to be definitive; however, it provides an analytical framework for further research on the history of IT entrepreneurship in Ukraine and may be used for in-depth analysis of specific stages, practices, and social transformations associated with the development of the digital economy.