Daria Krivonos is a researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her opinion piece on the differences between postsocialism and postcolonialism in the context of Russia's invasion of Ukraine was first published on the LeftEast platform, and an edited version is published on Global Voices with permission. In recent years, there has been a growing tendency among scholars and activists in Eastern Europe to draw parallels between the “postcolonial” and the “postsocialist.” As journalist Adem Ferizaj argues in his recent review, the use of postcolonial approaches in the context of postsocialism “leads to the false analogy that postsocialism is more or less the postcolonialism of all populations affected by the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has given a new push to this discussion. For example, the framing of Ukraine and other Eastern European countries as former Soviet/Russian colonies sometimes led to some expectations that countries in the global south would solidarize with Ukraine. The logic follows that the experience of colonialism and oppression should drive solidarities across Ukraine, Europe’s east and the global south. Yet it is telling that the move to build solidarities and to seek these connections has been unidirectional, and has predominantly come from those located in the east of Europe. There should be no doubt that Russia’s invasion should be understood as both nationalist and imperialist, and that Russia’s white majority should rethink Russian history through the prism of imperialism, while scholars of the region engage with extensive work which has discussed the applicability of the “colonial” to the case of Russian Empire/Soviet Union/Russian Federation. Another question to be asked is where the discussion of Russian imperialism leaves us in relation to global anti-colonial struggles, and what would be the grounds for seeking solidarities with those (formerly) colonized in other parts of the world? In this essay, I suggest that the jump to building analogies between postcolonialism and postsocialism might be too quick and, at the very least, requires examining the region’s active participation in the policing of the physical and symbolic borders of “Europe.” As critical scholars of postsocialism note, one of the narratives through which the post-1989 era was understood by Western and Eastern European elites was the story of a “return to Europe.” It is narrated as a liberation from Soviet occupation/colonialism, “orientalist Bolshevism,” and a return to the “European civilization” and a “common European home.” Underlining the innate Europeanness has become the priority for many identity discourses in the region. Notions of Europe and Europeanness again became central in the narrative of the war in Ukraine: Ukrainians do not only defend their right to exist as a nation, but they fight for “European values,” which supposedly should strengthen the support of Ukraine. This framing also suggests that the values of freedom, fairness and equality are inherently European, which overlooks the struggles for exactly the same values in a non-European world. The appeal to “European values” was also visible in the context of the ongoing tragedy and sanctioned violence at the Polish-Belarusian border , where some activists argued that Poland should embrace “European values” to asylum seekers from freezing and starvation in the forest, even though one would argue that it is precisely the value of “defending our European way of life” which sentences people to death in the forest and the sea. But what did the return to the “European home” entail for those who became EU member states? Among other things, the so-called “eastern enlargement” (indeed, a problematic term on its own) in the EU posed new challenges for the protection of the EU’s external frontiers considering that the new member states had to become responsible for the internal security of the union. Eastern European accession states got to be seen as vital to the containment of illegalized migration. As a result, the new EU member states had to change their legislative arrangements in increasingly restrictive ways, including the readmission agreements which became instruments enabling the removal of aliens from a state’s territory now part of the EU. In fact, the capacity for effective border control has been vital for the admission into the EU, which channeled considerable funds to shoring up the infrastructure and operational capacity of border guards to prepare them for their new responsibility of patrolling the EU’s eastern external frontiers.