Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine | PONARS Eurasia Insights
OUR MISSION
The Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) is a network of over 125 academics, mainly from North America and post-Soviet Eurasia, advancing new approaches to research on security, politics, economics, and society in Russia and Eurasia. Its core missions are to connect scholarship to policy on and in Russia and Eurasia and to foster a community, especially of mid-career and rising scholars, committed to developing policy-relevant and collaborative research.
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Clearing the Air: Secretary Blinken Visits Ukraine
Image license/credit Secretary Blinken’s recent visit to Ukraine stands out in a number of ways. Blinken had not been in Ukraine for exactly a year, since September 8, 2022. This is quite a long time considering the level of engagement between Kyiv and Washington since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion against Ukraine in February 2022. Indeed, this engagement has been enormous and…
Ukraine Task Force: Getting Ukraine Right: From Negotiations Trap to Victory
PONARS Eurasia has organized a Task Force of prominent academic experts based in Ukraine, Europe, and North America to generate expert-group assessments of Ukraine-related events, issues, and trends. Our goal is to help other scholars, the policy community, and the public to make sense of and put into broader context the voluminous flow of information from and about the region. See the…
Ensuring Genuine Results? A New Electoral Design in Uzbekistan
PONARS Eurasia Commentary | Uzbekistan is undergoing its first constitutional reforms since Shavkat Mirziyoyev’s accession to power in 2016, marking another important change to its political structure. The president has proposed replacing the two-part system with a mixed-member parallel system to increase the role of political parties in governance. According to officials, the new…
Ukraine, Taiwan, and Macron’s “Strategic Autonomy”
PONARS Eurasia Commentary | In Europe, one now wonders whether President Emmanuel Macron and his “strategic autonomy” proposal caused damage to the political and military cohesion of the West on which the freedoms of Ukrainians and Taiwanese lie. During his visit to China on April 8, Macron outlined to President Xi Jinping the possibility of increased EU strategic autonomy. He said the…
After Violence: Russia’s Beslan School Massacre and the Peace that Followed
NEW BOOK | Starting on September 1, 2004, and ending 53 hours later, Russia experienced its most appalling act of terrorism in history, the seizure of School No. 1 in Beslan, North Ossetia. Approximately 1,200 children, parents, and teachers were taken hostage, and over 330—nearly one of every hundred Beslan residents—were killed, hundreds more seriously wounded, and all severely…
Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022
NEW BOOK | The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has its roots in the events of 2013–2014. Russia cynically termed the seditionist conflict in Crimea and Eastern Donbas a ‘civil war’ in order to claim non-involvement. This flies in the face of evidence, but the authors argue that the social science literature on civil wars can be used help understand why no political solution…
A Rock and a Hard Place: The Russian Opposition in a Time of War | New Voices on Eurasia with Jeremy Ladd (April 11)
The latest in the New Voices on Eurasia Series, introducing the DC policy community to the best “up and coming” scholars on Eurasia. A Rock and A Hard Place: The Russian Opposition in a Time of War This talk looks at how the opposition space in Russia has been impacted by and responded to the war in Ukraine. In particular, this talk analyzes the extent to which the systemic opposition in…
Russia’s Regional Governors: Backing the War, Upholding the Status Quo
(PONARS Eurasia Commentary) Experts have been actively discussing the Russian domestic factors that could influence the course of the war. Considering the country’s territorial size and diversity, the stability of center-regional relations is, without a doubt, a crucial consideration. Could the weakening of these relations become a limiting factor for the Putin administration and its…
Online Academy
PONARS Eurasia Online Academy: educational videos authored by members and designed to provide succinct overviews of policy-relevant research and scholarship on Russia and Eurasia. Each video is accompanied by a list of additional sources, providing a foundation for those who would like to learn more about the topics addressed.
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Political Reforms and Transitional Justice for Postwar Russia
Political Reforms and Transitional Justice for Postwar Russia: Evidence from ...
Opportunities and Constraints for Russian Activists-in-Exile after Russia’s 2022 Invasion of Ukraine
Opportunities and Constraints for Russian Activists-in-Exile after Russia’s 2022 Invasion ...
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- In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman speaks with Russian China experts Vita Spivak and Alexander Gabuev about the February meeting between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and what it may tell us about where the Russian-Chinese relationship is headed.
- In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with scholars Kelly Smith and Benjamin Nathans about the history, achievements, and impending shutdown of the Memorial Society, Russia's oldest and most venerable civic organization, and what its imminent liquidation portends for the Russian civil society.
- In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with social scientist Andrey Shcherbak about the quality of the data collected in the recent population census and the goals of Vladimir Putin's government's nationalities policy
- In this week’s PONARS Eurasia Podcast, Maria Lipman chats with Alexander Verkhovsky about the Kremlin's ever expanding toolkit against political and civic activists, journalists, and other dissidents.
