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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Russia’s Road to Economic Ruin
(Foreign Affairs) The Long-Term Costs of the Ukraine War Will Be Staggering. fter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the Russian economy seemed destined for a nosedive. International sanctions threatened to strangle the economy, leading to a plunge in the value of the ruble and Russian financial markets. Everyday Russians appeared poised for privation. More than eight months into…
Putin Fans or Kremlin Bots? War and Mobilization Across Russian Social Media Platforms
(RE: Russia) If you are communicating on a social media site or just scrolling your timeline, and you think you are simply observing a cross-section of society and its responses to current events, then you are deeply mistaken. You are falling into a specially designed trap. Social media has long ceased to be a space of pure freedom. Now these websites are flooded with an army of trolls,…
New Voices on Eurasia with Guzel Garifullina: The Face of the Russian State at the Subnational Level (Nov. 9)
“People Behind the Scenes: The Face of the Russian State at the Subnational Level“ What kinds of people does the Russian state apparatus consist of? The state is not faceless, and individuals in decision-making positions, even at the local level, can have enormous consequences—particularly if the same features are seen across localities and regions and are institutionally…
Roundtable Discussion: Cultural & Heritage-Led Postwar Reconstruction of Donbas (Nov. 8)
Roundtable discussion to mark the opening of the exhibit “Labor, Exhaustion, & Success: Company Towns in Donbas,” on display 11/1-11/311 at the GW Elliott School This roundtable discussion will mark the opening of the poster exhibit “Labor, Exhaustion, and Success: Company Towns in Donbas,” which presents the history of Donbas through the history of mono-functional…
Russians Know the Reality of War, and Many of Them Still Support Putin
(NYTimes) Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, an old English proverb says. Its Russian counterpart advises you to count your chickens in the fall. In Russia, fall starts looming in August and is often revelatory. The August 1991 putsch burst open the cracks within the Soviet elite, accelerating the country’s implosion, and the August 1998 financial…
Is Ukraine a Multiethnic Country?
This paper critically examines the widespread perception of Ukraine as a multiethnic country with clear boundaries between ethnic groups. It demonstrates that despite the Soviet legacy of rather strong institutionalization and discursive presentation of nationality, the post-Soviet state discontinued or downplayed most of the institutional mechanisms for the reproduction of ethnic…
Book Presentation: Eugene Fishel: The Moscow Factor (Oct. 19)
In 2014, Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine, bolstered a separatist conflict in the Donbas region, and attacked Ukraine with units of its regular army and special forces. In each instance of Russian aggression, the U.S. response has often been criticized as inadequate, insufficient, or hesitant. The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin is a…
The End of the Post-Soviet Order: How Putin’s War Has Hurt Russia in Central Asia and the Caucasus
(Foreign Affairs) The Kremlin has struggled to contain the fallout of its invasion of Ukraine. It did not imagine that its war would inspire sustained unity among Western countries, nor that the Ukrainian army would resist so well, nor that it would need to partly mobilize the Russian population, a drastic measure with potentially disastrous domestic consequences. A war intended to restore…
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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- 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.
