Online lecture | Andreas Umland | Russia's war against Ukraine in a regional context: prehistory, interpretations, prospects

The  lecture will be also live-streamed on the CIUS Facebook page

Many interpreters approach Russia’s war against Ukraine from a historical perspective, which leads them to see the war as being overdetermined by the difficult past of Russian-Ukrainian relations. In contrast, I will try to contextualize the start of the war in 2014 as a more contingent event that was not predetermined but rather the combined effect of actions by a range of actors within and outside the region, as well as the result of specific developments in Eastern Europe.  

Andreas Umland , DPhil (FU Berlin), PhD (Cambridge), fellowships and lectureships at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), Harvard University, St. Antony’s College (Oxford), Urals State University, Kyiv National Shevchenko University, Catholic University of Eichstaett, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation and Ukrainian Institute for the Future (Kyiv), and Institute of International Relations Prague. Since 2020 Dr. Umland has been an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, Swedish Institute of International Affairs. He is the general editor of ibidem-Verlag’s book series Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society and Ukrainian Voices and a member of the boards of directors/editors of Forum noveishei vostochnoevropeiskoi istorii i kul’tury , the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies, the Boris Nemtsov Centre for the Academic Study of Russia at Charles University (Prague), ibidem-Verlag’s book series Explorations of the Far Right, Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, and Ideology and Politics Journal.

This lecture is organized by the Contemporary Ukraine Studies Program (CUSP), a research program of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta (Edmonton). CUSP’s mission is to develop contemporary Ukraine studies in the national Canadian and global intellectual contexts through cross-disciplinary and collaborative research, publishing, community involvement, and other projects that analyze the contemporary situation in Ukraine and within the broader comparative context of European, Transatlantic, Eurasian, Slavic, and post-Soviet studies.