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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The Impacts of Host- and Home-Country Political Environments on Russian Activists Abroad
Image credit/license The departure of thousands of activists from Russia since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has created opportunities for them both to engage with new constituencies and to work with old constituents in new ways. Social movement theory—specifically the concept of “political opportunity structure” (POS), which Sidney Tarrow defined as “the consistent…
Can Russians Learn to Recognize Propaganda? Understanding of Media Bias Amid the Ukraine War
Image credit/license Russians seem to be trapped in an echo chamber of propaganda: The polling suggests that most Russian adults consume news through state‐controlled media. Our own research shows that this is not only due to the suppression of independent news but also because many citizens genuinely trust state outlets. News consumers’ attachment to propaganda has helped the Kremlin to…
The 2024 BRICS Summit in Kazan: Another Russian Attempt to Regain Diplomatic Status
Image credit/license On October 22-24, 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted the latest BRICS summit in Kazan. Notably, it was the first gathering of the heads of state and government following last year’s expansion. As per the decision at last year’s summit, held in August in Johannesburg, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates officially became BRICS members on…
Despite Everything: How and Why Russia Remains an Actor in the Horn of Africa
Image credit/license The interest of major state actors in the Horn of Africa (HoA) and the Red Sea is evident in their basing strategies in the area. Djibouti is the rare state in the region to host several military bases of different states, namely, China, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States. The Sudanese coast has been of interest to external actors, as well, with Qatar, Russia,…
Resilience Strained: How Civil-Military Relations Are Shaping Russia’s War Effort
Image credit/license The shocks to Russian civil-military relations amid the Russia-Ukraine war started in the first days of the invasion in February-March 2022 and have kept rolling with the partial mobilization in September 2022, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in June 2023, and, most recently, the reshuffle and arrests at the Defense Ministry and General Staff in May 2024. On the one hand,…
Survey Data from Republic of Georgia Highlights Risks of Polarization Ahead of 2024 Election
Image credit/license The Republic of Georgia will hold highly consequential elections on October 26. This is the first parliamentary election conducted under a fully proportional electoral system, the first since Georgia was granted EU candidate status, and the first since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It also marks twelve years since the governing party, Georgian Dream,…
The Kremlin’s Dilemma: Effectiveness versus Loyalty in the Case of Prigozhin’s Wagner PMC
Image credit/license Autocracies constantly face the challenge of balancing loyalty and effectiveness, and Russia and its military are no exception. The demise of the Wagner Group and Yevgeny Prigozhin following the 2023 mutiny highlights the risks of empowering ambitious outside actors to address bureaucratic inefficiencies. Nonetheless, other private military companies (PMCs), along with…
Foreign Fighters in Ukraine Pose Growing, Unaddressed Threat to Western Security
Image credit/license The 2022 invasion of Ukraine has reshaped the security landscape of Europe, exposing Moscow’s renewed imperial ambitions and its subversive campaigns against Western countries. Yet, amid this upheaval, the activities of foreigners fighting for Ukraine—and their status and fate after the war—have largely escaped the attention of Western governments and intelligence…
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.
