RSVP to attend in person.
On April 24 at 5:00 PM, the Department of Russian & Slavic Studies will present the first talk in the Rybak Family Ukrainian Lecture Series: “Russia’s Invasion, Ukraine’s Resistance, and Prospects for Peace” with Professor Oxana Shevel. This event is organized by the Department of Russian & Slavic Studies. We invite you to join us for this important discussion.
Why did Russia invade Ukraine and how is the war (un)likely to end and why? This lecture will challenge the idea that NATO expansion provoked the invasion and will instead locate the root causes of the war in the growing domestic political divergence between Russia and Ukraine. Drawing on her recent co-authored book Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (Polity 2024), Oxana Shevel will explain how since 1991 Russia and Ukraine diverged politically, ending up on a collision course. Russia slid back into authoritarianism and imperialism, while Ukraine consolidated a competitive political system and pro-European identity. As Ukraine built a democratic nation-state, Russia refused to accept it and came to see it as an “anti-Russia” project. After political and economic pressure proved ineffective, and even counterproductive, Putin went to war to force Ukraine back into the fold of the “Russian world.” Ukraine resisted, determined to pursue European integration as a sovereign state. These irreconcilable goals, rather than geopolitical wrangling between Russia and the West over NATO expansion, are essential to understanding Russia’s war on Ukraine and the prospects of a negotiated settlement.
Oxana Shevel is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and Director of the Tufts International Relations Program. Her research and teaching focus on the post-communist region, especially Ukraine and Russia, and topics such as nation-building, identity, citizenship and memory politics, church-state relations, and democratization processes. She is co-author (with Maria Popova) of a book on the root causes of the Russo-Ukrainian war, Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (Polity, 2024). Her earlier book Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge, 2011) won the American Association of Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) prize for best book in the fields of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature, and culture. Shevel currently serves as the Vice President and President-Elect of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and as Vice President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN).
Please note that the event will take place in Room 102 on the first floor of 19 University Place.