Lauri Malksoo gives the keynote address at the 2025 REECAS Northwest Conference, an ASEEES regional conference which takes place annually at the University of Washington. Lauri Mälksoo is Professor of International Law at the University of Tartu in Estonia and member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences. During the academic year 2023-2024, he was fellow at the Institut d’études avancées (IEA) in Paris. He earned his law degree at the University of Tartu in 1998, his LL.M. at Georgetown University in 1999 and doctorate at Humboldt University Berlin in 2002. He has subsequently had fellowships at NYU School of Law, at the University of Tokyo and at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars (in Washington, DC). He is member of the Institut de Droit International and since 2021, of the Venice Commission of the Council of Europe. He is an editor-in-chief of the Baltic Yearbook of International Law (at Brill) and is member of the editorial board of the Review of Central and East European Law. Among his publications are monographs Illegal Annexation and State Continuity: The Incorporation of the Baltic States by the USSR'(2nd ed., 2022, Brill) and Russian Approaches to International Law (OUP, 2015). He has published widely on the history of international law related to Russia and the Soviet Union, as well as on current developments and cases in international law.

In February 2022, Russian missiles rained on Ukrainian cities and tanks rolled towards Kyiv to end Ukrainian independent statehood. President Zelensky declined a western evacuation offer and rallied the army and citizens to defend Ukraine. What are the roots of this war which has devastated Ukraine, upended the international legal order, and brought back the spectre of nuclear escalation? How is it that these supposedly “brotherly peoples” became each other’s worst nightmare?

In Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Divergent States, Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel explain how over the last thirty years Russia and Ukraine diverged politically ending up on a catastrophic 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 pressure and economic levers 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 – the authors argue – essential to understanding Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Nargis Kassenova is a senior fellow and director of the Program on Central Asia at the Davis Center. Prior to joining the center, she was an associate professor at the Department of International Relations and Regional Studies of KIMEP University (Almaty, Kazakhstan). She is the former founder and director of the KIMEP Central Asian Studies Center (CASC) and the China and Central Asia Studies Center (CCASC). Kassenova holds a Ph.D. in international cooperation studies from the Graduate School of International Development, Nagoya University (Japan). Her research focuses on Central Asian politics and security, Eurasian geopolitics, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, governance in Central Asia, and the history of state-making in Central Asia. 

Temur Umarov is a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. His research is focused on Central Asian countries’ domestic and foreign policies, as well as China’s relations with Russia and Central Asian neighbors. A native of Uzbekistan, Temur Umarov has degrees in China studies and international relations from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, and Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). He holds an MA in world economics from the University of International Business and Economics (Beijing). He is also an alumnus of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center’s Young Ambassadors and the Carnegie Endowment’s Central Asian Futures programs.

This webinar will be moderated by Scott Radnitz (Director of the Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington).

David Ost is a professor of Politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. He has written widely on eastern Europe, with a focus on Poland, labor, class, democracy, and the radical right. His books include Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics, Workers After Workers’ States, The Defeat of Solidarity, and the edited collection “Class After Communism.” Recent articles include “Why (Which) Workers Often Oppose (Which) Democracy?”, “REN PILL Politics in Poland,” and “The Surprising Right-Wing Relevance of the Russian Revolution.” He is currently finishing a book titled “Red Pill Politics: Fascism and Right-Wing Populism.”

When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked, full-scale invasion of Ukraine just before dawn on 24 February 2022, it marked his latest and most overt attempt to brutally conquer the country and reshaped the world order. Christopher Miller, the Ukraine correspondent for the Financial Times and the foremost journalist covering the country, was there on the ground when the first Russian missiles struck and troops stormed over the border. But the seeds of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the West were sown more than a decade earlier.

This is the definitive, inside story of its long fight for freedom. Told through Miller’s personal experiences, vivid front-line dispatches and illuminating interviews with unforgettable characters, The War Came to Us takes readers on a riveting journey through the key locales and pivotal events of Ukraine’s modern history. From the coal-dusted, sunflower-covered steppe of the Donbas in the far east to the heart of the Euromaidan revolution camp in Kyiv; from the Black Sea shores of Crimea, where Russian troops stealthily annexed Ukraine’s peninsula, to the bloody battlefields where Cossacks roamed before the Kremlin’s warlords ruled with iron fists; and through the horror and destruction wrought by Russian forces in Bucha, Bakhmut, Mariupol, and beyond.

With candor, wit and sensitivity, Miller captures Ukraine in all its glory: vast, defiant, resilient, and full of wonder. A breathtaking narrative that is at times both poignant and inspiring, The War Came to Us is the story of an American who fell in love with a foreign place and its people – and witnessed them do extraordinary things to escape the long shadow of their former imperial ruler and preserve their independence.

Contrary to Putin’s expectations, most Ukrainians responded to Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine by a stronger attachment to their country and nation. One element of this attachment is an embrace of the national language at both the symbolic and communicative levels. Not only did Ukrainians come to love their language more than before, but they also started to speak it more often in their everyday lives. Or so they say.

Volodymyr Kulyk is Head Research Fellow at the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He has also taught at Columbia, Stanford and Yale Universities, Kyiv Mohyla Academy and Ukrainian Catholic University as well as having research fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Woodrow Wilson Center, University College London, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and other Western scholarly institutions. His research fields include the politics of language, memory and identity as well as political and media discourse in contemporary Ukraine, on which he has widely published in Ukrainian and Western journals and collected volumes. Professor Kulyk is the author of four books, the latest of which is Movna polityka v bahatomovnykh kraïnakh: Zakordonnyi dosvid ta ioho prydatnist’ dlia Ukraïny (Language Policies in Multilingual Countries: Foreign Experience and Its Relevance to Ukraine) that was published in Kyiv in 2021. Currently he is an Adjunct Professor, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Stanford University.

Mutations of “Lenin” The Sacred Core of Sovereignty: Soviet, Post-Soviet, Anti-Soviet

Alexei Yurchak is Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley. His interests include political anthropology, linguistic anthropology, science and technology studies, anthropology of the

image and Soviet and post-Soviet studies. He is the author of the award-winning book, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. He is currently finishing a book on the political, scientific and aesthetic histories of Lenin’s body that has been maintained by a unique laboratory science for a century.

Józef Piłsudski, Founding Father of Modern Poland, and his Plan for Ukrainian Independence

Joshua D. Zimmerman is Professor of History at Yeshiva University in New York, where he holds the Eli & Diana Zborowski Chair in Holocaust Studies and East European Jewish History. He is the author of Józef Piłsudski: Founding Father of Modern Poland(Harvard, 2022), The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945(Cambridge, 2015), which appeared in Polish translation in 2018, and Poles, Jews and the Politics of Nationality: The Bund and the Polish Socialist Party in Late Tsarist Russia, 1892-1914 (Wisconsin, 2004). He is also editor of two contributed volumes: Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922-1945 (2005), and Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and its Aftermath (2003). Zimmerman’s articles in the popular press have appeared in The Washington Post, Politico, The Daily Beast, The Times of Israel, The Kyiv Post, Engelsberg Ideas, and Rzeczpospolita (Warsaw).

The lecture will focus on the current political developments in Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In response to thousands of civilian deaths and destruction of the country, the international community has imposed fierce sanctions targeting every sector of the Russian economy. The war has created a new reality and changed the relations between Russia and the European Union from the ground. Was it possible to avoid the war? How are the refugees from Ukraine received and how did the conflict change lives of the people in neighboring countries? What will be the impact for Europe in near future?

Dr. Martin Nekola, Ph.D. received his doctorate in Political Science at the Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. His research is focused on non-democratic regimes, the era of Communism, Czech communities abroad and the East-European anti-communist exiles in the USA during the Cold War. From time to time he participates in the election observation missions organized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). He is the member of Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), he is the author of more than three hundred articles and has published twenty-four books. He is also Czechoslovak Talks Project coordinator.

This event is sponsored by the Honorary Consulate of the Czech Republic, the Department of History and the Ellison Center for Russian, East European & Central Asian Studies, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington.

The Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies at the University of Washington presents the first talk (12/1/2022)in the 2022-2023 REECAS Lecture Series on Russia in the Arctic.

Valeria Vasilyeva (Ph.D. in Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences) is a research fellow at the Center for Arctic Social Studies, European University at St. Petersburg, Russia. Currently, she is a Fulbright visiting scholar at Boise State University. Her research focuses on mobility practices, social construction of space, and perception of infrastructure in the Russian North. She has conducted fieldwork in several regions on the Arctic coast, but her primary region of interest is the Taimyr Peninsula.