This special edition of Crossing Channels was organised in response to the invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022. It covers how the Ukrainian people, policymakers, and government have responded during the first ten days of the war, its geopolitical context and implications, and the scale of the information war taking place, within both Ukraine and Russia. 

This episode is hosted by Rory Cellan-Jones, and features expert guests Nataliia Shapoval from the Kyiv School of Economics, Horacio Larreguy from the IAST, and Ayse Zarakol from the University of Cambridge.

Listen to this episode on your preferred podcast platform.

Episode 6 transcript

For more information about the conflict, the BBC is running a live webpage with up-to-date coverage of the war here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-europe-60532634

The Kyiv School of Economics has on its website a summary of ways you can support it and Ukraine during the crisis: https://kse.ua/. This includes their lecture marathon to enhance Ukrainian intellectual sovereignty, along with ways to donate and apply political pressure. 

For more information about the podcast and the work of the institutes, visit our websites at www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk and www.iast.fr/. 

Tweet us with your thoughts at @BennettInst and @IASToulouse.

Audio production by Steve Hankey.

Podcast editing by Annabel Manley

More information about our guests:

Nataliia Shapoval is the Vice President for Policy Research and Director of the Center of Excellence in Procurement at the Kyiv School of Economics in Ukraine. She worked on policy research projects on public health’s cost and resource allocation, and on youth unemployment in Ukraine and Europe. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of Vox Ukraine, and a contributor to the Ukraine reform monitoring project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Ayse Zarakol is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests are at the intersection of historical sociology and international relations, focussing on East-West relations. She is the author of two books, her first being After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (2011) which covers the integration of defeated non-Western powers into the international system. Her second, Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders, which looks at an alternative global history for international relations focussed on (Eur)asia, was released in March 2022. This book is available for purchase here: https://tinyurl.com/2p9xddxp

Horacio Larreguy is an Associate Professor of Economics and Political Science at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM), and is currently a visiting researcher at the Toulouse School of Economics and IAST. His research interests are in political accountability and voting behaviour, including the importance of information for political accountability. More recently, he has worked on projects on misinformation and the Covid-19 infodemic.