CEURUS public lectures on the Ukrainian crisis

You are most welcome to attend two upcoming guest lectures on the Ukrainian crisis by two exceptionally well-informed and insightful experts. The lectures take place at 14.15-15.45 at Lossi 36-215 on April 21st and April 23rd.

"The End of the Soviet Ukraine. What's Next?" by Mykola Riabchuk, IWM, Vienna on April 21, 14.15-15.45 at Lossi 36-215 and

On April 21, Mykola Riabchuk will talk about the domestic implications of the conflict. After two failed attempts to break radically with the Soviet legacy and put their country on the European way of development, Ukrainians are trying now to complete once again the unfinished business of the 1989 East European revolutions. The shift of values that occurred in the relatively open and pluralistic Ukrainian society within the past two decades increasingly facilitates post-communist transformations. On the other hand, transition is dramatically complicated by the institutional and economic ruin left by the predecessors, as well as by Russia-s unprecedented political, economic, and military pressure.

Mykola Riabchuk is a political and cultural analyst in Kiev and currently a senior visiting fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and senior research fellow at I.F. Kuras Institute of Political and Ethno-National Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Previously, he was a senior research associate at the Ukrainian Centre for Cultural Studies in Kyiv. He lectured at Columbia, Alberta, Warsaw, Regensburg and also held a number of fellowships including Fulbright, Reuters and Milena Jesenska. His interests include civil society, state/nation building, nationalism, national identity, and post-communist transition in the post-Soviet countries, primarily in Ukraine. His most recent book is “Gleichschaltung: Authoritarian Consolidation in Ukraine, 2010-2012.”

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"Ukrainian crisis: implications for international relations, markets and norms” by James Sherr, Chatham House, UK on April 23, 14.15-15.45 at Lossi 36-215

On April 23, James Sherr will analyse the external dimension of the conflict focusing on the following questions: What does the crisis in Ukraine mean and what can it tell us about the political and economic developments in the world? What implications does it have for international relations? How to understand the involvement of major actors (i.e. Russia, EU, USA) and what do their responses to these developments tell us about the state of the international system?

James Sherr is Associate Fellow at Royal Institute for International Affairs/Chatham House. Previously he was head of Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House; fellow, Advanced Research & Assessment Group, at UK Defence Academy and lecturer in International Relations at Lincoln College Oxford. His interests include foreign and security policy of the Russian Federation, Ukraine, NATO/EU Enlargement and the Black Sea Region, security sector reform in post-Communist states, the energy relationship between Russia, Ukraine and the EU. His latest book is Hard Diplomacy and Soft Coercion: Russia's Influence Abroad.

The public lectures are organized by the Centre for EU-Russia Studies (CEURUS) at the University of Tartu. For more information about the Centre, see http://ceurus.ut.ee.