Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture, Room 206. Coffee/tea and cookies at 3:45 pm.

media release: Professor Oxana Shevel will present on her recent book, Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (co-authored with Maria Popova), which examines the root causes of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The book explains 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 – the authors argue – essential to understanding Russia’s war on Ukraine.

About the speaker: 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-Soviet 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 Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (Polity, 2023). 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. Prof. Shevel serves as Vice President of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) and of the AAUS. She’s also a country expert on Ukraine for the EU Global Citizenship Observatory, a member of the PONARS Eurasia scholarly network, a board member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society and an associate of both the Davis Center and the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Prof. Shevel holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard, an M.Phil. in international relations from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. in English and French from Kyiv State University.