Our guest for episode 56 of The International Risk Podcast is Taras Kuzio, who is an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Kyiv Mohlya Academy. Our conversation with Taras comes at a particularly timely occasion, as Russo-Ukrainian relations continue to tense and populate international media headlines.
“It’s nothing to do with NATO enlargement. It’s down to the question that for Vladimir Putin and similar Russian nationalists, Ukraine is a Russian land and Ukrainians are one of the three branches of the Russian people”
–Taras Kuzio, The International Risk Podcast
He is a prolific author having published over 22 books and 130 scholarly articles, including “Putin’s War Against Ukraine: Revolution, Nationalism, and Crime” and his most recent publication “Russian Nationalism and the Russian-Ukrainian War”. He has made numerous media appearances due to his expertise on Eastern European affairs. From 1998-1999, he was director of the NATO Information and Documentation in Kyiv and also served as a long-term observer for the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe during the 1998 and 2002 parliamentary elections in Ukraine. He has also been a consultant to different branches of the US government in fields of democracy, governance and human rights in Ukraine.
“The days are gone when big powers can decide the fortunes of smaller countries. So I’m not even sure what the West can do to respond, especially as some of the demands basically mean rolling back NATO enlargement to what it was prior to the late 1990s”
–Taras Kuzio, The International Risk Podcast
You can read Taras’s new book “Russian Nationalism and the Russian-Ukrainian War” here and learn more about the Henry Jackson Society here
