Public lecture

Press release — 19 May 2014

 

Professor Stefan Hedlund  from Uppsala University, Sweden, will give a public lecture entitled

“A Country Disappears: How Moscow and Brussels Lost Ukraine”

 on 27 May 2014 from 14.15-15.45 at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Lossi 36, room 215

The crisis in Ukraine has now passed the point of no return. The country that we knew only weeks ago is no more. What will come instead is highly unclear, but it will surely not be an outcome that is good for anyone. The root cause of the tragedy is linked to a decade of severe mismanagement by successive governments in Kiev. But we cannot ignore the respective roles played by Moscow and Brussels. By defining their struggle for influence over Ukraine as a zero sum game, they effectively paved the way for what is now happening.

Stefan Hedlund is Professor of Russian and East European Studies at Uppsala University and Research Director at Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He published numerous articles in scholarly journals and ten books including Russian Path Dependence (London: Routledge, 2005). His latest book is Putin’s Energy Agenda: The Contradictions of Russia’s Resource Wealth (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2014), that grapples with questions of resource nationalism and with the role of competing agendas in formulating Russian foreign and energy policy.

The public lecture is organized by the Centre for EU-Russia Studies (CEURUS) at the University of Tartu.