George Frost Kennan was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".
Power projection in international relations is the capacity of a state to deploy and sustain forces outside its territory. The ability of a state to project its power into an area may serve as an effective diplomatic lever, influencing the decision-making processes and acting as a potential deterrent on other states' behavior.
Andrei Vladimirovich Kozyrev is a Russian politician who served as the former and the first Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation under President Boris Yeltsin, in office for the Russian SFSR from October 1990 and, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, from 1992 until January 1996 for Russia. In his position, he was credited with developing Russia's foreign policy immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union, although many in Russia have criticized him for being weak and not assertive enough in defending Russian interests in the face of NATO in places such as Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ba'athist Iraq.
The Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars was founded in 1974 to carry out studies of the Soviet Union (Sovietology), and subsequently of post-Soviet Russia and other post-Soviet states. The institute is widely regarded as the foremost institute for advanced Russia studies in the United States.
China–Ukraine relations are foreign relations between Ukraine and China. The earliest contact in record between the nations date back to the first Russian Orthodox mission in China in 1715, which was led by the Ukrainian Archimandrite Hilarion (Lezhaysky). As part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine recognized the People's Republic of China in October 1949. After Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the two countries built formal diplomatic relations in 1992, and declared a strategic partnership in 2011.
There are currently no diplomatic or bilateral relations between Russia and Ukraine. The two states have been at war since Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula in February 2014, and Russian-controlled armed groups seized Donbas government buildings in May 2014. Following the Ukrainian Euromaidan in 2014, Ukraine's Crimean peninsula was occupied by unmarked Russian forces, and later illegally annexed by Russia, while pro-Russia separatists simultaneously engaged the Ukrainian military in an armed conflict for control over eastern Ukraine; these events marked the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War. In a major escalation of the conflict on 24 February 2022, Russia launched a large scale military invasion across a broad front, causing Ukraine to sever all formal diplomatic ties with Russia.
Taras Kuzio is a Professor of Political Science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. His area of study is Russian and Ukrainian political, economic and security affairs.
Mark Galeotti is a British historian, lecturer and writer on transnational crime and Russian security affairs and director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence. He is an honorary professor at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, and an associate fellow in Euro-Atlantic geopolitics at the Council on Geostrategy.
Hybrid warfare is a theory of military strategy, first proposed by Frank Hoffman, which employs political warfare and blends conventional warfare, irregular warfare, and cyberwarfare with other influencing methods, such as fake news, diplomacy, lawfare, regime change, and foreign electoral intervention. By combining kinetic operations with subversive efforts, the aggressor intends to avoid attribution or retribution. The concept of hybrid warfare has been criticized by a number of academics and practitioners due to its alleged vagueness, its disputed constitutive elements, and its alleged historical distortions.
Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government in Fairfax, Virginia, United States, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC. He researches and teaches classes about Russian politics and foreign policy, revolution, and the "War on Terror."
Andreas Umland is a German political scientist studying contemporary Russian and Ukrainian history as well as regime transitions. He has published on the post-Soviet extreme right, municipal decentralization, European fascism, post-communist higher education, East European geopolitics, Ukrainian and Russian nationalism, the Donbas and Crimea conflicts, as well as the neighborhood and enlargement policies of the European Union. He is a Senior Expert at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future in Kyiv as well as a research fellow at the Swedish Institute for International Affairs in Stockholm. He lives in Kyiv, and teaches as an Associate Professor of Politics at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. In 2005–2014, he was involved in the creation of a Master's program in German and European Studies administered jointly by the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Jena University.
The National Defence University of Ukraine (NDUU) is a university of higher military education in Ukraine, located in its capital city of Kyiv. Subordinated to the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, the University trains officers specializing in national defence.
The Center on Global Interests (CGI) is an independent, nonprofit 501(c)(3) research organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. The Center conducts research and analysis on global affairs, focusing on Russia and the post-Soviet space. CGI was founded in 2012 by Nikolai Zlobin, a Russian-American foreign policy expert and author of multiple books on foreign affairs. It has often partnered with leading experts and officials from the United States and Russia, including security expert Pavel Baev, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, Ambassador Steven Pifer, and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. Several of the Center's events have been broadcast on C-SPAN.
The Russo-Ukrainian War began in February 2014. Following Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, Russia occupied and annexed Crimea from Ukraine and supported pro-Russian separatists fighting the Ukrainian military in the Donbas War. These first eight years of conflict also included naval incidents and cyberwarfare. In February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and began occupying more of the country, starting the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II. The war has resulted in a refugee crisis and tens of thousands of deaths.
Kimberly Marten is an author and scholar specializing in international security, foreign policy, Russia, and environmental politics. She held the 5-year-term Ann Whitney Olin Professorship of Political Science at Barnard College from 2013 to 2018, and then returned to chair the Barnard Political Science Department for a second time from 2018-2021. She was the director of the Program on U.S.-Russia Relations at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute from 2015 to 2019, and the Harriman Institute published a profile of her career. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and a frequent media commentator.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine are the military forces of Ukraine. All military and security forces, including the Armed Forces, are under the command of the President of Ukraine and subject to oversight by a permanent Verkhovna Rada parliamentary commission. They trace their lineage to 1917, while the modern armed forces were formed again in 1991. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are the fifth largest armed force in the world in terms of both active personnel as well as total number of personnel with the eighth largest defence budget in the world, and it also operates one of the largest and most diverse drone fleets in the world. Due to the Russo-Ukrainian War, ongoing in 2024, the Ukrainian Armed Forces has been described as "the most battle-hardened in Europe," but has suffered many casualties.
Mikhail Minakov is a philosopher, political scholar and historian, Doctor of Philosophy. His studies focus on human experience, social knowledge, the phenomenon of ideology, political creativity, and the history of modernization.
Blair Aldridge Ruble is a non-fiction writer and academic administrator whose work has focused on comparative urban studies as well as Russian and Ukrainian affairs.
Matthew Rojansky is an American academic, lawyer, and national security policy scholar. As of January 2022, he is President & CEO of the U.S. Russia Foundation for Economic Advancement and the Rule of Law (USRF), an American non-profit organization founded in 2008 that aims to strengthen relations between the United States and Russia and to promote the development of the private sector in the Russian Federation. He is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He served as a director of the U.S.-Russia Foundation and founded the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Ukraine Program. From July 2013 to January 2022, Rojansky was the director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which focuses on Russia and Ukraine issues.
The Gerasimov Doctrine, named after the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces General Valery Gerasimov, is a pseudo-military doctrine created by the Western media and some Russian analysts. It is based on Gerasimov’s views about U.S. contemporary warfare, putting interstate conflict and warfare on a par with political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other non-military activities. It became known after Mark Galeotti coined the term in his blog "In Moscow Shadows" and the invasion and annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014. Some Western analysts were convinced that the Russian actions reflected the "Gerasimov Doctrine" helping to spread the term and making it a buzzword.
