Tanya Kotelnykova was fourteen years old when Russian-backed separatists occupied Horlivka, her hometown in Eastern Ukraine. She was torn away from her family and has been displaced since.

Voices of Ukraine, Season 2, Episode 3: No Ordinary Fourteen-Year-Old

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has its roots in the events of 2013–2014. Russia cynically termed the seditionist conflict in Crimea and Eastern Donbas a ‘civil war’ in order to claim non-involvement. This flies in the face of evidence, but the authors argue that the social science literature on civil wars can be used help understand why no political solution was found between 2015 and 2022. Jesse Driscoll explains how Russia, after seizing Crimea, was reacting to events it could not control and sent troops only to areas of Ukraine where it knew it would face little resistance (Eastern Donbas). Kremlin decisionmakers misunderstood the attachment of the Russian-speaking population to the Ukrainian state and also failed to anticipate that their intervention would transform Ukraine into a more cohesively ‘Ukrainian’ polity.  
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About the Speaker: Jesse Driscoll is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Faculty Chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. He is the author of Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge, 2015) and Doing Global Fieldwork (Columbia, 2021)

Ukraine's Unnamed War - Jesse Driscoll (2.9.23)

A podcast from the Harriman Institute at Columbia University and eurasianet.org. Masha Udensiva-Brenner interviews experts about political and cultural developments in Russia and Eurasia.

CREECA’s mission is to support research, teaching, and outreach on Russia, Eastern and Central Europe, and Central Asia.  We approach this three-part mission by promoting faculty research across a range of disciplines; by supporting graduate and undergraduate teaching and training related to the region; and by serving as a community resource through outreach activities targeted to K-12 teachers and students, other institutions of higher education, and the general public. 

As a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center, CREECA hosts a variety of events and lectures which are free and open to the public. You can find recordings of past events here.

New tracks tagged #EuroMaidan