Day: May 29, 2022

Background Briefing: May 29, 2022

 

Putin Digs in For a Long War While His Security Services Tighten Control of Russia

We begin with the debate within the foreign policy establishment between those who want to increase the arming of Ukraine as Putin intensifies his brutal campaign to destroy the country and those who want to seek a diplomatic solution to end the war. Joining us is Angela Stent, the Director of the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Affairs and a Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at Georgetown University. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-chairs its Hewett Forum on Post-Soviet Affairs. From 2004 to 2006, she served as National Intelligence Office for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council, and, from 1999 to 2001, she served in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. She is the author of The Limits of Partnership: U.S.-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century and her latest book is Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and with the Rest

 

Russia is Inciting Genocide and Violating the U.N. Genocide Convention

Then we look into a new report from the New lines Institute for Strategy and Policy and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights that accuses Russia of inciting genocide and violating several article of the United Nations Genocide Convention. Joining us is an advisor to this legal report signed by more than 30 leading legal scholars and genocide experts, Christopher Atwood, a graduate student at Columbia University who spent a number of years in the post-Soviet space working in media, advertising, journalism and politics. He served as a senior advisor on media, communications and journalism at the Souspilnist Foundation in Kyiv, Ukraine and his research focuses on contemporary challenges in international relations, the development of national identities in Eastern Europe and the impact of information campaigns on social, cultural and political trends.

 

Ukrainians Are Fighting For All Who Believe in Democracy and the Rule of Law

Then finally we speak with Marci Shore, a professor of history at Yale University who teaches the intellectual history of twentieth and twenty-first century Central and Eastern Europe. She is the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, and The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution. Her forthcoming book is Eyeglasses Floating in Space: Central European Encounters That Came about While Searching for Truth and we assess what might stop Putin who is murdering a country and its people before our eyes as the Ukrainians fight for all of us who believe in democracy and the rule of law.