Eastern Platform - Tartu Seminar provided interesting insights

On March 18-19, the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies hosted the seminar “Post-soviet space between the EU and Russia. The state of the crisis: winding down or going global?”

The event was organized in cooperation with Eastern Platform-Platform Ukraine, a multidisciplinary project based at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (SSEES), University College London. The goal of the event was to discuss the consequences of the Ukrainian crisis and its expansive destabilization potential in the post-Soviet region and globally. It had therefore the ambition to shed light on the evolution of the crisis and its impact on the nature of the EU-Russia relations at a time when few dare to predict how events will unfold in the future.

The event managed to gather more than 45 scholars from 17 foreign countries, including Ukraine, Russia, and the United Kingdom. Multi-disciplinary scholarly contributions combined very different perspectives, and not just politics and international relations, but also sport, religion, gender and media studies.

The discussion in six panels involving also political stakeholders in order to bridge academic discussion with "real world" decision-making, was followed by an expert roundtable with the objective to combine the different perspectives emerged during the seminar. The roundtable “Perspectives and Dynamics: Making sense of the present to understand the future” brought together five key-note speakers: Miguel Vázquez Liñán (University of Sevilla, Spain), Anna-Cara Keim (University College London, UK), Mariya Zubrytska (Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine) and Andrey Makarychev (University of Tartu), Mukhtar Hajizada (Khazar University, Azerbaijan) and was moderated by Stefano Braghiroli (University of Tartu).

According to Dr. Stefano Braghiroli, “the tragic events in Ukraine have changed the structure of continental security and represent, at the moment, only the peak of a very deep ice-berg which projects its destabilizing impact from far beyond the post-Soviet space and the Eastern flank of the EU, until the Middle East. It calls also into question very diversified dimensions such as the global challenge of international terrorism, the ongoing migration crisis, and the growing political and economic instability faced by the EU”.

The roundtable participants defined the nature of Russia’s current foreign policy as a projection of the imperial ambitions of a declining empire attempting to reassert its status as witnessed by the revamped activism in the post-Soviet space and by the post-Maidan developments along the Eastern flank of the EU. They also highlighted how Moscow is very successfully profiting from the number of frozen conflicts that dots the whole post-Soviet space, in line with the Kremlin’s strategy of divide et impera. While Russia’s current international game denotes the clear intention to increase the political and military ambiguity of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and to possibly stretch this scenario until the shores of Syria, it keeps failing to attract the political elites of the harmed countries into its geo-political orbit (as in the case of the Eurasian Union).

“In this perspective, the long-term sustainability of the European and Western joint reaction to Moscow’s actions destabilizing actions and their credibility appear crucial”, says Braghiroli. According to many speakers, the current Western approach should wisely balance the necessity to mitigate Russia’s imperial ambitions with the need to prevent highly destabilizing political disruptions in Russia – such as the uncontrolled collapse of the current regime – which could cause unpredictable consequences for the EU and its Eastern neighbors.

Many of the speakers highlighted Moscow’s chameleonic role as both a friend and foe of the EU over the past decades, before the current diplomatic black-out. They also stressed the fact that, in the long term, both the EU and Russia will need to find a common language again to address common global challenges, given the high level of interdependence that has characterized the Eurasian space for more than two decades since the collapse of the USSR and which has been dramatically challenged by the current developments in Ukraine.

So far, the Tartu seminar is the only event organized within the framework of “Eastern Platform-Platform Ukraine” outside of the UK.

Additional information: Dr. Stefano Braghiroli, [email protected]

Forwarded by

Silver Bohl
Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies
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