There can be little doubt that Russia has been influencing global and regional politics for a long time, creating a huge problem for the EU and the USA.

Russia’s actions have helped shape the lives of millions of people living outside its borders, but the question must be asked: to what end? Our panel will attempt to unravel this question and decipher whether current Russian actions are part of a long-term strategic plan, or an opportunistic action. 

Join our panellists Paul Rogers, Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, and Bishop Nick Baines for a frank discussion about Russia’s plan.

About The Academics

Paul Rogers

Paul Rogers is Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies at Bradford University. He trained originally as a biologist, lectured at Imperial College and worked in East Africa on tropical crop research before working on environmental conflicts and joining Peace Studies in 1979. His research is on the changing causes of international conflict, especially in relation to political violence, socio-economic divisions and environmental limits to growth.

Richard Sakwa headshot

Richard Sakwa

Richard Sakwa is Professor of Politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, a Senior Research Fellow at HSE in Moscow and an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Political Science at Moscow State University. After graduating in History from the LSE, he took a PhD from the Centre for Russian and East European Studies (CREES) at the University of Birmingham. He held lectureships at the Universities of Essex and California, Santa Cruz, before joining the University of Kent in 1987. He has published widely on Russian and international affairs. Recent books include Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (I. B. Tauris, 2016; reissued April 2022), Russia against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Russia’s Futures (Polity, 2019) and The Putin Paradox (I. B. Tauris, 2020). His book Deception: Russiagate and the New Cold War came out with Lexington Books in late 2021 and he is currently working on The Lost Peace: How We Failed to Prevent a New Cold War for Yale University Press.

Contributor

Bishop Nick Baines

Nick Baines is the Bishop of Leeds. He’s an author (of six books), a broadcaster, blogger and tweeter (with 15K followers), and is a member of the House of Lords. He was previously Bishop of Bradford, Bishop of Croydon, and a Russian linguist at GCHQ (after reading German and French at Bradford University).