Perspectives on Putin and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

05/11/22 • 33 min

Guests featured in this episode:

Stephen Holmes, the Walter E. Mayer Professor of Law and co-director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University. Stephen has been the recipient of prestigious fellowships from, among others, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the Wissenschaftkolleg in Berlin, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the IWM in Vienna.

Between 1994 and 1996, he served as Director of the Soros Foundation program for promoting legal reform in Russia and Eastern Europe, and was also named Carnegie Scholar in 2003-2005 for his work on Russian legal reform.

He is also the co-author of The Light that Failed: A Reckoning with Ivan Krastev, a book that details the ride of authoritarian antiliberalism in Russia.

GLOSSARY

What is the Kievan Rus ?
(00:8:11 or p.2 in the transcript)

Kievan Rus (862-1242) was a medieval political federation located in modern-day Belarus, Ukraine, and part of Russia (the latter named for the Rus, a Scandinavian people). The name Kievan Rus is a modern-day (19th century) designation but has the same meaning as 'land of the Rus,' which is how the region was known in the Middle Ages.

The Rus ruled from the city of Kiev (also given as Kyiv) and so 'Kievan Rus' simply meant "the lands of the Rus of Kiev". The Rus are first mentioned in the Annals of Saint-Bertin which records their presence in a diplomatic mission from Constantinople to the court of Louis the Pious (r. 814-840) in 839. The annals claim they were Swedes, and this is possible, but their ethnicity has never been firmly established. Source:

What was the crisis and annexation of Crimea ?
(00:08:38 or p.2 in the transcript)

As pro-Russian protesters became increasingly assertive in Crimea, groups of armed men whose uniforms lacked any clear identifying marks surrounded the airports in Simferopol and Sevastopol.. Masked gunmen occupied the Crimean parliament building and raised a Russian flag, as pro-Russian lawmakers dismissed the sitting government and installed Sergey Aksyonov, the leader of the Russian Unity Party, as Crimea’s prime minister.

On March 6 the Crimean parliament voted to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation, with a public referendum on the matter scheduled for March 16, 2014. On the day of the referendum, observers noted numerous irregularities in the voting process, including the presence of armed men at polling stations, and the result was an overwhelming 97 percent in favour of joining Russia On March 18 Putin met with Aksyonov and other regional representatives and signed a treaty incorporating Crimea into the Russian Federation. Western governments protested the move. Within hours of the treaty’s signing, a Ukrainian soldier was killed when masked gunmen stormed a Ukrainian military base outside Simferopol. Russian troops moved to occupy bases throughout the peninsula, including Ukrainian naval headquarters in Sevastopol, as Ukraine initiated the evacuation of some 25,000 military personnel and their families from Crimea. On March 21 after the ratification of the annexation treaty by the Russian parliament, Putin signed a law formally integrating Crimea into Russia. Source:

Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:

• Central European University: CEU

• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD

• The Podcast Company: Novel

• Central European University: @CEU

• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: @AHDCentre

Subscribe to the show. If you enjoyed what you listened to, you can support us by leaving a review and sharing our podcast in your networks!

Guests featured in this episode:

He is also the co-author of The Light that Failed: A Reckoning with Ivan Krastev, a book that details the ride of authoritarian antiliberalism in Russia.

GLOSSARY

What is the Kievan Rus ?
(00:8:11 or p.2 in the transcript)

What was the crisis and annexation of Crimea ?
(00:08:38 or p.2 in the transcript)

Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:

• Central European University: CEU

• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD

• The Podcast Company: Novel

• Central European University: @CEU

• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: @AHDCentre

Subscribe to the show. If you enjoyed what you listened to, you can support us by leaving a review and sharing our podcast in your networks!

Previous Episode

Assessing the 2022 Hungarian Parliamentary Elections

Guests featured in this Episode

Gábor Tóka, Senior Research Fellow in the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest. A sociologist by training, he has published more than 60 articles on electoral behaviour, public opinion, political parties and democratic consolidation in edited volumes, political science and sociology journals. He is also the author of Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and has co-edited The Europeanization of National Polities (Oxford University Press, 2012).

GLOSSARY

What is Fidesz, the Hungarian political party ?
(00:1:20 or p.1. in the transcript)

Fidesz, by name of Federation of Young Democrats–Hungarian Civic Alliance, is a centre-right Hungarian political party. Fidesz (the Federation of Young Democrats) was founded in 1988 as an anticommunist party that promoted the development of a market economy and European integration. Initially, membership was restricted to those age 35 and younger, though this restriction was eliminated in 1993. In 1995 the party appended the name Hungarian Civic Party to its shortened form (altered to Hungarian Civic Alliance in 2003). Fidesz had its first notable success in 1990, when candidates associated with a coalition of which Fidesz was a member won mayoralties in a number of cities. In elections to the National Assembly, Fidesz won 22 seats. In 1997 members of a Christian Democratic group that had dissolved joined Fidesz in the National Assembly, enabling the joint group to form the largest bloc. The following year Fidesz became the single largest party in the National Assembly.

After some eight years of Socialist rule, Fidesz, capitalizing on Hungary’s ongoing economic problems after the country’s economic collapse in 2008, swept back into power in the parliamentary elections of April 2010, winning more than two-thirds of the seats. Fidesz and its junior electoral coalition partner, the Christian Democratic People’s Party, repeated that feat in 2014 and again in 2018 and 2022, with Orbán returning as prime minister each time. Source:

What is The Visegrad Group?
(00:22:12 or p.5 in the transcript)

The Visegrad Group (V4) is an informal regional format of cooperation between the four Central European countries: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary, which are not only linked by neighbourhood and similar geopolitical situation but above all by common history, traditions, culture, and values.

The idea behind the Group was to intensify cooperation in building democratic state structures and free market economies and, in the long term, to participate in the process of European integration. The date of its creation is 15 February 1991, when the Presidents of Poland and Czechoslovakia, Lech Wałęsa and Václav Havel, and Prime Minister of Hungary József Antall signed a joint declaration on the objectives and conditions of cooperation in the Hungarian town of Visegrad.

Since 2004, all V4 countries have been members of the European Union, and the Visegrad Group provides a forum for exchanging experiences and working out common positions on issues relevant to the future of the region and the EU.

In addition to European issues, V4 cooperation focuses primarily on matters concerning Central Europe, exchange of information, and cooperation in culture, science, education and youth exchanges. Priority areas include expanding transport infrastructure and strengthening energy security in the region. Source:

Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:

• Central European University: CEU

• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD

• The Podcast Company: Novel

• Central European University: @CEU

• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: @AHDCentre

Subscribe to the show. If you enjoyed what you listened to, you can support us by leaving a review and sharing our podcast in your networks!

Next Episode

The French Presidential Election and the State of Democracy in France

Guests featured in this episode:

Éric Fassin, Professor of sociology and co-chair of the Gender Studies Department at Paris VIII. University, where he also established the Research Center on Gender and Sexuality Studies. His research addresses sexual and racial politics as well as immigration issues, in France, Europe, and in the United States in a comparative perspective. He is currently working on book project with his brother, Didier Fassin, on The Rising Significance of Race in France, to be published the University of Chicago Press.

GLOSSARY:

How Assa Traoré became a symbolic figure in France?
(00:16:00 or p.4 in the transcript)

Assa Traoré is the sister of Adama Traoré, a black French man who died in police custody in 2016. Assa Traoré has been acquitted of defamation charges brought against her by police officers. She accused three police officers of killing her brother, but the investigators have been unable to agree if he was suffocated or if he died because of an underlying medical condition.

The death of Adama Traoré has elicited many parallels between George Floyd's death in the U.S. Assa Traoré, has become the symbolic figure of the Black Lives Matter movement in France. Source:

Democracy in Question? is brought to you by:

• Central European University: CEU

• The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: AHCD

• The Podcast Company: Novel

• Central European University: @CEU

• Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy in Geneva: @AHDCentre

Subscribe to the show. If you enjoyed what you listened to, you can support us by leaving a review and sharing our podcast in your networks!

What does Harry Frankfurt write On Bullshit?
(00:35:06 or p.8 in the transcript)

Harry Frankfurt, a moral philosopher, makes the following observation in his book: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”

Aspects of the bullshit problem are discussed partly with reference to the Oxford English Dictionary, Wittgenstein and Saint Augustine. Three points seem especially important – the distinction between lying and bullshitting, the question of why there is so much bullshit in the current day and age, and a critique of sincerity qua bullshit.

Frankfurt makes an important distinction between lying and bullshitting. Both the liar and the bullshitter try to get away with something. But ‘lying’ is perceived to be a conscious act of deception, whereas ‘bullshitting’ is unconnected to a concern for truth. Frankfurt regards this ‘indifference to how things really are’, as the essence of bullshit. Furthermore, a lie is necessarily false, but bullshit is not – bullshit may happen to be correct or incorrect. The crux of the matter is that bullshitters hide their lack of commitment to truth. Since bullshitters ignore truth instead of acknowledging and subverting it, bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies. Source: