Ukraine Between the West and Russia

Ukraine’s European and Western aspirations and Ukrainians’ civic emancipation are a thorn in the side of the Russian political elite. That is why Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014 and set off a civil war in the Donbas. On top of that, it launched a new military encirclement of Ukraine in the last year. Recently Russia’s President Putin declared that Ukraine as a state was a project of the West, which wished to make it a kind of anti-Russia. The Kremlin’s pressure on the Ukraine and the West (the US, NATO and the EU) has intensified in recent months, and there has even been talk of war. However, Russia’s stated aim is also the transformation of the geopolitical coordinates of Central and Eastern Europe, which relates to Czech sovereignty too.

What is the current situation in Ukraine? What position should the West adopt toward Russia’s revisionist imperialism? And what does it all mean for the Czech Republic?

These questions will be discussed diplomat Jaroslav Kurfürst, the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs special envoy for the Eastern Partnership; and security and political analyst Martin Svárovský from the think tank
European Values.

Historian Petr Hlaváček will moderate (Collegium Europaeum, Faculty of Arts, Charles University and Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences).