Dr. Alina Nychyk will give a talk about the research from her forthcoming book “Ukraine vis-à-vis Russia and the EU in the first year of the war (February 2014 – February 2015). The story of misperceptions in foreign policy”. The book studies Ukraine’s foreign policy in the country’s relations with the EU and Russia during the first year of the war in Ukraine (February 2014 – February 2015). To contextualise this first year of the war, the book also both explains the history of EU-Ukraine-Russia relations since 1991 and draws lessons relevant for 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. This research employed an innovative game theory-inspired analytical approach to foreign policy analysis and methodologically relied on 38 elite interviews, analysis of official documents, and diverse media outlets. The main findings uncovered mutual misperceptions and misleading in EU-Ukraine-Russia relations. Looking at Ukraine’s ‘side of the story’, the analysis in this book shows how Russia’s assertiveness, the EU’s passivity, but also Ukrainian leaders’ limited crisis management experience and flaws in their foreign policy steps (poor analysis of foreign interlocutors, trust in their good intentions and corruption) – all contributed to worse outcomes for Ukraine. The persistence (although with certain visible changes) of the same tendencies made the Russian full-scale war in 2022 more likely.
In her presentation, Alina will explain interesting peculiarities of EU-Ukraine-Russia relations and will concentrate on findings relevant to the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. The talk will be followed by a Q&A session so that the attendees will have a chance to involve in the discussion of this currently important topic.
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