November 2nd, 2022

Those who ascribe to the Great Powers view of history, may interpret the Russia Ukraine war as a clash of political cultures, part of a wider geo-political game; they may go so far as to suggest that such a civilizational conflict was inevitable. But this interpretation ignores the agency of individuals, groups, and nations in making decisions and in some way absolves them of guilt for the crimes that are being committed on an unimaginable scale against individuals. This macro political interpretation also skirts over the illegality and corruption at the heart of Putin’s system of governance; the vertical power structure, rampant nepotism, the lack of checks and balances, rule of law and an independent judiciary is just as important in explaining how we got to this dangerous tipping point in history.

June 9th, 2022

Drawing on PONARS Eurasia's worldwide network of experts, the Policy Exchange series offers interactive discussions that bring a diversity of informed views to tough questions. For this first Policy Exchange event, six experts discuss the following forward-looking question that is likely to be central to regional security for the long-term: regardless of how the war ends, how can Ukraine’s long-run security realistically be guaranteed?

January 26th, 2022

Professor Popova joins Global News Morning to explain why Russia is poised to invade Ukraine, and how the conflict could impact Canada.

Our 2020 article with Daniel Beers, “No Revolution of Dignity for Ukraine’s Judges” received the American Association of Ukrainian Studies Article Prize, awarded for the best article-length work in the field of Ukrainian history, politics, language, literature and culture published in English.

I wrote a blogpost, with Prof Nikolay Marinov from University of Houston, for LSE’s EUROPP Blog on the April 2021 Bulgarian parliamentary elections. This was the most unexpected and interesting election in 20 years—read our analysis here.

It’s been six months since the avalanche of Covid-spurred school closings, shelter-at-home, and lockdown orders. In March, no one would have predicted that Eastern European governments would be doing as well as they have at tackling the virus. But they have:

A) All Eastern Europeans flattened the curve better than all Western Europeans.
B) Populist and authoritarian incumbents embraced the world scientific consensus and implemented early measures/lockdowns.
C) Some liberal opposition parties and opinion leaders (in Bulgaria and Serbia, for e.g.) embraced minority scientific views (herd immunity) and/or conspiracies and turned into covid-deniers.

Why?

1. Eastern European incumbents have thoroughly internalized three decades of criticism of their state’s capacity, efficiency, and policy implementation. They all expected that their health care systems would crack under the pressure immediately. They expected that shirking would be high because they know trust in institutions is low. They took measures super early and forcefully and it paid off.
2. Eastern European party systems have long been weak on left-right differentiation (in some cases, even flipped), so neither the former Communist “left” nor the anti-Communist “right” have clear and hard positions on the “save lives vs. save the economy” dichotomy that dominates the discourse in older democracies. Political actors are unencumbered by previous ideological commitments and thus could choose whatever position they want on the covid policy debate.
3. EU influence in structuring the covid cleavage: at the very start of the crisis, incumbents were worried about being shamed and possibly punished by the EU if they underperformed and didn’t flatten the curve, so they took swift measures
4. Oppositions in countries with recent democratic backsliding were worried that incumbents would use the crisis to power grab or to beg for and then steal EU crisis funds and use them to further entrench themselves in power. As a result, some opposition quickly bought into conspiracies that the public health crisis wasn’t real, but manufactured for incumbents’ benefit.

I recently gave an interview to the independent radio station Ekho Moskvy, on the recently concluded criminal case against university student, Yegor Zhukov. 21-year-old Zhukov attracted significant international attention with the closing statement he delivered at his trial on charges that he incited extremism online through his popular video blog. Specifically, I discussed how Russia’s authoritarian regime uses the courts not simply to remove political opponents, but to send messages to society. In Zhukov’s case, the charges against him were meant to admonish young people in Russia that they should avoid participating in protests or blogging about regime change if they want to avoid serious legal consequences. Zhukov seemed ready to go to prison for his beliefs and even appeared a bit disappointed at the suspended sentence he received, but he is, of course, the exception that proves a point—many young Russians probably refrained from criticizing the government on social media after watching the kind of trouble such criticism got Zhukov in. The reason trials like Zhukov’s serve as an effective public relations tool for the government is that the courts are widely perceived as subservient instruments in the hands of the authorities, rather than as adjudicators of complex legal debates or impartial enforcers of the laws on the books. In countries with stable rule of law, few pay attention to prosecutions of individuals accused of violating the law during a protest or those accused of inciting hatred online. Most people don’t think any legal repercussions could follow from participating in a protest, because they think: “If I don’t assault anyone and I don’t loot, I have nothing to worry about”. However, the situation in Russia is very different—most people are afraid that what happened to Zhukov could easily happen to them, even if they never violate the law. As we know, some people prosecuted for assaulting police officers at a notorious protest in 2012 (the cases became known as the Bolotnoe cases) claimed never to have set foot at the square.

You can listen to the full interview (in Russian) here.