WHEN:

01/02/2016 (17:00-18:30)

WHERE:

War Studies Meeting Room (K6.07), King’s College

Language:

English

Admission:

Free, but registration is required. Please RSVP to [email protected]

An Invisible War on the Periphery of Europe: Strategic, Humanitarian and Propaganda dimensions of the conflict in east Ukraine.

A Panel Discussion is organised by the Russian and Eurasian Security Research Group, in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute in London

Speakers:

• Anna Matveeva, Visiting Senior Research Fellow, King’s College, London
• Aleksei Bobrovnikov, journalist, 1+1, Kiev, Ukraine
• Dana Pavlychko, Director of Osnovy Publishing, Kyiv, Ukraine

Moderatored by Dr Natasha Kuhrt, Lecturer, Dept of War Studies, King’s College, London and introduced by Marina Pesenti, Director, Ukrainian Institute

The discussion will be followed by a Q&A session and include the sale of “War. Journalism from the Frontline”, a Osnovy publishing colour photoalbum.  See the book promo video:

Agenda:

• update on the current military and political situation in the east of Ukraine. Is it becoming a frozen conflict? Is Minsk agreement working?
• what impact on the Ukrainian domestic politics has the conflict had? On Ukraine’s institutions? Is it hindering reforms?
• what is the impact on the Ukrainian society as a whole? What are the tensions resulting from it? How did civil society show itself during the conflict?
• what is the propaganda dimension to it? What are the main features of the information war Russia unfolded against Ukraine?  Has Ukraine managed to fight back and how?

Speaker Biogrpahies

Dr Anna Matveeva, Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Dept of War Studies, King’s College, London.

Dr. Matveeva joined the Department in 2012 where she is a member of the Russia and Eurasia Security Research Group. She worked both as an academic and a practitioner, specialising in conflict studies and developmental aspects of international peacebuilding. The geographical remit of her interests covers conflicts in the Ukraine, the North and South Caucasus, and in Central Asia, where she lived in 2003 – 2004 working as the UNDP Regional Adviser on Peace and Development, while her initial research background is in Afghanistan. In 2010 Dr. Matveeva headed the Research Secretariat of the international Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Commission. She presently acts as a consultant to international organisations, such as the UN, the EU and OSCE, and for international non-governmental organisations. Previously she was a Research Fellow at Chatham House, worked at the London School of Economics and headed programmes at International Alert and Saferworld. She is also an Honorary University Fellow at the Department of Politics, University of Exeter and writes as a senior analyst for Wikistrat on Russsia in international relations.

Aleksei Bobrovnikov, journalist, short-stories writer.

Aleksei works as a special correspondent of the Ukrainian broadcaster ”1+1”, covering the warfare in Donbass. A Reuters foundation trainee, chief of financial news section in business newspaper Kommersant in Ukraine in 2005, he later switched to lifestyle and investigative journalism. In spring 2009 he got a special prize for investigative documentary “Vaccines: Business, Based On Fear” at an international film festival “DetectiveFEST”. In 2011 he made a documentary “Katyn: letters from paradise” about massacre of Polish officers in Soviet Russia during the WW2 co-funded by the government of the Republic of Poland. He moved to Georgia to write a guidebook on ethnography and ancient traditions of this part of the Southern Caucasus. The book was published under the title “Краями Грузії” (“The Edges of Georgia”, Ukrainian publisher KSD, Kharkiv, 2015) While living in Caucasus Aleksei completed a short-stories collection “Seven Encounters with Death” (available on Amazon in Russian). He covered the events of the Revolution of Dignity and witnessed a start of the “little green men” operation in Crimea, which marked the Russian annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula.

Dana Pavlychko, Director of Osnovy Publishing, Kiev, Ukraine.

Dana graduated with an MA in Public Policy from King’s College London and is a member of the United World College selection committee in Ukraine. Osnovy Publishing has been Ukraine’s most important academic publishing house since 1992. Today Osnovy’s catalogue contains over three hundred titles.