WHEN:
3rd April 2017, 13:00 – 14:00
WHERE:
Henry Jackson Society, 26th Floor, Millbank Tower, 21-24 Millbank, London, SW1P 4QP
Admission:
To register your interest, or for any further information, please email [email protected]
In early 2014, Ukrainians overthrew Viktor Yanukovych’s government in the hope of putting their country on a pro-Western path. This event, as well as those running up to it, energised Ukrainian civil society, but Russia’s occupation of Crimea and its support for separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions has created a multitude of economic, political, and social challenges for the country. Some of the reforms that the protestors, who camped out on Kyiv’s Maidan in the winter of 2013/4, called for have been implemented, but others have been difficult to act upon, leading to frustration for many Ukrainians.
The Henry Jackson Society is pleased to invite you to a panel event to mark three years since the revolution. The speakers, Orysia Lutsevych, Roland Oliphant, and Rory Finnin, will discuss the set of circumstances that led up to the Maidan Revolution, and examine the aftermath. They will examine the motives of the protestors, and the unique role that Ukraine has played – and resisted playing – in Russia’s power struggles in Eastern Europe. They will ask whether the momentum of the revolutionary energy has been sustained to make lasting changes to Ukraine.
Orysia Lutsevych is manager of the Ukraine Forum in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. Lutsevych’s research focuses on social change and the role of civil society in the democratic transition in the post-Soviet region. She also provides consultancy services on programme development and evaluation, citizen engagement and high-impact strategies to public and private donors. Before joining Chatham House, she led the start-up of Europe House Georgia and was executive director of the Open Ukraine Foundation. She has a Master’s degree in international relations from Lviv State University and a Master’s in public administration from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Roland Oliphant is the Daily Telegraph’s Moscow correspondent. He has lived and worked in the former Soviet Union for ten years, spending much of that time reporting politics, business, and wildlife in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He reported on the crisis in Ukraine from the outbreak of the Maidan protests in 2013, and witnessed the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovyuch, the annexation of Crimea, and the war in eastern Ukraine first hand.
Dr Rory Finnin is Head of the Department of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. He also directs the Ukrainian Studies programme and chairs the Cambridge Committee for Russian and East European Studies (CamCREES). Finnin’s primary research interest is the interplay of literature and national identity in Ukraine. He also studies Crimean Tatar literature, Soviet Russian dissident literature and Turkish nationalist literature. His broader interests include nationalism theory, human rights discourse, and problems of cultural memory.
Tags: maidan