Research Interests:

EU-Ukraine-Russia relations, Ukraine's foreign policy, the war in Ukraine, foreign policy analysis

Current Research Project:

“Ukraine vis-à-vis Russia and the EU: the case of the first year of the war (2014-2015)”

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. The book is based on PhD research (defended at the University of Manchester in April 2022), which theoretically rested on 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, 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 of core decision-makers) – all contributed to worse outcomes for Ukraine. The persistence (although with certain visible changes) of the same tendencies made Russian full-scale war in 2022 more likely.