Foreign and domestic policy issues in Putin's Russia
Dr Andrey Kortunov and Professor Richard Sakwa will discuss Russia's new directions under the government of President Vladimir Putin.
They will focus on the country's engagements in Syria, the wider Middle East and Ukraine, as well as on the 'Turn to the East' in its foreign policy initiatives in the Asia-Pacific.
The discussion will be moderated by Laura Tingle, Political Editor for the Australian Financial Review.
About the presenters
Dr Andrey Kortunov has been the Director General of the Russian International Affairs Council since 2011. He graduated from the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) and completed postgraduate studies at the Institute for US and Canadian Studies, USSR Academy of Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. degree in history; was Deputy Director of the Institute for US and Canadian Studies; was founder and first president of the Moscow Public Science Foundation; taught Russian foreign policy at the University Of Miami (USA), and at the Lewis & Clark College in Portland (University of California). His academic focus areas include: international relations, foreign and domestic policy of Russia and Russian-American relations. Dr Kortunov is the author of over 120 publications dedicated to the analysis of Soviet/Russian-American relations, global security, and the foreign and domestic policy of the USSR and Russia. He alsos sits on the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group.
Richard Sakwa is a Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent and an Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House. After graduating in History from the London School of Economics, he took a PhD from the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham. He held lectureships at the Universities of Essex and California, Santa Cruz, before joining the University of Kent in 1987. He has published widely on Soviet, Russian and post-communist affairs. Professor Sakwa's books include Communism in Russia: An Interpretative Essay, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010 (with a Russian version published by Rosspen in 2011), The Crisis of Russian Democracy: The Dual State, Factionalism and the Medvedev Succession (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Putin and the Oligarch: The Khodorkovsky - Yukos Affair (London and New York, I. B. Tauris, 2014) and Putin Redux: Power and Contradiction in Contemporary Russia (London and New York, Routledge, 2014). His latest book is Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands, an extended paperback version of which was published by I. B. Tauris in 2016. He is currently working on Russia against the Rest: Problematising the New Cold War (contracted for Cambridge University Press).