Video Recording Link
Overview:
Samuel Charap and Dara Massicot from the RAND Corporation will join RSI for an in-depth discussion of the August 2021 RAND report, "Russian Grand Strategy: Reality and Rhetoric." Understanding Russia's grand strategy can help U.S. decisionmakers both avoid strategic surprise by anticipating Moscow's actions and reactions and assess the depth and nature of potential conflicts between Russia and the United States. The authors of the report review Russia's declared grand strategy, evaluate the extent to which Russian behavior is consistent with stated strategy, and outline implications for the United States.
Link to Report
Biographies
Dara MassicotSenior Policy Researcher, RAND Corporation
Dara Massicot is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. Before joining RAND, she served as a senior analyst for Russian military capabilities at the Department of Defense.
Her work at RAND focuses on defense and security issues in Russia nd Eurasia. She specializes in Russian military strategy, combat operations, and escalation dynamics. Her long-term interests include force posture, force planning, and grand strategy. She is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University's Security Studies Program.
Massicot received her M.A. in national security and strategic studies from the U.S. Naval War College's College of Naval Command and Staff in Newport, Rhode Island.
Samuel CharapSenior Political Scientist, RAND Corporation
Samuel Charap is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. His research interests include the foreign policies of Russia and the former Soviet states; European and Eurasian regional security; and U.S.-Russia deterrence, strategic stability, and arms control.
From November 2012 until April 2017, Charap was the senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Prior to joining the IISS, he served at the U.S. Department of State as senior advisor to the undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security and on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff, covering Russia and Eurasia. From 2009 to 2011, Charap was director for Russia and Eurasia at the Center for American Progress.
Charap's book on the Ukraine crisis, Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (coauthored with Timothy Colton), was published in January 2017. His articles have appeared in The Washington Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Survival, Current History and several other journals.
Charap was a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center and the International Center for Policy Studies (Kyiv), and a Fulbright Scholar at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. He is fluent in Russian and proficient in Ukrainian. Charap holds a Ph.D. in political science and an M.Phil. in Russian and East European studies from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He received his B.A. in Russian and political science from Amherst College. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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