Link to Video Recording
Abstract:
Moscow regularly uses limited military actions—far short of direct aggression but often creating escalatory risks—that have caused concern and consternation in Western capitals. It is, however, far from clear what Russia intends to signal through these actions. The discussion will focus on analysis of these activities during recent years to provide a better understanding of the drivers of Moscow's behavior and practical guidelines for assessing future events.
Biographies
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.
Andrew (Andy) Stravers joined RAND as an Associate Political Scientist in August 2019. Since then, he has worked on projects related to the political determinants of military access in Europe, basing posture, the defense industrial base, building conflict scenarios, strategic competition, global force management, Russian coercive signaling behavior, and others. Before joining RAND, Andy was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Texas-Austin, where he also earned his Ph.D. His academic research focused on military base politics, American foreign policy, grand strategy, and great power politics. He has also done further work on conflict minerals, foreign aid, and rebel groups. He has published in the American Political Science Review, Conflict Management and Peace Science, the Journal of Global Security Studies, and elsewhere.
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