REEES | Kennan Conversations | The Origins of the War in Ukraine: Sequence and Sources
Please join us for this this conversation between Professor Mary Sarotte and Michael Kimmage, the Director of the Kennan Institute. The conversation will focus on the origins of the war in Ukraine, establishing key turning points in the period from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It will also address the question of how historians today and in the future will research the origins of this war and of what the twenty-first century archive is likely to be.
This event is sponsored by the Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program at Yale's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.
Speakers
Michael Kimmage is the director of the Kennan Institute. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. He is the author of, among other books, Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability, which was published with Oxford University Press in 2024 and will be coming out in paperback in 2027.
Professor Mary Elise Sarotte is the author of five books and co-editor of a sixth. Her most recent book, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, was shortlisted for both the Cundill History Prize and the Duke of Wellington History Medal; received the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize Silver Medal; and won the Pushkin House Prize for Best Non-Fiction Book on Russia. It is now appearing in multiple European and Asian countries, including a best-selling updated version for German-speakers. One of her earlier books, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall, became an Economist, Financial Times, and BBC History Book of the Year. Its predecessor, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe—also a Financial Times Book of the Year—remains the only book to win both the Ferrell History Prize for best book on US foreign relations and the Shulman Prize for best book on Soviet foreign relations.
Sarotte received her AB in History and Science from Harvard and her PhD in History from Yale. She went on to earn tenure at the University of Cambridge before returning to the States to become a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Dean’s Professor of History at the University of Southern California, and, subsequently, the Kravis Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She has just returned to Yale for a joint, tenured appointment in both the School of Organization and Management (SOM) & the Jackson School of Global Affairs) and as the director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy.