Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, the end of the Cold War stood as inarguably the greatest inflection point in global politics in living memory. Contrary to expectations, the NATO alliance did not disband once its intended adversary was no more, but remained in place as the basis of a new European security order. The challenge of how to build a relationship between the alliance and the fledgling Russian Federation is one that was never satisfactorily resolved. Sergey Radchenko, one of the pre-eminent historians of the era, will talk on what went wrong between Russia and NATO in the 1990s, and how it laid the grounds for today’s conflicts.
Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins Advanced School for International Studies, and a visiting professor of international relations at Cardiff University. He is originally from Sakhalin, Russia and earned his BA in international relations and PhD in International History from the London School of Economics. An historian of the Cold War, Radchenko’s work focuses primarily on Soviet foreign policy and Sino-Soviet relations.