In a new PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, Tetyana Malyarenko and Stefan Wolff see Moscow using a “de facto state playbook” that makes territorial concessions dangerous, and Paul Goode reports that 82% of Ukrainians oppose any territorial concessions. For Pavel Baev, U.S. approval of a “colossal” $40 billion emergency aid package to Ukraine is helping boost Ukrainian society’s resolve to defeat Russia.
 
A second new PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, by Mariya Omelicheva, argues that Russian international relations scholarship supports state agendas through “influencers, echo chambers, and epistemic bubbles.” Marlene Laruelle sees Russian power structures dividing into a party of war, a “centrist” group focused on more limited territorial gains, and technocrats and oligarchs for whom everything is bad news. Regardless of war outcomes, Samuel Charap says, Russia is going to be weakened, isolated, impoverished, and surrounded by more NATO states. Whether Russia winds up with recognized territorial gains will have a big impact on the future international order, argues Henry Hale.
 
To best defend against Russian subversion, Anders Aslund and Maria Snegovaya call for full European financial transparency and strong enforcement. South Korea is complying with sanctions, hindering Russian LNG exports, notes Elizabeth Wishnick. More broadly, in a Carnegie Corporation forum, Laruelle argues the United States needs granular knowledge of Russian society and Russian elites, and Theodore Gerber calls for preserving Russian social science capacity outside Russia itself.
 
Georgi Derluguian and Ruben Hovhannisyan find that Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 Karabagh war crushed the liberal naivete of its 2018 revolution.