Separate Ways? Public Opinion in Divided Donbas

Friday, February 19, 2021 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. (EST)

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The 6th anniversary of the Minsk II accords are a reminder of how the Donbas conflict endures as a territorial division and geopolitical sandbox. What do ordinary people affected most by the war on both sides of the Donbas divide think of the conflict? This panel presents the work of a transatlantic team of researchers who organized simultaneous surveys on public opinion on both sides of the divide in the Donbas in the fall of 2020. How they organized the research, what they found, how attitudes are changing; this is the subject of this event.

Speakers:

John O’Loughlin, college professor of distinction at the University of Colorado at Boulder, is a political geographer with research interests in the human outcomes of climate change in sub-Saharan Africa and in the geopolitical orientations of people in post-Soviet states.

Gwendolyn Sasse, Director of the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin and Senior Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. Her research interests include the dynamics of war, identities, protest and migration. She is currently engaged in a series of survey projects in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.

Gerard Toal, professor of government and international affairs at Virginia Tech’s campus in Arlington, is the author of Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest for Ukraine and the Caucasus (Oxford University Press, 2019), which won the ENMISA Distinguished Book Award in 2019.

This event is on the record and open to the media.

The Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES) Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University 1957 E Street, NW / Suite 412 / Washington, DC 20052 Tel (202) 994-6340 / Fax (202) 994-5436 / Email ieresgwu@gwu.edu ‌ ‌ ‌