Putin’s position for the March 2018 presidential election is invincible, yet Russia’s domestic playground is becoming more troublesome for the Kremlin. Along with the economic recession, the situation has become critical in a number of Russian regions. As a result, a variety of local protests has taken place throughout the country in 2015-2017. Sociological polls show that citizens’ expectations for change are exceeding the longing for stability, while the Kremlin’s patriotic policies of stability and order have lost their novelty against the citizens’ socio-economic demands. Finally, the success of the populist style of the Kremlin’s challenger Aleksei Navalny in 2017, particularly among the youth, indicates that the Kremlin’s status-quo on societal stability does not speak to younger Russians anymore. This seminar will offer an opportunity to discuss the prospects of the Kremlin and of the opposition in Russia in light of the forthcoming presidential election.
Puhujat
Jussi Lassila / Photo: Matias Salo/FIIA
Valery Solovey / Photo: Matias Salo/FIIA
Puheenjohtaja
Arkady Moshes is Programme Director for the Russia, EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood and Eurasia research programme. He is also a member of the Programme on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) at George Washington University. Moshes’ areas of expertise include Russian foreign policy, European-Russian relations as well as internal and foreign policy of Ukraine and Belarus. He received his Ph.D in history of international relations from the Russian Academy of Sciences (1992).
Before moving to Finland in 2002, he had been working in the Institute of Europe in Moscow since 1988. From 2008 to 2015 he was an Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House. From 2017 to 2022 he was a member of EU-Russia Expert Network (EUREN). He has been a visiting scholar at the Danish Institute for International Studies (2002) and the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University (2016), a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2007) and a regular guest lecturer at the NATO Defence College (2005-10, 2013-15) and Geneva Center for Security Policy (1998-2022).
Arkady Moshes has authored a large number of academic and analytical publications and is a frequent media commentator.
He co-edited “A Slavic Triangle? Present and Future Relations Between Russia, Ukraine and Belarus” (Swedish National Defence College, 2002), “Russia as a Network State: What Works in Russia When State Institutions Do Not” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), “What has remained of the USSR: Exploring the erosion of the post-Soviet space” (FIIA, 2019) and “Russian Policy toward Belarus after 2020 At a Turning Point?” (Lexington Books, 2023) and contributed articles to, among others, Security Dialogue, International Affairs, Post-Soviet Affairs and Demokratizatsiya.