Book Launch: The Zelensky Effect by Olga Onuch and Henry Hale

Olga Onuch and Lucan Way discussed Onuch's and Hale's new book (co-authored with Henry Hale) titled The Zelensky Effect.

 

About the book:

 

With Russian shells raining on Kyiv and tanks closing in, American forces prepared to evacuate Ukraine’s leader. Just three years earlier, his apparent main qualification had been playing a president on TV. But Volodymyr Zelensky reportedly retorted, "I need ammunition, not a ride." Ukrainian forces won the battle for Kyiv, ensuring their country’s independence even as a longer war began for the southeast.

 

 

Olga Onuch is Professor of Comparative and Ukrainian Politics at The University of Manchester. In 2021, she was visiting CERES at the University of Toronto as a Senior Research Associate. From 2014 to 2020, she was an Associate Member of Nuffield College (Oxford). Since 2017 she has been an Affiliate of, and previously in 2014 a Fellow of, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. In 2017, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Davis Center (Harvard). She is the winner of the 2017 Political Studies Association National Sir Bernard Crick Award for Outstanding Teaching.  

 

Henry E. Hale is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, and Co-Director of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia)

He has spent extensive time conducting field research in post-Soviet Eurasia and is currently working on identity politics and political system change, with a special focus now on public opinion dynamics in Russia and Ukraine.  His work has won two prizes from the American Political Science Association and he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for his research in Russia in 2007-2008.

Prior to joining GW, he taught at Indiana University (2000-2005), the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia (1999), and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (1997-98). He is also chair of the editorial board of Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization.