Russia’s War in Ukraine: View from Finland and Sweden

Vladimir Gel’man is Professor of Russian Politics in the University of Helsinki. His books include Authoritarian Russia: Analyzing Post-Soviet Regime Changes (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Authoritarian Modernization in Russia: Ideas, Institutions, and Policies (Routledge, 2017). He also authored scholarly articles in Europe-Asia Studies, Post-Soviet Affairs, International Political Science Review, East European Politics, and other journals.

Dr. Arkady Moshes is Program Director for the EU Eastern Neighborhood and Russia research program. He is also a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) at George Washington University. 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 since 1988 working in the Institute of Europe in Moscow. From 2008 to 2015 he was an Associate Fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House. Since 2017 he has been a member of EU-Russia Expert Network (EUREN). He has been a visiting scholar at the Danish Institute of International Affairs (2002) and the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at Elliott School of International Relations, 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 (1998-2021). His areas of expertise include Russian foreign policy, European-Russian relations as well as internal and foreign policy of Ukraine and Belarus.

Fredrik Löjdquist is Director of the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies (SCEEUS), an independent institute constituted and financed by the Swedish Government, with its organisational domicile at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. He is a former Swedish diplomat, with previous missions such as special envoy and ambassador for the Swedish Presidency of the EU in Georgia 2009, ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) 2012–2017, and most recently, Sweden's first ambassador and special envoy for hybrid threats based in Stockholm 2018–2021. He has also been on diplomatic missions in Vilnius, Moscow and Vienna, represented Sweden in the OSCE Structured Dialog on European safety 2017–2021, and been a member of the steering board of the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, located in Helsinki.

Martin Kragh is deputy director of the Stockholm Center for Eastern European Studies at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, and associate professor at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University. He defended his PhD at the Stockholm School of Economics in 2009, and specializes in the economic and political development of Russia and the EU's eastern neighbourhood. His research interests include economic history, political economy, foreign affairs and Nordic-Russian relations.