Is Putin’s Russia a great strategic foe?

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In 2018 The Centre for Independent Studies hosted a timely debate on whether Russia is a great western geopolitical threat. With Peter Jennings (executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute) and Michael Danby (Federal Labor MP for Melbourne Ports) taking on Kirill Nourzhanov (senior lecturer at the Australian National University’s College of Arts and Social Science) and Alexey Muraviev (associate professor of national security and strategic studies at Curtin University).

In recent years, Russia has occupied Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, intervened in eastern Ukraine, aided Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and allegedly meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. In response, the Western conventional wisdom has blamed Vladimir Putin for undermining what is termed the rules-based liberal international order.

Meanwhile, July 18 2018 marked the centenary of the Bolshevik execution of Tsar Nicholas II and the Russian royal family. To put the revolutionary events of 1917-18 in a broader historical context, Tom Switzer had a conversation with ANU’s Leonid Petrov.