Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the War with Russia

On Wednesday, October 8, the Clements Center for National Security with the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and AROTC hosted Adrian Karatnycky for a book talk on Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the War with Russia. The event took place in RLP 1.302B, Patton Hall from 12:15-1:30 PM.

Adrian Karatnycky is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, where he helped since 2007 established its Ukraine programs and launched the Ukraine in Europe Initiative. 

He is the founder and Managing Partner of the Myrmidon Group LLC, a business advisory and a co- director, a co-founder of the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter. 

For twelve years, he was the President and CEO of Freedom House, a major US-based pro-democracy non-governmental organization, where he presided over the benchmark annual Survey of Freedom in the World, created its Nations in Transit survey of reform in post-Communist Europe, and established a range of democracy assistance programs in Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. 

In the 1980s, as Assistant to the President of the AFL-CIO Labor Federation, he played a leading role in coordinating assistance to and building support for Poland’s Solidarity movement, and a range of Polish and Central European underground publications and civic movements.   

Karatnycky has served as co-director of the US Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on the US and the United Nations, was co-director of the first World Forum on Democracy in Warsaw, and was a member of the United Nations Blue Ribbon Commission on Ukraine.  

Karatnycky, has co-authored and edited over twenty books focused on the post-Communist space and global trends in reform and has completed a history of modern-day Ukraine from 1991 to the war with Russia. A respected expert on Ukraine and Eastern Europe, he writes for Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal and is a regular contributor to Foreign Policy. He has written books on the disintegration of the USSR, the emergence of 15 new states in the USSR’s aftermath, and, most recently, Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the War with Russia, a history of the post-Soviet Ukrainian state published by Yale last year.