Podcast host Alex Gabuev is joined by Ekaterina Schulmann, a non-resident senior fellow at Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, and Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, the German ambassador to Russia, at the Berlin Foreign Policy Forum to discuss the last thirty years of Russian history and how freedom turned into dictatorship and war.
Russia went from a tsarist empire and the totalitarian USSR to the freedom of the 1990s, complete with hopes of becoming a European democracy. Unfortunately, multiple missteps and reckless foreign policy endeavors have resulted in Russia becoming a security threat to Europe and its own neighbors. Two Chechen wars, the invasion of Georgia, and annexation of Crimea paved the way for Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. How did it end up this way? Were there signs? What is the current state of Russian society?