Professor Richard Sakwa (Kent University, Visiting professor at Harvard University) will deliver the lecture on “Russian Foreign Policy: From Cold Peace to War ” on Saturday February 28th, 2026 from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Richard Sakwa is Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent at Canterbury, a Senior Research Fellow at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics in Moscow and an Honorary Professor in the Faculty of Political Science at Moscow State University. After graduating in History from the London School of Economics, he took a PhD from the Centre for Russian and East European Studies (CREES) at the University of Birmingham. He held lectureships at the Universities of Essex and California, Santa Cruz, before joining the University of Kent in 1987. He has published widely on Soviet, Russian, post-communist and international affairs. Recent books include Putin Redux: Power and Contradiction in Contemporary Russia (London and New York, Routledge, 2014), Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (London, I. B. Tauris, 2016), Russia against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Russia’s Futures (Cambridge, Polity, 2019). His book The Putin Paradox, was published by I. B. Tauris (Bloomsbury) in 2020 and his Deception: Russiagate and the New Cold War came out with Lexington Books in late 2021. He is currently working on The Lost Peace: How We Failed to Prevent a New Cold War for Yale University Press. [read more]