Closing Discussion – Into the Third Year of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Nikolay Kozhanov (Moderator)

Nikolay Kozhanov is a research associate professor at the Gulf Studies Center of Qatar University. He is also a nonresident scholar at the Economics and Energy Program of the Middle East Institute and a consulting fellow at the Russia and Eurasia Programme of Chatham House. Kozhanov’s research focuses on the geopolitics of the Gulf’s hydrocarbons, Russian foreign policy in the Middle East, and Iran’s economic and international relations. 

Anna Borshchevskaya

Anna Borshchevskaya is a senior fellow in The Washington Institute’s Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation Program on Great Power Competition and the Middle East, focusing on Russia’s policy toward the Middle East. In addition, she is a contributor to Oxford Analytica. In June 2024 she served as a consultant for the U.S. Department of State on defense strategies in the Black Sea region. Her analysis is published widely in publications such as Foreign Affairs, The Hill, The New Criterion, and Middle East Quarterly, as well as peer-reviewed journals. She is the author of the 2021 book, Putin’s War in Syria: Russian Foreign Policy and the Price of America’s Absence (I.B. Tauris, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing). She is the author of the February 2016 Institute monograph, “Russia in the Middle East.”

James Nixey

James Nixey joined Chatham House in 2000 and has been Director of the institute’s Russia and Eurasia Programme since 2013. He is also an Associate Fellow with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, an honorary research fellow at the University of Exeter, and serves on the board of the journal UA: Ukraine Analytica. Principal research interests concern Russia’s relationships with the other post-Soviet states, and key international actors. Selected publications include chapters in Putin Again: Implications for Russia and the West (2012), The Russian Challenge (2015), The Struggle for Ukraine (October 2017), Myths and Misconceptions in the Debate on Russia (2021) and most recently, the conclusion and introduction to How to end Russia’s war on Ukraine: Safeguarding Russia’s Future and the Dangers of a False Peace (July 2023). He has also written for The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent, Newsweek, USA Today, BBC.co.uk and CNN.com.

Hanna Shelest

Hanna Shelest is the Director of Security Programmes at the Foreign Policy Council “Ukrainian Prism” and Editor-in-chief at UA: Ukraine Analytica. She also is a non-resident senior fellow at CEPA (Washington, DC). She is a member of the Supervisory Board at the Ukrainian Institute. Before this, she had served for more than ten years as a Senior Researcher at the National Institute for Strategic Studies under the President of Ukraine, Odesa Branch. In 2014, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome. She was an adviser of the Working Group preparing Ukrainian Navy Strategy 2035 and was involved in working groups developing the Foreign Policy Strategy of Ukraine, Asian Strategy for MFA, and Ukraine’s NATO Public Communication Strategy. She led different policy-related projects, among others: Scorecards of the Ukrainian Foreign Policy (2015-2022); Ukraine-NATO: Enhanced Level (2021-2022); The Hybrid War Decade: Lessons Learned to Move Forward Successfully (2019), Ukraine’s Elections in Focus (2019); Foreign Policy Recommendations for the Parliament of Ukraine (2017-2021).

Li-Chen Sim

Li-Chen Sim is an Assistant Professor at Khalifa University in the United Arab Emirates and a non-resident scholar at the US Middle East Institute. She is a specialist on hydrocarbon and low-carbon energies in the Gulf and their intersection with international relations. Her research is applied to the political economy of development and to foreign policy implications for Gulf-Asia exchanges and Russia-Middle East interactions. Her most recently published books include Asian Perceptions of Gulf Security (Routledge, 2023), Low Carbon Energy in the Middle East and North Africa (Palgrave 2021), and External Powers and the Gulf Monarchies (Routledge, 2018). Her articles have appeared in top-tier academic journals including Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Energy Research & Social Science, Journal of Contemporary China, and Policy Studies. She has been a guest speaker at Chatham House London, Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington DC, Emirates Center for Strategic Studies & Research, Foreign Service Institute in Washington DC, INSEAD Abu Dhabi, and Japan’s Institute of Energy Economics among others.