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Vinay Shukla
Nobuo Shimotomai
Konstantin Simonov
Ivan Safranchuk
Harold Saunders
Vsevolod Sviridov
Pavel Sharikov
Jacques Sapir
Elizabeth Sidiropoulos
Richard Sakwa
United Kingdom
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 and post-communist 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 latest book is The Putin Paradox, published by I. B. Tauris (Bloomsbury) in 2020. His book Deception: Russiagate and the New Cold War is due out with Lexington Books by the end of 2021. He is currently working on The Lost Peace: The Second Cold War and the Making of a New Global Conflict for Yale University Press.
Materials
Opinions
Covid and Leadership Crisis in Britain
The gulf between the promise and the delivery is widening, the political distance between the devolved administrations growing, and the distrust between the government and people deepening. Ultimately, Britain is suffering not only a crisis of governance but entering into a fully-fledged crisis of the state, writes Valdai Club expert Richard Sakwa.
21.01.2022
Opinions
The Cultural Revolution of the West and World Politics
In 1945 the US agreed to compromise its unfettered freedom of action in international affairs in the belief that engagement with allies and adversaries through multilateral agencies would avoid the pitfalls of the interwar period while rendering US power more legitimate, and thereby more effective. This bargain between power and legitimacy proved remarkably effective, and helped the political West survive and triumph in the Cold War. However, the tension between the autonomy of the Charter (Yalta-Potsdam) international system and the institutions of liberal hegemony were evident, although disguised during the Cold War.

02.08.2021
Opinions
A New Concert of Powers: Another Substitution?
The Yalta-Helsinki international system is far from perfect, but rather than further undermining it through ad hoc arrangements of one sort or another, effort should be more profitably directed at devising improved ways of combining sovereignty with more effective and progressive forms of internationalism; a new synthesis adequate to meet the challenges of our times while recognising the changed balance of power in the state system, writes Valdai Club expert Richard Sakwa.
05.05.2021
Opinions
Covid: Beyond the Negative
The pandemic has once again demonstrated that it is not enough to leave fundamental decisions about the public good to technocratic elites or social identity entrepreneurs. The common good is a matter for the people to decide, and for that we require the renewal of politics as an open-ended process of public contestation.
08.02.2021
Opinions
The New Wave of Covid: A Negative Crisis?
Can the negatives of the crisis be turned into the positives by taking advantage of the opportunity afforded by the global shock to the system? In international affairs all the signals are turned to red, with the liberal international order crumbling and the 1945 international system challenged as never before. However, at the societal level the green signals are strongest, Valdai Club expert Richard Sakwa writes.
12.11.2020
Opinions
Normality: Coronavirus and State Transformation
A crisis is a moment of reflection in the life of a community. The response to a challenge is as important as the summons itself. In the case of Covid-19, the crisis is the most profound in living memory. Like a neutron bomb, it destroys people but not the physical infrastructure. It prowls unseen, and the threat of contagion pushes people apart. No less important, it undermines accustomed models of normality, the ‘common sense’ of an era, and breaks boundaries that had hitherto been sacrosanct, writes Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent.
29.04.2020
Opinions
The Brexit Saga Continues: Turning Disaster into Catastrophe
No matter if there is a deal or no deal, Britain would end up worse off than it is today. This is why there is a general consensus that Brexit itself is a type of excess, even a type of collective suicide, pursued by a hardline group of people who always considered the European Union an alien and oppressive force, which in itself is a sign of a long-term crisis of British state development.
19.03.2019
Opinions
The Skripal Affair
There is no doubt that the Skripal poisoning is a major incident that will resonate through history. The only question is whether the confrontation will dissipate, as it did over Agadir in 1911, or whether this is the Sarajevo slow-burning crisis that could explode into flame at some later point.
23.03.2018
Opinions
A Phony War for Our Times
The ‘phony war’ is the term used to describe the period between Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and followed in short order by the declaration of war by Britain and France, and the blitzkrieg that saw France defeated in less than a month in May 1940. This was a period in which war was anticipated, accompanied by an accelerated re-armament programme in the two countries. Today there is something of a similar atmosphere, although in a very different historical situation.

16.02.2018
Opinions
Clinton and Russia: Who is Ms Hillary?
It would not be accurate to call this ‘Russophobia’, since Hillary Clinton has nothing serious to say about Russia as a whole, and instead the focus is on Vladimir Putin personally, and the general malevolence of Russia’s contemporary political system and actions on the world stage.
09.10.2017
Video
Virus Mutation and World Experience in Revaccination: Human Rights and Society. An Expert Discussion
13.07.2021
The First Year of COVID-19: Socio-Political Consequences Through the Lens of Valdai Club Experts
28.01.2021
Richard Sakwa on the 14th Valdai Club Annual Meeting
23.10.2017
Richard Sakwa: We Need New Continental Vision
27.06.2016
Richard Sakwa: Every Valdai Forum Is Different
11.11.2015
Richard Sakwa: The Debates Were Enormously Productive
03.11.2014
Richard Sakwa: Discussions at the Valdai Club do affect policy both ways
09.09.2013
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