Learning about the Russia-Ukraine war

The Centre for International Studies (CIS) in collaboration with UTAR Centre for Corporate & Community Development (CCCD) organised a talk titled Russo – Ukrainian War, as part of UTAR’s Global Affairs Talk Series.  The talk took place on 13 July 2022 via Zoom and Facebook Live. It was presented by Distinguished Research Fellow and Founding Director of Institute of Political Science Academia Sinica Taiwan (IPSAS) Prof Wu Yu-Shan.

While explaining the few main reasons for the Russian-Ukrainian war, Prof Wu mentioned that the first reason was due to cruelty from Russia’s perspective. He then showed the statistics of countries that have joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and subsequently the European Union (EU); Hungary and Poland joined NATO and the EU in 2004, while Croatia joined NATO in 2009 and the EU in 2013. Prof Wu also pointed out that the Western Balkan countries such as Albania, Montenegro and Macedonia became part of NATO in 2009, 2017 and 2020 respectively, while becoming candidates for the EU. On the other hand, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Serbia and Ukraine are some of the countries that have a Partnership for Peace with NATO.

Prof Wu showing interesting statistics

Describing Putinism, he said, “Putinism is a mixed system of different political ideas. It is not a communist party dictatorship nor is it a western democracy but rather a sovereign democracy, which is a type of competitive authoritarianism; there are regular elections held, however, the media is suppressed, and the opposition party are murdered or kidnapped to prevent them from overtaking the ruling party. Thus, as you can see, there is no level ground between the ruling and opposition party, and this system is in between authoritarianism and democracy.” He also spoke about the existing security dilemma between Ukraine and Russia.

Next, Prof Wu mentioned ethnic and linguistic rivalry as the second reason for the war. He shared the Ukrainian history, and how the Eastern and Southern parts of Ukraine are friendly with the Russians, and even speak their language, while the Northern and Western parts are anti-Russia. Therefore, there was a conflict between the pro-Russian and anti-Russian segments in Ukraine which became a contributing factor to the war.

Prof Wu explaining Ukraine’s history

Prof Wu also mentioned the tactics used by the Russian forces and explained how the current Ukrainian President dealt with the Western and Russian parties. He ended the talk by explaining the two stages of the war, which were the critical and second stages.

Prof Wu explaining the war