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Please join the Fletcher Russia and Eurasia Program for a presentation by Dr. Samuel Charap on the prospects for relations between NATO in Russia after the end of Russia's war against Ukraine.Until quite recently, Western governments have been consumed by the question of how to respond to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But recent Russian “hybrid” attacks in Europe have underscored that there is a significant risk of a broader conflagration on the continent. This risk is likely to persist even after the guns fall silent in Ukraine.
This talk looks past the current war to the strategic environment that will follow it. It explores what the fighting has done to the architecture that once governed relations between Russia and the West, and asks how much— if any —of that architecture can be rebuilt. It considers what the sources of conflict might be after the immediate crisis recedes, and how policies can and should be aimed at mitigating them.
Even after the Russia-Ukraine war ends, there is no prospect for a shared security architecture in Europe. Yet neither Russia nor NATO wants a war with the other. The challenge for the NATO alliance is to deny Russia its malign objectives while avoiding a direct clash. That will require both deterrence and diplomacy.
Dr. Samuel Charap is Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy and a senior political scientist at RAND. His research interests include the foreign policies of Russia and the former Soviet states; European and Eurasian regional security; and U.S.-Russia deterrence, strategic stability, and arms control.
From November 2012 until April 2017, Charap was the senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Prior to joining the IISS, he served at the U.S. Department of State as senior advisor to the undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security and on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff, covering Russia and Eurasia. From 2009 to 2011, Charap was director for Russia and Eurasia at the Center for American Progress.
Charap's book, Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (coauthored with Timothy Colton), was published in 2017. His articles have appeared in The Washington Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Survival, Current History, and several other journals.
Charap was a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center and the International Center for Policy Studies (Kyiv), and a Fulbright scholar at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. He is fluent in Russian and proficient in Ukrainian. Charap holds a Ph.D. in political science and an M.Phil. in Russian and East European studies from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall scholar. He received his B.A. in Russian and political science from Amherst College. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Date: Thursday, November 12, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM ET
Location: Mugar 231
Address: 160 Packard Ave, Medford, MA 02155
Refreshments will be served. This in-person event is open to the public. Please register via the link in the first comment.
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Event venue
160 Packard Ave, Medford, MA 02155-5815, United States
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