Russian Foreign Policy Research and War in Ukraine

Abstract

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shattered numerous assumptions about the drivers of Russian foreign policy, posing a fundamental challenge to the Russia studies community. Against this backdrop, the article centers on the imperative to reflect how we think and examine Russian foreign policy amid considerable transformations in the country’s international as well as domestic realities. This contribution does so by reviewing and critically reassessing past accomplishments and shortcomings within the field of Russian foreign policy research, evaluating their pertinence in a post-2022 context. Focusing on the scholarly work done with regard to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the study demonstrates that the literature suffers from the inertial tendency of offering old answers to new questions, suggesting potential avenues for further scholarly work on this topic.