Intro text. Who is this guy? What is this site? what do I do next?
Latest Work
Are Russia and Ukraine Cooperating? The Black Sea Grain Initiative
Why would Russia and Ukraine sign a deal to allow grain shipments while they are at war? What happened? Possibly as early as a week
Is Sderzhivanie a nuclear strategy concept or not: Reading Charap’s essay
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is not necessarily an утку. Samuel Charap’s essay Strategic Sderzhivanie: Understanding Contemporary Russian
Editing a glossary of sociolinguistic terms for the Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences
One of my most rewarding opportunties was aworking with Dr. Aisa Bitkeeva, a sociolinguist and “Leading Researcher, Research Center on Ethnic and Language Relations” at the Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences. Initially she asked me to read and edit some English journal articles for Sociolinguistica, but I’m not sure they were used, and we pivoted pretty quickly to a much different piece of work.
About copywriting and production of Folklorica
For four years, I assisted Dr. Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby with the production and distribution of Folklorica, the Journal of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Folklore Association.
Leading an Exchange Program Redesign
In 2020, I took responsibility for requesting visa eligibility documents for South Korean applicants to a twelve-year international exchange program in a university graduate department. As I was learning the application process, COVID-19 was grinding international exchange to a halt.
Evaluating The International Atomic Energy Agency
If you had walked out of the signing of the United Nations Charter on June 26th, 1945 and taken a bicycle ride south and then east along US40 for roughly six hours per day, in three weeks you could have shown up in Socorro, New Mexico on July 16th to witness the first ever detonation of a nuclear weapon.
What is Counter-Proliferation Finance?
The efforts to use explicit sanctions on banks, companies and individuals is new, and has introduced a new field of transnational economic statecraft: counter-proliferation finance.
Buying a Russian S-400 Triumf Air Defense System
In September of 2017 Turkey signed a $2.5 billion contract to buy S-400 Triumf air defense systems from Russia. The US was none-too-pleased with the news and voiced disdain for the purchase repeatedly. What was the big deal?
How hard is it to get a sense of the Russian Armed Forces budget data?
It’s not very hard to get a number, or a couple numbers. I found close to a dozen sources that would state a budget or a spending number. Those are not necessarily the same thing.
How do the Russian Armed Forces express jointness?
The Army’s Foreign Military Service Office (FMSO) produced an e-book in 2017 called The Russian Way of War, which is one of the only documents I’ve found that explores Russian inter-service cooperation thoroughly. According to the authors Dr. Lester Grau and Charles Bartles, Russian command and control has jointness baked-in.