Since Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his support for a plan to recruit fighters from abroad to join the Russian army in early 2022, foreigners have fought in Ukraine as part of Russian forces. Many of these fighters are mercenaries in the commonly understood sense of that term. That is, they are fighters who have gone, intentionally, to fight for Russia in return for significant payment. Although these fighters have often found themselves in Ukraine with little to no training and without their promised salaries, this article is not primarily concerned with them. Instead, it is interested in those fighters who arrived in Russia without knowing that they would be sent to the conflict, or who did not know that they were going to Russia at all. The article argues that such ‘forced fighters’ who are misled or tricked into taking part in an armed conflict should be given protection beyond that given to other combatants, specifically that they should be offered repatriation to their countries of origin. It argues that international humanitarian law is unable to effectively capture the position of these fighters or provide adequate protection to them. It suggests, rather, that the law on modern slavery can provide a way to understand and reconceptualise the position of these fighters—as victims of servitude and human trafficking—and that this body of law can deliver the remedy of repatriation to them.

This article explores the evolution of US policy on Antarctica, focusing on its legal, environmental and geopolitical aspects. It aims to identify changing US priorities in this regard. The Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) governs the region, emphasizing peace, scientific cooperation and environmental protection. The USA has issued four major memoranda on Antarctica in 1982, 1994, 2020 and 2024. This article highlights growing geopolitical competition, particularly with China and Russia. China frames Antarctica as essential to its global rise, using dual-purpose technologies that blur the line between science and strategic military interests. Similarly, Russia’s activities in the region raise concerns about potential violations of the ATS’s peaceful purpose mandate. The USA maintains its leadership in Antarctic diplomacy, advocating for environmental preservation and scientific cooperation. This article concludes by emphasizing the need for international collaboration to address climate change, resource exploitation and rising strategic tensions, ensuring Antarctica remains a region dedicated to peace and science.

Autocrats frequently appeal to socially conservative values, but little is known about how or even whether such strategies are actually paying political dividends. To address important issues of causality, this study exploits Russian president Vladimir Putin’s 2020 bid to gain a popular mandate for contravening presidential term limits in part by bundling this constitutional change with a raft of amendments that would enshrine traditional morality (including heteronormativity and anti-secularism) in Russia’s basic law. Drawing on an original experiment-bearing survey of the Russian population, it finds that Putin’s appeal to these values generated substantial new support for Putin’s reform package, primarily from social conservatives who did not support him politically. These findings expand our understanding of authoritarian practices and policy making by revealing one way in which core political values are leveraged to facilitate autocracy-enabling institutional changes and potentially other ends that autocrats might pursue.

This article examines the divergent historical views espoused by Russian and Ukrainian societies and their representatives on topics such as the 1932-1933 famine, Stalinism, and the post-World War II Soviet Union. We draw on an original online survey, conducted simultaneously in January 2021 in Ukraine and Russia, to provide an in-depth analysis of views on history in Ukraine and Russia before the 2022 invasion. In Russia, we illustrate how little contestation there is of official narratives. This may signal the existence of an integrated mnemonic community after a decade of state-curated historical narratives, but it might also imply that Russian society is disengaged from history. In pre-2022 Ukraine, meanwhile, we identify persistent fragmentation in the ways in which society perceives history, largely centered along the country’s linguistic divide. However, a central finding is that Russian-speakers in Ukraine differ in their historical views from Russian citizens on key dimensions such as the memory of Stalin and the Holodomor. These results speak to the evolving and politicized nature of societal memory and provide an important baseline for interpreting potential mnemonic shifts that accompanied the full-scale war launched against Ukraine by Russia in February 2022.

L’invasion de l’Ukraine par la Russie en février 2022 a suscité des réactions importantes au Québec, mettant de l’avant des traits distinctifs de sa culture stratégique. Cet article propose une analyse rigoureuse et systématique des attitudes québécoises face à la guerre en Ukraine, en examinant les discours des élites politiques, des élus et politiciens, des médias et de l’opinion publique du 1er novembre 2021 au 24 février 2024. L’objectif est d’explorer les caractéristiques de la culture stratégique québécoise, d’évaluer son évolution et d’analyser son articulation avec la culture stratégique canadienne dominante. L’article s’intéresse également à la présence d’attitudes prorusses au Québec. Bien que la culture stratégique québécoise évolue progressivement vers un internationalisme libéral, nos résultats démontrent qu’elle demeure marquée par certaines tendances pacifistes, antimilitaristes et anti-impérialistes. Les attitudes prorusses, bien que présentes, sont principalement véhiculées par un nombre restreint d’acteurs.

The tattoos of the Pazyryk ice mummies are of paramount importance for the archaeology of Iron Age Siberia and are often discussed from a broad stylistic and symbolic perspective. However, deeper investigations into this cultural practice were hindered by the inaccessibility of quality data. Here, the authors use high-resolution, near-infrared data in conjunction with experimental evidence to re-examine the tools and techniques employed in Early Iron Age tattooing. The high-quality data allow for the previously unfeasible distinction of artist hands and enable us to put the individual back into the picture of a widespread but rarely preserved prehistoric practice.

The article explores the interplay between imperialism and ethnonationalism, revealing how these seemingly conflicting ideologies coalesced in Russian political thought. The period of 1989–1994 saw a struggle between civic nationalism, which sought to redefine Russia within its existing borders, and imperialist-nationalist currents that viewed Soviet disintegration as a geopolitical catastrophe. Within this ideological conflict, the “time bomb” metaphor emerged as a potent rhetorical device, encapsulating anxieties about territorial fragmentation and national decline. The study identifies Russian émigré intellectual Gleb Rahr as a key figure in introducing the metaphor, later popularized by figures such as Dmitry Rogozin and Vladimir Putin.

Why and how does Russia engage in the arms trade? Scholars have largely focused on why Russia participates in the arms trade, often neglecting the equally crucial question of how it conducts this trade. Yet understanding the mechanisms by which Russia promotes arms sales provides deeper insights into why it does so. While many portray Russia’s arms trade as driven by economic or strategic motivations, few examine the specific tools it employs, particularly defence counter-trade, which includes non-monetary barter, counter-purchase obligations, and industrial or technological investments (offsets). This paper fills that gap by offering an eight-decade perspective on Russian arms trade practices, drawing on data and case studies to uncover a more nuanced set of motives. Russia integrates economic and political objectives in its arms trade, seeking not only to out-compete Western suppliers but also to expand or regain influence in various regions, circumvent Western-imposed sanctions, secure access to valuable resources, and sustain its military capabilities. Although barter and technological cooperation have long been part of its trade practices, Russia has only recently adopted offset practices in a systematic way. By leveraging defence counter-trade, Moscow aims to stabilise, and potentially grow, its arms exports as global conditions shift.

This article explores the role of ideology in shaping Russia’s foreign and security policies, addressing whether it serves as a genuine guiding principle for the ruling elite or merely functions as a strategic tool to legitimise authoritarian rule and challenge the international order. Rather than focusing solely on Vladimir Putin, this study highlights the plurality of elite groups engaged in the production and contestation of strategic ideas. It highlights two key dimensions of ideology’s influence: first, its structural role in shaping elite networks and defining their internal power struggles, particularly among hawkish groups seeking policy influence; second, its instrumental function as a resource exchanged between ideological actors and policymakers, where ruling elites actively promote or demote ideological groups to justify strategic shifts in foreign and security policy. By analysing both the bottom-up diffusion of ideological narratives and the top-down mechanisms of state sponsorship, this research advances a nuanced understanding of how ideology interacts with domestic power dynamics, social environments, and international constraints to shape policy outcomes.

In this article, we show that the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a pro-democratic reaction from citizens in liberal democracies, which we term the “rally for democracy.” Unlike the conventional “rally ‘round the flag” effect that boosts government popularity, this involves citizens rallying behind democracy as an international ideal. It includes expressing stronger proximity to democratic powers, stronger approval for democratic leaders abroad, and greater aversion to authoritarian regimes. Through a survey quasi-experiment conducted in six countries between February and May of 2022, we provide evidence that the “rally for democracy” emerged immediately following Russia’s invasion. Exploring this observation further via analysis of data from 55 countries between 2014 and 2023, we find this to be the intensification of a longer-term trend in response to the rise of authoritarian great powers. A new cleavage exists in geopolitical loyalties, based on the degree to which citizens feel attachment to democracy, and this divide runs both between and within countries.

Russian nation-building policy has often been described as ambiguous, blending a rhetorical commitment to the state’s multinational character together with more exclusionary rhetoric and policies. Drawing from original survey questions on national identity commissioned in December 2022, I find that Russian citizens continue to endorse a multinational vision of the Russian state during wartime. Respondents are simultaneously likely to exclude minorities from being fully considered as “true Rossians” [istinnye rossiiane], while socioeconomic and political factors are meaningfully associated with these patterns. In line with previous scholarship, these findings underscore the blurriness of the russkii/rossiiskii distinction in practice: just as russkii should not always be interpreted as an exclusively ethnic term, rossiiskii should not be seen as a non-ethnic category, either. The findings in the Russian case carry implications for understanding how nation-builders in multiethnic contexts may seek to cater to ethnic majorities while simultaneously signaling commitments to ethnic diversity.

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on reactionary internationalism by linking it with scholarly discussions on civilisation and civilisationism, which have mostly been running in parallel trajectories. By doing so, it attempts to address the question of how the radical right, rooted in numerous particularisms, such as cultural, national, and religious, has managed to foster a global movement with an internationalist ideology that poses a significant challenge to the liberal international order. Through an analysis of the relevant literature and a case study of the Serbian radical right, this article tries to elucidate this question and bridge the gap between the two debates by demonstrating that civilisationism forms the core of reactionary internationalism, unifying the radical right from the West to the East. This article examines the Serbian case and its history of civilisational and geopolitical reactions as a possible paradigm for the contemporary radical right in general. Furthermore, it explores the role of Russian revisionism and war in Ukraine in shaping this civilisational discourse, specifically considering the narratives built around the Serbian foreign fighters’ network in Ukraine. An additional contribution of this article is that it provides a non-Western perspective on civilisation, religion, and nationalism.

This article examines the evolution of Soviet operatic conventions during Khrushchev’s Thaw. The first opera to be prematurely cancelled from the Bolshoi Theatre since Stalin was Rodion Shchedrin’s 1961 opera Not Love Alone, and as such, it set the standard for what would be deemed unacceptable in Thaw-era opera. Using this opera as a case study, I employ extensive archival material, including never-before-accessed audience surveys and internal Bolshoi Theatre meeting minutes, to analyse the opera’s path to official acceptance – and then official rejection. I thus illuminate the competing demands that composers, Party bureaucrats, and audiences expected of the Soviet opera project, and the convergences and divergences with the Stalin-era. Finally, I demonstrate why the project of creating a robust repertoire of contemporary-themed Soviet opera failed during the Thaw, never to be revived with such fervour, and demonstrate why Shchedrin’s opera was the attempt closest to achieving enduring success.

Appeals to “decolonize” now range widely, from decolonizing the university to decolonizing Russia. This article poses the question of what work the concept of decolonization can and cannot do. It underscores how much can be learned about how decolonization came about if one explores the different goals that activists sought in their time. It suggests that if instead of looking for a colonial “legacy,” we explore historical trajectories of colonization and decolonization, we can reveal how political, economic, and social structures in both ex-colonies and ex-metropoles were shaped and reshaped over time. Finally, it brings into conversation with the literature on the decolonization of the empires of Western European states more recent scholarship on Russia and the Soviet Union, pointing to different forms of imperial rule and imperial collapse and also to the possibility of “reimperialization,” of reconstituting empire in new contexts.