Referee:   Wilfried Jilge (DGAP Berlin)

Chair:      Jan C. Behrends (Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam)

“New Russia” (Novorossija) is the historical term for the regions north of the Black and Azov Sea, which were incorporated into the Russian Empire in the middle and at the end of the 18th century and today belong to Ukraine. In the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict, “New Russia” has been imagined by Russian pro-Kremlin politicians and pro-Russian separatists as a monolithic “South East” of Ukraine: It is supposed to be inhabited exclusively by Russian speaking “compatriots” of the Russian Federation and to be orientated politically towards Moscow. With the help of these concepts the respective groups tried to legitimate the protective role of the Russian state for “its compatriots” as well as the annexation of the Crimean peninsula and the military aggression against Ukraine in 2014.

The lecture shows that the concept of “New Russia” is not a product of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict but has in fact been developed by Russian ideologues and pro-Russian intellectuals and academics in Ukraine since the end of the 1990s. Wilfried Jilge analyses the genesis and function of the concept of “New Russia” in the context of the wider geopolitical concept of the “Russian World” since the 1990s. He asks whether and if so, to what extent “New Russia” is of importance for the perception of the Ukrainian state and nation in Russia.

Wilfried Jilge is a historian of Eastern Europe and program officer at the DGAP’s Robert Bosch Center for Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia in Berlin. His areas of specialization are contemporary history and politics in Ukraine and Russia, and his research interests include German and European relations with Ukraine in the context of EU integration and the EU’s neighborhood policy; the current Russian-Ukrainian crisis; domestic and foreign-policy implications of the Ukraine-Russia crisis; and new currents of nationalism, Slavophilism, geopolitical identity, and identity-based politics in post-Soviet Russia.

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Time & Place

Thursday, 12. January 2017  |  18:00 - 19:30 

Forum Transregionale Studien
Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin

Please find further information here.