European academia studies Russia too little, too refined, and too slowly

Photo: Antonello Marangi / Shutterstock

When we stop studying our enemies, we lose our intellectual advantage. For Ukraine and the West to boycott in-depth research on Russia is to become entangled in our own assumptions, create false expectations for the public, risk losing their trust, and undermine our ability to shape effective defence policies or counterstrategies.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine exposed the uncomfortable truth that the West – with all its rich traditions in political studies – may have lost that intellectual edge. Scholars have created a “warm bath” of liberal assumptions, reassuring us that democracy’s rise is inevitable (Francis Fukuyama), or that large-scale violence is a thing of the past (Steven Pinker). Of course, some voices challenged these claims, but donors, institutions and societies were content to keep believing the comforting paradigm that promised them peace and predictability.

Can these intellectual leaders be blamed for incompetence? Not exactly. Their calculations were methodologically sound, philosophically reasoned, and statistically supported. But they were grounded almost exclusively in western logic – where human life has value, economic benefit matters, societal welfare is a goal, progress is desirable, and international law is a guiding framework. Putin also weighs these things, but through a different lens: one of kleptocracy, historical revisionism, and imperial resurrection.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine – long regarded in the West as impossible, irrational and absurd – nevertheless took place. Today, the media reports that Russia has for years been cooperating with and financing far-right political movements, while also helping them achieve electoral success in countries like Germany, Romania and Moldova. It has been recruiting refugees to destabilize host societies, violating national borders, and consistently carrying out hybrid and cyber attacks. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has now publicly warned that within the next five years, Russia could launch a military assault on European members of the Alliance.

Is Europe ready to face Putin’s Russia? Does it truly understand its enemy? That is a complex question. On one hand, European leaders now issue strong statements about increasing defence spending; Russian threats are a regular topic at conferences; and think tanks routinely expose Moscow’s influence operations across the continent. Finally, there seems to be a broad consensus that the Kremlin is a dangerous beast. But does Europe truly understand the nature of that beast?

Too little

Despite the sheer volume of discourse around Russia – hundreds of conferences, public debates, and government briefings – the actual academic investment remains surprisingly modest. In monitoring leading European research platforms such as EURAXESS and Academic Positions, I was struck by how little new, concrete research on Russia is being funded within European universities. Out of more than a thousand open calls for PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers and fellows, only around ten projects directly concern Russia – and almost none address its violent societal dynamics, war-related propaganda, cognitive warfare, or state-sponsored terror.

The overwhelming majority of grants go to engineering, computer science and the natural sciences. While these disciplines are undoubtedly essential, the imbalance is striking given the scale of the current threats. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that in 11 European NATO countries, significant portions of right-wing parties now believe Putin is doing the right thing in global affairs. These parties are gaining momentum and electoral power. Is the growing justification and acceptance of an unprovoked aggressor and convicted war criminal not a clear sign that Europe’s discourse on Russia is in crisis – and that the humanities must return to the centre of the strategic focus?

One might argue that defence ministries and think tanks are indeed taking Russian threats seriously – and their progress in studying Russia is, to be fair, significant. But as the historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Tuchman observed in The Guns of August, military analysis is often shaped more by beliefs, biases and institutional inertia than by objective reasoning. As she wrote: “What a staff makes out of the available evidence depends upon the degree of optimism or pessimism prevailing among them, on what they want to believe or fear to believe, and sometimes upon the sensitivity or intuition of an individual.”

This is where European universities should step in – to offer more independent and less doctrinaire research. Baltic countries are already doing this, funding studies on resilience, disinformation, Russian studies, and influence operations. But elsewhere in Europe – especially in the West and South – such efforts are rare exceptions.

At a recent meeting, I asked an assistant professor at a Dutch university why there are so few funded PhD positions on Russian disinformation, terrorism and media literacy. She shrugged: “We don’t decide who gets the grants.”

Too refined

Another colleague of mine, who spent several years as a researcher at a Swedish university, describes a similar tendency. According to her, many of the projects they proposed – focusing on Russian information warfare, war crimes and related issues – also failed to secure funding. But she added something deeper: Europe, she said, still studies Russia in a “refined” way.

At one academic conference on war crimes, she presented unfiltered footage of Russian atrocities. After the session, she was diplomatically advised to reconsider such material in the future – because “the audience may not be ready for this.”

Refined means without impurities. And it is precisely in those “impurities” that academics tend to leave out the harshest – but most realistic – aspects of Russia, such as its capacity to unleash barbaric, large-scale violence. Ukrainians have already paid the price for this illusion. Because of their own refined perception of Russians, many civilians did not flee during the early days of occupation – and became victims of unspeakable war crimes. “Surely the Russians won’t kill defenceless civilians,” they told themselves.

Europe now risks repeating the same mistake. Scholars often avoid “politicizing” their research, hesitate to study the aggressor directly, or continue to invite “good Russians” to academic platforms – voices that lull audiences with mirages of a liberal Russia. This sanitization of knowledge risks turning intellectuals into “useful idiots”.

Too slowly

There is also the issue of speed. Let me offer an example from terrorism studies, which is my own field. For decades, terrorism was conceptualized as violence carried out by non-state actors. When Russia has conducted proxy campaigns – whether through the Wagner Group in Africa and the Middle East, or mercenaries in the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics in Ukraine, which committed a global act of terror by downing Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 – it can still be classified as a “state sponsor of terrorism”.

But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, marked by terror tactics and systematic war crimes, created a new question: what if the state itself is the terrorist?

Years later, no clear academic or legal framework has emerged to address this issue. Global political divisions have made it nearly impossible to codify such a concept in international law. A 2024 report by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism (ICCT) takes a bold step toward conceptualizing “Russian state terrorism” (and the author deserves credit for that), but even it concedes that the global academic community remains hesitant. As the report notes:

“Even if further designations of the country [as a state terrorist] do not materialise, it is useful to raise awareness of Russian involvement in such [terrorist] activities for the benefit of the research, academic and expert milieu, which tended to see Moscow not as a foe or a threat, but more of a partner in countering jihadi terrorism.”

Not only is this absurd, it is offensive to Ukrainians, who are direct victims of Russian terror. Imagine if, during the 2010s, when Western European capitals were suffering deadly jihadist attacks, the US had suggested cooperating with ISIS to fight al-Qaeda. Unthinkable. Instead, the West studied ISIS deeply and aggressively. Russia, by contrast, remains insufficiently examined.

This intellectual sluggishness may stem from the uncomfortable reality that studying Russia today requires a fundamental rethinking of long-established paradigms – and many in the West are simply not ready for that. As Ukrainian diplomat Volodymyr Ohryzko put it: “The West doesn’t know what Russia is. But worse – until recently – it didn’t want to. Because it hasn’t yet decided what to do with such a Russia.”

Sun Tzu famously wrote that “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither, you will succumb in every battle.”

Russia, it seems, knows the rules. It studies its enemies, invests in influence operations, conducts espionage, recruits proxies, and actively works to destabilize societal identities. Its goal is to plunge societies into chaos and uncertainty, eroding their resilience and capacity to resist. And Russia does all of this while Europe hesitates.

Europe must act – and invest in Russian studies that go beyond political correctness, beyond abstraction, and into the dark interior of what Russia is and what it is becoming. How did Bucha happen? Why did Russian soldiers carry out the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war? The words of Dmytro Kuleba, then Ukraine’s foreign minister, deserve to be echoed here:

“Bucha did not happen in one day. For many years, Russian political elites and propaganda have been inciting hatred, dehumanizing Ukrainians, nurturing Russian superiority, and laying ground for these atrocities. I encourage scholars around the globe to research what led to Bucha.”

We must uncover the psychological roots of Russian radicalization and cruelty, expose the architecture of its propaganda, and develop the intellectual tools necessary to defend against a potential future full-scale war.

When Russia strikes, it will not be refined. It will be raw, real and full of impurities.

Ukrainian scholars already know what that face looks like. Bringing them into wider European academic research is not only prudent – it may be the most vital contribution to Europe’s understanding of the Russian threat.

Ihor Myslovskyi is a Ukrainian journalist, communications specialist, and researcher of media and terrorism. He has authored academic articles on how terrorism is covered in the media and on the evolving relationship between terrorism and journalism. His expert columns on global politics, strategic communication, and Russia’s terrorist tactics and behaviour have appeared in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, European Pravda, Detector Media, and NV.

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academia, Russia, Russian imperialism, Russian propaganda, Russian studies