Europe’s Futures Fellow 2023/24

Hanna
Shelest

Photo description
© Markus Korenjak
Foreign Policy Council "Ukrainian Prism" and UA: Ukraine Analytica
The Political Spectrum of the Right, Authoritarianism and the Reaction to the Russo-Ukrainian War

In the last decade, there has been an increase in right-wing and far-right political sentiments in many European countries, including Turkey. Some gravitate towards authoritarianism, some towards populism. In her research, Hanna Shelest proposes to look at these political actors’ reactions and positions towards the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and further relations with the authoritarian Russian regime, in light of the fact that some had a history of active cooperation with the Kremlin or affiliated political parties. Shelest will study whether those with authoritarian sentiments are more eager to justify Russian aggression or call for peace on Russian terms than those with a populist tendency, as the Italian example shows.

Hanna Shelest is Security Studies Program Director at the Foreign Policy Council Ukrainian Prism and editor-in-chief at UA: Ukraine Analytica. She is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington. Previously, she served as a senior researcher at the National Institute for Strategic Studies under the President of Ukraine, Odesa Branch, for more than ten years. In 2014, she was a visiting research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome. She was an adviser of the working group preparing the Ukrainian Navy Strategy 2035 and was involved in working groups developing the Foreign Policy Strategy of Ukraine, the Asian Strategy for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Ukraine’s NATO Public Communication Strategy. She has led different policy-related projects, most recently Scorecards of the Ukrainian Foreign Policy, Ukraine-NATO: Enhanced Level, and Foreign Policy Recommendations for the Parliament of Ukraine.