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Yalta 2023: Planning for Life After the Russian Invasion

In Brussels, Jens Stoltenberg’s answers about Ukrainian NATO ascension deeply frustrated the Ukrainians in attendance. Photo: Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Julia Ioffe
May 30, 2023

Last week, I attended two conferences. The first was the Brussels Forum, organized by the German Marshall Fund, on the future of Ukraine. The second, organized by the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, focused on what will happen to Russia. It was a week spent imagining a long-term forecast for both countries at a time when even the present is hard to fathom. 

The questions are myriad. How, for example, do you rebuild a country while it is being actively destroyed by a foreign army? How do you understand the future of a country that has kicked out all real journalists, making the present reality so hard to understand? How do you reimagine a country whose territorial integrity is very much up in the air, or one whose dictator seems more powerful at home than ever?