CSEEES put on an event titled “The Russian Invasion of Ukraine”. The conversation definitely leaned more on the side of how Ukraine was doing at the time. This included Volodymyr Zelenskyy and how his approval ratings skyrocketed during the crisis. It was mentioned that many Ukrainians and even Russians who are not in favor of Putin and his decisions have started to use less Russian and incorporate more Ukrainian language into their vocabulary.
This event relates to IA because major conflicts such as this have consequences all over the world (ie foreign policy, economy). It is important to be up to date with these conflicts so that we can see what it means for the state of the world.
I think that this event was helpful in my understanding of the Russia-Ukraine conflict because it synthesized some of the key aspects. I am interested in that particular region of the world so this event was relevant to my personal interests.
This event relates to my major in security and intelligence and my minors in Russian and psychology. Aside from the obvious connections to my major and Russian, a lot of things that were mentioned in the discussion could be explained by what I learned in my Psychology of Personal Security class. We learned that during times of conflict, people become a lot more patriotic and approval ratings shoot up which explains the Ukrainian reactions to what Zelenskyy is doing or saying. Since people feel insecure when their country is under attack, they bolster their attachments by promoting their worldview defense. In Ukraine, (hopefully) Ukrainians are attached to their country because they think that their image will be carried on by their country when they pass away. Because their attachment is threatened, they will be patriotic as a worldview defense mechanism. I think that this discussion definitely helped me to pull my psychology knowledge out of the classroom.