Pål Kolstø, professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Oslo, has written extensively on nation-building and ethnic issues in Russia and Eastern Europe.
The first two months of the war alone turned the Russian clock back decades, undoing thirty years of post-Soviet economic gains and reducing the country to an international pariah state.
Russia has witnessed a growing rapprochement between some of its nationalists and some of its democrats, but this trend is threatened by divisions over the annexation of Crimea.
