At the heart of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lies a struggle over who defines the past and who is allowed to shape the future.
The programme studies the war from three vantage points, each through a different kind of vehicle. A research platform builds the evidence base on the territory Russia occupies. A policy network translates Ukrainian frontline expertise into UK and allied defence decisions, and carries allied doctrine back to Ukrainian units. An analysis strand reads how the war is reshaping the futures open to Russia. Together they span the occupied territories, Ukraine’s defence, and Russian society.
What connects them is a shared method and purpose: each rests on direct, primary evidence, and each serves both rigorous scholarship and concrete influence on policy in the UK, Europe, and North America. The work proceeds with scholarly independence, recognising that Russia’s aggression is an ongoing catastrophe for the Ukrainian people, and that a Russian victory would endanger not only Ukrainian sovereignty but European security and the civic freedoms that make academic work possible.
Strand 1: Occupied Territories
TOT Insights is the programme’s research platform on Russian-occupied Ukraine: a structured evidence base of original fieldwork in Ukraine, occupation administrative records, and open-source monitoring, turned into analytical briefings, datasets, primary-source collections, and peer-reviewed scholarship.
The occupied territories are among the least researched and most consequential dimensions of the war. They are a humanitarian catastrophe for the millions of Ukrainians living under occupation; an underexamined subject in scholarship and policy; and a direct security threat, because the methods Russia tests in occupied Ukraine, from forced passportisation to youth militarisation, shape the threats the UK and its allies will face next. TOT Insights builds the authoritative foundation this subject requires, for scholars and decision-makers alike.
You can access TOT Insights here.
Who: Dr Jade McGlynn, Dr Maeve Ryan, Dr Yelyzaveta Monastyrova, Oleksandr Kachmar, Kimberly Metcalf, Petro Andriushchenko, Vladyslav Havrylov.
Strand 2: Lessons from Ukraine
Most lessons-from-Ukraine analysis reaching UK and European decision-makers is produced at one remove, over-filtered and out of date, and rarely validated by the people who generated it. It records what Ukraine did without tracking how Russia adapted, and tends to confirm existing UK assumptions rather than test them. The result reassures more than it informs.
This network exists to change UK decisions. It channels frontline Ukrainian defence and security expertise into UK policy, capability, and doctrine, and carries UK questions and adapted NATO doctrine back to Ukrainian units, most notably on staff competency as Ukraine’s brigades scale into corps. Lessons are captured as structured, searchable records in a living evidence base, the Observatory, rather than papers read once and filed. The reciprocity is deliberate: a network that only extracts does not last.
Where to find it: forthcoming papers will be published in the programme’s publications.
Who: Dr Jade McGlynn, Chris Pool, Jack Cottam, Dr Andrew Ehrhardt.
Strand 3: Russian Futures
This strand asks how the war reshapes the futures available to Russia: which trajectories the conflict opens, which it forecloses, and which it makes more likely. The war is not only remaking Ukraine but the Russia that will emerge from it, and the political, economic, and social futures on offer are being narrowed and redrawn as the fighting continues.
Understanding those trajectories means tracing the forces that drive them: how Russians justify the war and live with it, how that scaffolding holds or cracks under mobilisation, casualties, and sanctions, and how state and society are likely to renegotiate their relationship once the war ends. From these dynamics the strand sketches the plausible scenarios: the futures that look likely, those that stay open, and the early signals that would tell us which way Russia is turning. The aim is not to predict a single outcome but to map the range of paths ahead and the assumptions each rests on. Both the diagnosis of where Russia is now and the forecasting of where it could go run off direct access to IKAR’s polling and in-depth interviews, alongside other primary sources. Output stays interpretive: briefings for policy and intelligence readers, and peer-reviewed articles for the scholarly record.
Where to find it: papers are published through the programme’s usual channels and by IKAR.
Who: Dr Jade McGlynn, in partnership with IKAR and others.
Programme Team
Dr Jade McGlynn. Head of the Ukraine and Russia Programme at the Centre for Statecraft and National Security, King’s College London. A Leverhulme Early Career Fellow specialising in Russian identity formation, memory politics, and occupation policy in Ukraine, she is the author of Memory Makers (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Russia’s War (Polity, 2023). She holds non-resident fellowships at CSIS Washington DC, ICDS Tallinn, and the Kennan Institute, and conducts regular fieldwork in eastern Ukraine. King’s College London profile
Chris Pool. Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Statecraft and National Security and a PhD researcher in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. His research focuses on civilian participation in the defence of Ukraine, studying societal mobilisation from practical, organisational, and legal perspectives. Alongside his research, Chris has invested in Ukrainian defence-tech and dual-use start-ups since 2024, and since March 2022 has acquired and delivered pick-up trucks to the Ukrainian armed forces as a civilian volunteer.
Kimberly Metcalf. Research Assistant. A PhD candidate in War Studies at King’s College London, her research examines Russian identity production, securitisation, and economic predation in Ukraine’s temporarily occupied territories, using political anthropological approaches grounded in fieldwork across the former Soviet space and the Middle East. A former US Army Special Operations Civil Affairs Officer with two decades of operational experience, she has published in the Texas National Security Review, Small Wars Journal, and War on the Rocks. MA cum laude, European Union and Russian Studies, University of Tartu (2020).
Oleksandr Kachmar. Research Assistant. An MA student in National Security Studies, originally from Ukraine, he supports research on the occupied territories strand and is currently preparing, as co-author, an academic article on the theorisation of settler colonialism in light of Russian settlers in the occupied territories. He previously worked as an interpreter for Ukrainian soldiers training in the United Kingdom.
