Jan Balliauw, Putin's dream

On February 24, 2022, what few thought possible happened. De Russische president Vladimir Poetin decided to invade Ukraine and thereby unleashed the largest war on European soil since the Second World War. This was accompanied by heavy destruction, a lot of loss of life, and a large flow of refugees. Suddenly, our security also seemed no longer so certain because Ukraine borders NATO territory. Getting Mocht Rusland Oekraïne under control, would Putin find that sufficient or would he also want to test NATO solidarity? In his lecture, Jan Balliauw goes deeper into the run-up to this war and makes a preliminary assessment of this devastating war. He starts from an analysis of the facts and tries to outline possible future scenarios based on this. War causes a great deal of unrest among the majority of the population, but Jan Balliauw finds it important that in times like these, people form their judgment based on facts and rationality, and do not let themselves be guided by emotionality. Because emotion is not always a good advisor in times of war. Over Jan Specialist international relations and Ruslandkenner Jan Balliauw has been following developments in Russia and Ukraine closely since the end of the 80s. As a Moscow correspondent for the VRT, he witnessed the fall of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union from the front row. He was an eyewitness when dozens of protesters were shot by riot police on Maidan in Kiev in 2014. He was there when Rusland de Krim annexed. He regularly visited the areas in Eastern Ukraine where fighting broke out with separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk after 2014. After the start of the war, he traveled through all of Ukraine during several trips. He visited frontline areas but also investigated the impact of the war in places in Ukraine where the war is not immediately visible. He is therefore well-placed to analyze how the situation between Russia and Ukraine on the one hand and Russia and the West on the other could escalate so much.