Starry Aspirant

Large-scale migration, a deep recession and severe damage to industrial capacity are among the main effects (for The Chartist) A month and a half into the latest phase of the Russia-Ukraine war, Russia’s attempt to take the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, appears to have been checked, and its forces to have withdrawn from Ukraine’s northern regions, leaving large-scale human and material destruction in their wake. The purpose of the withdrawal, according to military analysts, may be to regroup and refocus on expanding Russia’s territorial hold on the eastern Donbas regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, parts of which have been under de facto Russian control since 2014-15. While the course of the war will determine the political, social and economic future of the main protagonists—that is, of Ukraine and Russia—and will also have a significant impact across the Eurasian continent more broadly, its outcome remains uncertain. Nonetheless, it is already possible to say something of the scale of the dam

Working title. “Reform of Ukraine’s national governance institutions: a comparison of the scope, progress and impact of Yatsenyuk’s 2014 ‘de-oligarchisation’ drive after the Euromaidan revolution with that of Zelenskyi following the onset of the global pandemic in 2020”. In short. The research will examine critically the design and implementation of reforms of Ukraine’s national governance structures attempted after the crises of 2014 and 2020, from the perspective of the political economy of institutional development, using a comparative and evaluative approach. Following up on the policy implications of my PhD on the Ukrainian oligarchy as self-reproducing institution, it will contribute to debates on the role of institutional reforms in development in the area where academic research and policy-making meet. Research problem. The problem that my research proposal addresses is that successive attempts to reform Ukraine’s national governance structures—whether encouraged from the