We sat down with EHRAC lawyer Elba Bendo to learn more. A specialist in enforced disappearances and equality and non-discrimination law, Elba Bendo is a human rights lawyer at EHRAC. She works closely with domestic partners to bring cases involving serious human rights abuses by security forces before the European Court of Human Rights and United Nations human rights mechanisms.

For over two decades, successive U.S. administrations have pursued fleeting hopes of recalibrating relations with Russia, only for such efforts to unravel in the face of geopolitical realities. Now, under Trump’s renewed leadership, this cycle repeats—but with a crucial difference. Rather than a misguided attempt at diplomatic engagement, the current shift reflects a deeper transformation in American foreign policy: a pivot away from long-standing alliances and democratic values toward an increasingly transactional, self-interested approach. Whether driven by personal admiration for authoritarian leaders, political advantage, or economic self-interest, Trump’s foreign policy choices are eroding America’s traditional role as a stabilizing force in global affairs.

As Russia and Ukraine negotiate a naval ceasefire in the Black Sea, something ominous is taking place on its eastern shores. In Abkhazia, Georgia’s breakaway region locked in a frozen conflict since 2008, the latest elections underscored Russia’s tightening grip on its domestic politics.

The UK has found a new means to reassert its global status through individual sanctions on Russia’s shadow fleet, which operates through clandestine networks to fund Russia’s war efforts. Through nuanced sanctions, the UK has begun to establish itself as a Western leader in maritime trade, liberal values and financial transparency in the backdrop of China’s global maritime leadership. 

When General Eisenhower criticised the brutal determination with which Soviet generals spent the lives of their men on the Eastern front, Marshal Zhukov proudly told him that ‘Russian women will birth more.’ With Zhukov’s successors on the Ukrainian battlefield settled into a similarly callous military strategy, the leadership back in Moscow are scrambling for new ways to reverse a rapidly dropping birth rate which is threatening to turn Russia’s long-running demographic decline into an acute social crisis. 

On the 12th of March, King's Russia Institute welcomed Dr. Marina Yusupova, Lecturer in Sociology at Edinburgh Napier University, for a talk titled "Masculinity and Empire: The Case of Contemporary Russia." To introduce her research project, Dr. Yusupova emphasized the trend on TikTok and other social media platforms surrounding the "Roman Empire." This refers to a 2023 trend when people asked their male partners how often they thought about the Roman Empire and which highlighted a gendered approach to history. Dr Yusupova used this example to emphasise the cultural recognition of the rhetoric of masculinity and empire, stressing that popular imagination should not be underestimated.