Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict Between Russia and the West

Author Maximilian Hess joins us to discuss his award-winning work on the Ukraine war and wider conflict between Russia and the West.

Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict Between Russia and the West explores how Vladimir Putin's aggression against Ukraine is not just an attempt to re-draw borders and upend Europe's security order but also the core thrust of a wider agenda that seeks to fragment the international economic order.

It details how both Russia and the West used geo-economic tools against one another even before Russia's initial 2014 invasion of Ukraine and how this set the ground-work for the largest set of sanctions and weaponisation of commodities supplies since the lead-up to the Second World War in the aftermath of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Economic War was awarded the US-Russia Relations Book Prize in 2024.

AUTHOR

Maximilian Hess is the founder of the political risk consultancy Enmetena Advisory. He is also a fellow with the Delphi Global Research Centre, Foreign Policy Research Institute, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Additionally, Max is a columnist for Al Jazeera, sits on the advisory board of the Centre for Strategy and Development in Tbilisi, and serves as secretary of the British-Georgian Society.