Professor Kristin M. Bakke and her collaborators (Professor John O’Loughlin at the University of Colorado and Professor Gerard Toal at Virginia Tech) have published some of their initial findings from their joint NSF/ESRC-funded project on geopolitical orientations in Russia’s ‘near abroad’. In an article on the Open Democracy website, they examine whether citizens in Ukraine and Georgia worry about civil society organizations as ‘foreign agents’. They also examine whether people in Ukraine see themselves leaning towards Russia or ‘the West”, in this piece in the Washington Post’s ‘Monkey Cage’ blog. And reporting survey findings from Crimea, they write about what people in Crimea think about their future and the annexation, in this piece in Foreign Affairs.