This article is part of the Ellison Center blog Series on Sochi. Click here to read more as we cover the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Russia!    By Sarah McPhee For weeks we have seen the viral image of the tandem toilets, incomplete construction and shoddy workmanship in Sochi. “There is no point hosting

Ellison Center Director Scott Radnitz speaks with The Record’s Ross Reynolds about the on-going situation in Ukraine. Listen to the interview on Seattle’s local NPR affiliate, KUOW here.

By Jennifer J. Carroll This post was written at 11 a.m. Feb. 20, 2014 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Read Jennifer’s previous report on EuroMaidan here. I got up early Tuesday morning. A march on parliament had been planned to demand a return to the 2004 constitution — the constitution replaced six years later by a new one

This article is part of the Ellison Center blog Series on Sochi. Click here to read more as we cover the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Russia!    By Sarah McPhee “It’s like holding the Olympic Games in Kabul!” This description of Sochi by Russian policy analyst Arkady Ostrovsky only seems like irresponsible hyperbole. According

By Julianne Maila February 6 marked the first official visit of Zygimantas Pavilionis, Lithuanian Ambassador to the US and Mexico, to the city of Seattle. With a packed agenda, in three short days, Ambassador Pavilionis participated in a variety of events at UW and within the Seattle community. As one of the most distant American

This article is part of the Ellison Center blog Series on Sochi. Click here to read more as we cover the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Russia!    By Sarah McPhee Russia has a historic preoccupation with national identity, and Sochi is a part of the plan to shape the modern global perception of the

This article is part of the Ellison Center blog Series on Sochi. Click here to read more as we cover the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Russia!    By William D. Frank Thirty-three medals awarded across 11 biathlon events are up for grabs in Sochi — Norway, Austria and the Czech Republic snagged the first

Guntis Šmidchens, the head of the Baltic Studies program at UW, will launch his just-published book, The Power of Song, at the Nordic Heritage Museum Tuesday, Feb. 11 at 7 p.m. The Power of Song shows how the people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania confronted a military superpower and achieved independence in the Baltic “singing revolution.”

By Larisa Shuvalova During my early commute from Bellingham on Jan, 25, I had plenty of time to think about what I was expecting to learn by attending the Heritage Literacy Symposium at UW. My commute reminded me about the summer of 2012 when I decided to join the STARTALK program and personally learned how

This article is part of the Ellison Center blog Series on Sochi. Click here to read more as we cover the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Russia!    By Andrew Yarbrough For several months, countries and groups across the world have condemned the Russian anti-gay “propaganda” laws, a set of ill-defined legal jargon with the ignoble goal