Florida State University’s Ukraine Task Force welcomed Kateryna Shynkaruk, a senior lecturer at Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government and Public Service and nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to deliver a lecture on March 10 about the changing political situation in Eastern Europe.
The event was part of the Center for Global Engagement’s Engage Your World Speaker Series and aimed to inform students and faculty about the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on European security. The topic is significant as it addresses how current events in Ukraine are reshaping international relations and security structures across Europe.
“My lecture was about European security and how it is affected by the Ukraine war and basically how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has completely overturned the European security architecture,” Shynkaruk said. “I thoroughly enjoyed the questions and answer session with students. They clearly were engaged and I was positively impressed by how closely they followed it.”
Shynkaruk has published over 30 articles on post-communist transformations in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, worked as a political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, and served as a senior research fellow at Kyiv-based Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting. She said she appreciated sharing her experiences with FSU faculty, staff, and students: “My hope is that there is this interest actually in European affairs, that it is strengthened through engagements like my visit and generally that there is more interest in Ukraine, in European security and European affairs built here among students.”
FSU’s Ukraine Task Force was established in 2022 within the Learning Systems Institute to build partnerships between FSU and Ukrainian scholars while educating the university community about Ukraine. In 2025 alone, UTF hosted 21 Ukrainian visitors and organized 17 educational events. Shynkaruk said, “When teaching students, I do believe that direct information is always better than interpretations through second and third-hand perspectives. So, whenever you have a Ukrainian expert or a Ukrainian coming from Ukraine at the table in the classroom, you will have students exposed to a real-life experience and perspective rather than reading about it.”
FSU recently signed a memorandum of understanding with National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy to expand global connections. The UTF also hosted two Ukrainian scholars last semester through an exchange program funded by the U.S. State Department connecting Ukrainian and American researchers. Shynkaruk concluded: “The work they [the UTF] are doing and the fact that they also bring people from Ukraine directly — some cultural presence, some academic presence — there is no better way to learn than to learn from the perspective of the ground.”
