On November 17, 2023, the university’s Office of International Affairs hosted a round table discussion themed “The Soft Power of Russia” which explored the topical issues pertaining to Russia’s relations with other countries.

Opening the event, Prof. Sergei Iurchenko, the First Vice-Rector, Vice-Rector for International Affairs and Information Policy at Vernadsky CFU, highlighted: “The main task of the intellectual community is to perceive and comprehend the younger generation’s sense of patriotism, as well as the technologies of converting it into external political successes. Our task as a university is to provide our students with such opportunities.”

Prof. Maksimilian Shepelev from the Vernadsky CFU’s Department of Political Science and International Relations spoke about the human resources and the pivot to the East.

“The traditional understanding of national strength, which exists in the understanding of international relations, includes not only material parameters such as, for example, military, economic, or technological strengths, but also some intangible ones. These include a national character, the quality of governance and diplomacy. The attention that Russia pays to the humanitarian and cultural process incorporates the notion of the “soft power”. There’s no doubt that today, in the context of international processes, Crimea is of particular importance. In this regard, being a specific region, it combines various civilizational, cultural and historical factors,” Prof. Shepelev said.

The round table was attended by a number of the University’s administrative and academic staff members, officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation in Simferopol, and the Vernadsky CFU international students from India, Iran, and Egypt.

The event also featured the exhibition of maps tracing the history of Crimea through the centuries from the collection of Professor Petr Panukhin from the Department of History, Architecture and Urban Development at the Moscow Institute of Architecture.

Russia’s soft power discussed at Vernadsky CFU