Russia’s Attack on Ukraine and the Responses in Belarus

David R. Marples is Distinguished University Professor and Chair, Department of History & Classics, University of Alberta and teaches Russian and East European history. He holds a PhD in Economic and Social History from the University of Sheffield (1985). At the University of Alberta, where he has been employed since 1991, he received a McCalla Professorship in 1998, the Faculty of Arts Prize for Full Professors in 1999, the J. Gordin Kaplan Award for Excellence in Research in 2003, a Killam Annual Professorship in 2005-06, and the University Cup, the university’s highest honour, in 2008. He has held several major awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), most recently for the topic “History, Memory, and World War II in Belarus.”

Professor Marples has served as a consultant on Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia to a wide array of government and non-government organizations, including the US Embassy in Minsk, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom, the Department of Defence and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Canada, as well as Voice of America, and RFE/RL. He is a member of the Advisory Board on Belarus for the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He is an Editorial Board Member of Nationalities Papers and Canadian Slavonic Papers and serves on boards of several other, mainly European-based, journals. He is also Honorary President of the Belarusian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Canada. In March 2022, he was appointed a Research Fellow with the Contemporary Ukraine Program. Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta.

Professor Marples is author of sixteen single-authored books and five edited books on topics ranging from 20th Century Russia, Stalinism, contemporary Belarus, contemporary Ukraine, and the Chernobyl disaster. His recent books include The War in Ukraine's Donbas (edited, 2022), Understanding Ukraine and Belarus (Bristol: E-International Relations, 2020), Ukraine in Conflict (2017), ‘Our Glorious Past: Lukashenka’s Belarus and the Great Patriotic War (Stuttgart, Germany: Ibidem Verlag, 2014), Russia in the 20th Century: The Quest for Stability  (London: Routledge, 2011), Heroes and Villains: and Creating National History in Contemporary Ukraine (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008).