Experts & Staff
Kadri Liik

Kadri Liik

Senior Policy Fellow

Areas of expertise

Russian domestic and foreign policy; relations between Russia and the West; the Baltic Sea area; Eastern Europe

Languages

English, Russian, Estonian

Biography

Kadri Liik is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Her research focuses on Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Baltic region.

Before joining ECFR in October 2012, Liik was the director of the International Centre for Defence Studies in Estonia from 2006 until 2011, where she also worked as a senior researcher and director of the Centre’s Lennart Meri Conference. Throughout the 1990s, Liik worked as a Moscow correspondent for several Estonian daily papers, including the highest-circulation daily in Estonia, Postimees, as well as Eesti Päevaleht and the Baltic News Service. In 2002, she became the foreign news editor at Postimees. In 2004, she left to become editor-in-chief at the monthly foreign affairs magazine, Diplomaatia. She was also the host of “Välismääraja”, a current affairs talkshow at Raadio Kuku in Tallinn.

Liik holds a BA in Journalism from Tartu University (Estonia) and an MA in International Relations specialising in diplomacy from Lancaster University.

Russia policy after the US election

Regardless of the election result, Moscow will continue to see US policies as provisional – as a part of a temporary phase that one needs to wait out, to see what follows

How Russia is winning at its own game

War and revolution are not inimical to Moscow if they follow paths Russian policymakers understand and even support

Why analysts in Moscow dismiss the UK Parliament’s Russia report

The July 2020 report by the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee is part of a wider and somewhat depressing phenomenon: Western countries’ analyses of what Russia is doing are often mediocre in the eyes of those in Moscow

Publications

Articles

Russia, elections, and the West: Ten years later

If the Kremlin sees the Duma election result as a buffer that will allow it to safely prepare for a transition at the top, the Russian political system might still find a way to evolve. But, if it views the result as confirmation that the system works just fine, its ‘victory’ really is a Pyrrhic one

The invisible battle for Russia’s future

There are homegrown democrats in Russia who do not automatically sympathise with the West. They could lead the country to change from the top

Podcasts

Events

In the media