On 3rd October, Donatas Kupčiūnas, Senior Research Fellow at the Lithuanian Institute of History, will deliver a lecture at Stanford University, „Like It or Don’t Like It, It’s Your Duty, My Beauty": Józef Piłsudski, Vladimir Putin and Their Ideas of Lesser Brotherhood.“

Relations between greater and smaller neighbouring powers have always been exciting, mostly for the latter. These relations get particularly tumultuous when a greater power claims their smaller neighbouring nation as its wayward brother and a natural ally, whose independence aspirations can only result from hostile intrigues of their foreign enemies. This lecture will compare Józef Piłsudski's attitude towards Lithuania and Lithuanians, and Vladimir Putin's thinking of Ukraine and Ukrainians a century later - the two cases where the concept of lesser brotherhood became state policy and led to a disaster.

Donatas Kupčiūnas DPhil (Oxon), LL.M. is a Baltic Fellow at the Centre for Geopolitics, University of Cambridge, a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Lithuanian Institute of History. His research interests include modern international history, relations between East/Central and Western Europe since the First World War, cultural and intellectual history of diplomacy, geopolitics of the Baltic sea region, history of NATO enlargement, international law of global security, and contemporary Russian foreign policy. Dr Kupciunas has a forthcoming book `The Vilnius conflict in European diplomacy, 1919-1923` with Oxford University Press. At Cambridge, he teaches the MPhil course 'Geopolitics of the lands in between'.