April 20, 2022

Russia’s War on Ukraine: Origins and Consequences

Robert H. Donaldson
Professor Emeritus
University of Tulsa

Robert (“Bob”) Donaldson retired as Trustees Professor of Political Science  in 2013 after 45 years of college teaching in Political Science, specializing on Russian and American Foreign Policy and World Politics. At the University of Tulsa, where he was President in the 1990s, he was chosen “Faculty Member of the Year” in 2013. Earlier he was President of Fairleigh Dickinson University and a professor and administrator at Vanderbilt University and at Lehman College of the City University of New York. 

Dr. Donaldson has three degrees from Harvard and is author or co-author of 6 books and monographs and more than two dozen articles and book chapters. The sixth edition of The Foreign Policy of Russia: Changing Systems, Enduring Interests, (with Vidya Nadkarni) was published in October 2018, and a seventh edition is in preparation. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, former Board President of the American Committees on Foreign Relations, and (since 1998) Director of the Tulsa Committee on Foreign Relations, he has also twice served as a consultant in the U.S. intelligence community. 

He has spoken to Foreign Relations Committees across the country and has lectured for the U.S. State Department in Europe and the Indian Subcontinent. He has made 20 trips to Russia since 1969, leading four study tours there. Since 2014 he has been a featured lecturer on 20 ocean cruises. Bob, a native of Houston, and Sally, a native New Yorker, have four children and three grandchildren, and they have called Tulsa home since 1990.