Next Steps
After the two meetings, we were planning a third meeting that would have taken the process forward and ensured its continuity, which is a crucial element of dialogue. If the last two seminars focused on building the trust between the parties and tried to solve how to make the dialogue even possible, this time we wanted to aim for concrete results. The idea was to invest in better transparency by broadening the participant base and by communicating the process and its results more to the public and decision makers.
However, since the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine in February 2022, the possibility of continuing the dialogue in the near future seems extremely challenging, if not unthinkable. The future of the dialogue process is therefore in this moment still unknown.
After the two meetings, we opened a survey for Russian and Ukrainian historians, which includes questions about historical disputes between the countries, historical issues that are in danger of being politicized or issues that can be abused in conflicts. Data gained from the survey will be analyzed and used to determinate the themes for the third seminar. This way we make sure that this meetings main themes will be gathered from the inside the situation, not by forcing our own interpretations.
After the last seminar, participants expressed hopes that the next meeting will consist of international experts as participants as well, to have more diverse discussions and create an atmosphere, where participants will notice issues and problems that unite them as historians, not only concentrate on problems separating them.