The similarities between the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan and Russia’s war in Ukraine will be the focus of a public lecture to be held at The University of Western Australia this week.

Adjunct Professor Amin Saikal, from UWA’s Centre for Muslim States and Societies and School of Social Sciences, will present Putin’s Ukraine War Echoes Brezhnev’s Afghanistan War.

“Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, together with three of his Politburo colleagues, decided to invade Afghanistan in December 1979 and expected a rapid triumph,” Professor Saikal said. 

“But the Soviet Union could not extricate itself from the Afghan trap until a decade later and the United States played a vital role in ensuring the Soviet venture would end in failure.”

Professor Saikal sees close similarities in Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Soviet Afghan campaign and will examine whether the Russian leader is heading in the same direction as that of his Soviet predecessor.

“Putin anticipated a quick victory, but his Ukrainian campaign has provided a unique opportunity for the US and its NATO allies to degrade Russia’s assertive power,” he said.

The lecture will be held next Thursday 2 June, from 11am to 12.30pm in the Economics and Commerce Conference Room (3.73) at UWA. It will be followed by a lunch (at the participant’s own expense) at University Club with the speaker. For more information or to register for the free talk click here.

Professor Saikal’s books include Iran Rising: The Survival and Future of the Islamic Republic (Princeton University Press, 2021); The Zone of Crisis: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq (I.B. Tauris, 2014); and he is co-author of Islam Beyond Borders: The Umma in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019).