Grigory Ioffe

Grigory Ioffe (born 21 October 1951) is a geographer and professor emeritus at Radford University who focuses on Belarusian history and contemporary politics.

Biography Ioffe was born in Moscow in a Jewish-Belarusian family with roots in Mozyr on 21 October 1951.

He graduated from Moscow State University in 1974, defended his PhD in geography in 1980, and started to work at the Institute of Geography of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Ioffe and his family left the Soviet Union in 1989 for Austria, where they spent a few months. They later moved to Rome, where he was screened by the American embassy. Due to a petition from his former colleagues who had emigrated to the USA earlier, American officials accepted his application.

Ioffe initially moved to Boston, but settled in Radford, Virginia, where he found a university position in 1990 as an assistant professor in the Department of Geography.

In 2015, Ioffe met with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Up to 2024, Ioffe regularly wrote for the Jamestown Foundation. Among his other contributions are articles in Encyclopædia Britannica, the Wilson Center, the Russian think tank Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and the Kyiv Post.

Political views Grigory Ioffe stated that Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is underappreciated as a politician and that Western media portrayal of Belarus lacks expertise. He claimed that the Belarusian leadership is doing everything possible to preserve the independence of Belarus. Lukashenko especially started to care about it after Putin proposed to incorporate Belarus into Russia as six separate oblasts in 2002. While the Belarusian opposition is suppressed, this is true for both the pro-Russian and the pro-Western factions. Ioffe described Belarus, compared to Ukraine, as a success story.

Later, commenting on the 2020 Belarusian protests, Ioffe said that Lukashenko destroyed the reputation he had tried to build in Western circles after the Russo-Georgian war in 2008 and Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014. Nevertheless, he claimed that sanctions against Belarus were counterproductive because they pushed Belarus further into Russian orbit. Ioffe also called the Ukrainian and Lithuanian responses to the protests "childish". He argued that keeping Belarus in its sphere of influence is strategically important for Russia, and it is not only appropriate to talk in such terms, but necessary.

Research Books and reviews

Selected publications

Personal life Grigory Ioffe is married and has two children. Through his wife, the family practices the Eastern Orthodox Christianity.