Warmest congratulations to Madison Sergeant (MARS-REERS ’22) who won this year’s Pascual Essay Prize from the Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies Northeast (REEESNe) network. Her essay “Historical Mythmaking and Defense: Katyn, Smolensk, and Polish Defense Policy in the 2010s” develops a novel “open wound” theoretical framework in order to relate Polish defense spending and rhetoric back, not to the frequently cited 2008 Russo-Georgian War, but to a narrative arc bridging the 1940 Katyn massacre to the 2010 Smolensk plane crash.