Ilan Berman is the Senior Vice President of the American Foreign Policy Council, with focuses on regional security in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Russian Federation, Featured on: The Axis of Rogues
Marta Baziuk is the Executive Director of the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium. Featured on: War, Famine and Genocide
Michael Sawkiw is the Executive Vice President and Director of the Ukrainian National Information Service, Vice President of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, and President of the US Holodomor Committee. Featured on: War, Famine and Genocide
Andrew Weiss is the author of the just-released graphic biographical novel, The Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin. Andrew has served in the administrations of George HW Bush and Bill Clinton in various posts including Director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs on the National Security Council staff and as a member of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. These days, Andrew is the James Family Chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research on Russia and Eurasia. Featured On: The Cartoon Villain
Eka Tkeshelashvili serves as head of USAID’s Anti-Corruption Program in Ukraine and is the Former Minister of Justice of Georgia. Featured on: Toward a Marshall Plan for Ukraine
Jim Townsend served eight years as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Policy in the administration of former US President Barack Obama. Featured on: Threats, Lies, and Dirty Bombs
Andrea Kendall-Taylor is the Director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security who served as eight years as a senior intelligence officer in the U.S. government. Featured on: Threats, Lies, and Dirty Bombs
Angela E. Stent served in the U.S. State Department’s Office of Policy Planning in the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Currently she is Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University and director of its Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies. Featured on: Ukraine Strikes Back,
Lieutenant General (Retired) Ben Hodges is a 37-year veteran of the United States armed forces and the former commander of U.S. Army Europe. He currently serves as Senior Advisor to
Human Rights First, a non-profit, nonpartisan international human rights organization based in New York, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles. Prior to joining Human Rights First, he held the Pershing Chair in Strategic Studies at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). General Hodges also serves as NATO Senior Mentor for Logistics and consults for several companies on Europe, NATO, and the European Union. He is co-author of the book Future War and the Defense of Europe, published by Oxford University Press. Featured on: War, Mobilization, and Blowback , The Case for Liberating Crimea
Maria Avdeeva is Research Director at the European Expert Association in Ukraine. She focuses on international security, Ukraine-EU relations, and emerging security challenges. In addition, she analyses information operations, efforts to counter disinformation, and threats to democracy. Featured on: The War After Kharkiv,
Dr. Volodymyr Dubovyk has been working at the Odessa I. Mechnikov National University since 1992. He is an Associate Professor at the Department of International Relations since 1996 and has acted as a Director of the Center for International Studies since 1999. Among his teaching and research interests are U.S. foreign policy, U.S.-Ukraine relations, Black Sea regional security, foreign policy of Ukraine. Dubovyk was a Fulbright Scholar in 2016/2017. Featured on: The War After Kharkiv, A Year of War: Part One
Dr. Agnia Grigas is an energy and political risk expert based in Washington D.C. She specializes in energy and foreign policy of the U.S. and Eurasia including Europe, Russia, China, the states of the former Soviet Union, and the Baltic States. An author of three critically acclaimed books and a frequent media contributor, she also has fifteen years of experience working and consulting in the public and private sectors. Featured on: Putin’s Energy War,
Dr. Benjamin L. Schmitt, is a Research Associate and Project Development Scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. At Harvard, Dr. Schmitt focuses on supporting the technical design, project management, and deployment of novel instrumentation and infrastructure that will comprise next-generation experimental cosmology telescopes aimed at imaging the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation from the South Pole. For this work, Dr. Schmitt traveled to the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica in early 2020 and is a recipient of the U.S. Antarctica Service Medal. Dr. Schmitt is also an associate of the Harvard-Ukrainian Research Institute and a member of the Harvard Faculty Club. Featured on: Putin’s Energy War, Who Blew Up Nord Stream?
Jeff Mankoff is a historian and a Distinguished Research Fellow at National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and author of the recently published book Empires of Eurasia: How Imperial Legacies Shape International Security. Featured on: Lessons From Between Cold Wars, Putin’s Escalation: An Act of Desperation or a Turning Point?, When The War Is Over, Ukraine and The War Over History, Dictators, Summits, and War Crimes, The Black Sea Front, After the Uprising, Putin’s Other Wars, The War In Autumn, Unpacking Putin’s Global Strategy, DEATH OF A DISSIDENT, TERROR IN MOSCOW, DELUSION IN THE KREMLIN
Peter Pomerantsev is a Senior Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and author of the books Nothing is True and Everything is Possible and This Is Not Propaganda, who is part of a journalistic initiative called The Reckoning Project that is documenting Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Featured on: War and Reckoning
James Sherr is a Senior Fellow at the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute at the International Center for Defense and Security, and has been regularly consulted by Western governments on the foreign, defence and security policies of the Russian Federation and since 1995 has had an active advisory role in Ukraine, working closely with the defence and security establishment. Since 1991, James has been a frequent visitor to Estonia and its Baltic neighbours before taking up residence in January 2019. Featured on: The Wider War: Russia’s Assault on Ukraine – and the West, War, Mobilization, and Blowback, The Guns of Winter, A Year of War: Part Two, Ukraine on the Eye of the Spring Offensive, Insurrection and Consequences , The War In Autumn, Breaking the Stalemate, A Moment of Truth In Ukraine
Michael Weiss is an American journalist and author. He is news director at the New Lines magazine, contributing editor at The Daily Beast, director of special investigations at the Free Russia Foundation and the coauthor of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. Featured on: Putin’s Propaganda Fail, Northern Exposure, Ukraine’s Guns of August, The Axis of Rogues, The Belarusian Front, Kremlin Chaos and NATO Unity, Breaking the Stalemate
Max Bergmann is the director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Prior to joining CSIS he was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he focused on Europe, Russia, and U.S. security cooperation. From 2011 to 2017, he served in the U.S. Department of State in a number of different positions, including as a member of the secretary of state’s policy planning staff, where he focused on political-military affairs and nonproliferation; special assistant to the undersecretary for arms control and international security; speechwriter to then secretary of state John Kerry; and senior adviser to the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs. Before serving in the State Department, Bergmann worked at the Center for American Progress as a military and nonproliferation policy analyst and at the National Security Network as the deputy policy director.
Featured on: Ukraine and the Future of European Society , The Endurance War, The Ukraine War Escalates, When The War Is Over, Ukraine and the Global Battle for Democracy, Dictators, Summits, and War Crimes, Sanctions and Putin’s War Machine
Michael Carpenter is the United States Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). When he appeared on the podcast, he was the managing director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Carpenter previously served in the Pentagon as deputy assistant secretary of defense with responsibility for Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, the Balkans, and Conventional Arms Control in the administration of former U.S. President Barack Obama. He also served in the White House as a foreign policy advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, as well as on National Security Council as director for Russia. Previously he was a career foreign service officer with the State Department. Featured on: Uncharted Waters
Konstantin Eggert is an independent journalist, political analyst and communications consultant. He is a Baltic States correspondent and weekly columnist on Russian affairs for Deutsche Welle (DW), Germany’s international broadcaster. Eggert has served as program host and political commentator for TV Rain, Russia’s groundbreaking independent TV network, deputy editor-in-chief of Kommersant FM, Russia’s first ever 24-hour news station, and vice president for public and government affairs for ExxonMobil Russia, Inc. His opinion pieces appear in International Herald Tribune, The Times, The Financial Times, Milliyet, and Helsingin Sanomaat. He makes regular appearances on BBC, CNN, NPR, and other major TV and radio networks. Featured on: Navalny’s Homecoming, The Navalny Phenomenon, Putin’s Escalating War On Dissent, When Biden Met Putin: Assessing the Geneva Summit, Putin’s War at Home, Putin’s Road From Munich, The War After Bucha, Ukraine and Western Security, Assassination, Intrigue, and Power Struggles, Insurrection and Consequences, Sedition and Punishment
Mark Galeotti is the director of Mayak Intelligence, and honorary professor at University College London School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, a senior associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute, a nonresident senior fellow at the IIR and the Middle East Institute’s Frontier Europe Initiative. His most recent published books include A Short History of Russia, We Need to Talk About Putin, Russian Political War: moving beyond the hybrid, and The Vory: Russia’s super mafia. He is an original co-host of The Power Vertical Podcast, and is the creator of In Moscow’s Shadows, a blog and podcast on Russian affairs. Featured on: Putin’s Bad Year
Melinda Haring is the deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. Previously, she was the editor of the Atlantic Council’s most popular publication, the UkraineAlert blog. She is the author of the report “Reforming the Democracy Bureaucracy,” co-author of “Ukraine’s Internally Displaced Persons Hold a Key to Peace,” and a contributor to “Does Democracy Matter.” Haring has worked for Eurasia Foundation, Freedom House, and the National Democratic Institute, where she managed democracy assistance programs in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia. A graduate of Georgetown University, she holds an M.A. in Government with a certificate in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies. Haring is the vice-chair of the board of East Europe Foundation in Kyiv, Ukraine, a member of the supervisory board of Right to Protection in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Featured on: Ukraine’s Third Revolution
Oleksiy Honcharuk served as the prime minister of Ukraine from 2019 to 2020. While in office, Prime Minister Honcharuk focused on carrying out market reforms and began to transform Ukraine’s post-Soviet state apparatus. He initiated the adoption of legislation that aided the introduction of land reform; commenced the implementation of medical and education reforms; conducted the unbundling of Naftogaz; launched a wide privatization process and a country-wide support program for small and medium businesses; introduced public-private partnership; and started the comprehensive digital transformation of Ukraine. The Cabinet of Prime Minister Honcharuk was the first in Ukraine to not be accused of corruption. Prior to his appointment in 2019, he served as deputy head of the Office of the President, focusing on state economic policy. Featured on: Ukraine’s Third Revolution
Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Russian democracy activist, politician, author, and filmmaker. He is the vice president of Free Russian Foundation and a former deputy leader of the People’s Freedom Party and candidate for the Russian State Duma. He was a longtime colleague of Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov and chairs the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom. He has testified before Parliaments in Europe and North America and played a key role in the passage of the Magnitsky legislation that imposed targeted sanctions on Russian human rights violators in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain, and several EU countries. Twice, in 2015 and 2017, Kara-Murza was poisoned with an unknown substance and left in a coma; the attempts on his life were widely viewed as politically motivated. He is a contributing writer at The Washington Post and has previously worked for the BBC, RTVi, Kommersant, and other media outlets. He has directed three documentary films, They Chose Freedom, Nemtsov, and My Duty to Not Stay Silent; and is the author of Reform or Revolution: The Quest for Responsible Government in the First Russian State Duma. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Sakharov Prize for Journalism as an Act of Conscience, the Magnitsky Human Rights Award, and the Geneva Summit Courage Award. Featured on: Navalny vs. Putin, Putin’s Death Squads
Paul Massaro joined the U.S. Helsinki Commission in 2013. He serves as the policy advisor responsible for OSCE “second dimensions” issues, or economic and environmental policy. His portfolio includes topics such as anti-corruption, sanctions, finance, trade, Arctic issues, and energy security. He is also responsible for Mongolia and the OSCE Asian Partners for Cooperation (Japan, Korea, Thailan, Australia, and Afghanistan). Massaro holds a Master of Public Policy with a specialization in international security and economic policy from the Maryland School of Public Policy, where he graduated top of his class. He also holds two bachelor’s degrees in government and politics and Germanic studies from University of Maryland, College Park, where he graduated summa cum laude. He is fluent in German. Featured on: Corruption Is The New Communism, Autocrats, Kleptocrats, and Sanctions, The Kleptocracy Front, Ukraine on the Eye of the Spring Offensive
Ilya Vladimirovich Ponomarev is a Russian politician, former member of the State Duma, and a technology entrepreneur. During his political career, he was a member of the Community Party of the Russian Federation, and a member of the Central Committee of the social-democrat party. He was the only member of the State Duma to vote against Russia’s annexation of Crimea during the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He now lives in exile in Kyiv, Ukraine. Featured on: Weird Scenes Inside the Kremlin
Josh Rudolph is the fellow for Malign Finance at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. He previously served in a range of U.S. Government positions at the intersection of finance and national security. As advisor to the U.S. executive director at the International Monetary Fund, Josh formulated and represented official U.S. positions towards matters being decided by the IMF executive board. At the White House National Security Council, he chaired interagency diplomatic and technical work on Russia sanctions and coordinated other economic statecraft initiatives. He also served as deputy director of the markets room at the U.S. Treasury Department. Before his public service, Josh worked for seven years at J.P. Morgan in New York as an investment banker and financial markets research strategist. Featured on: Follow the Money, Corruption Is The New Communism, Sanctioning Russia: Deterrence, Defense, and Containment, Toward a Marshall Plan for Ukraine, Ukraine and the Global Battle for Democracy Build Ukraine Back Better
John Sipher is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and the co-founder of Spycraft Entertainment, a production firm providing content and talent to the entertainment industry. He is a foreign policy, intelligence, and national security expert. His articles have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Politico, Foreign Affairs, Newsweek, Slate, Lawfare, and Just Security, among others. In 2014, he retired from a 28-year career in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, which included serving in Moscow and running the CIA’s Russia operations. Featured on: The Looking Glass War, The Great Hack, Threats, Lies and Dirty Bombs
Maria Snegovaya is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, a visiting scholar with the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the George Washington University, and postdoctoral scholar with the Kellogg Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She previously worked as a fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis and as a postdoctoral fellow with the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is a comparative politics, international relations, and statistical methods specialist. The key focus of her research is democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe as well as Russia’s domestic and foreign policy. Her research results and analysis have appeared in policy and peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Democracy, Democratization, and Post-Soviet Affairs. Her research has been referenced in publications such as The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Economist, and Foreign Policy. Featured on: Navalny’s Homecoming, Taking It To The Streets: Confronting The Putin-Lukashenka Axis, The Power Horizontal, Dissidents and Exiles, Putin’s War at Home, War and Consequences, The Endurance War, Ukraine Strikes Back, Sanctions and Putin’s War Machine, After the Uprising, The Putinist Ideology , RUSSIA AFTER NAVALNY
David Venable is the vice president of cyber security at Masergy Communications, has over fifteen years experience in information security with expertise in cryptography, network and application security, vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, and compliance. He is a former intelligence collector with the National Security Agency with extensive experience in computer network exploitation, information operations, and digital network intelligence. Venable served as adjunct faculty at the National Cryptologic School and is an instructor in cyber security at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Featured on: The Great Hack
Franak Viačorka is a journalist from Belarus, and an advisor to Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. He previously worked as a research media analyst for the U.S. Agency for Global Media as a contractor focusing on Eurasia’s digital markets. His research focused on Russian and Chinese efforts to control the global media space, spread disinformation, and build the sovereign internet infrastructure. He has served as a creative director for the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), vice president for the Digital Communication Network, consultant for Freedom House, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Viačorka is a frequent speaker and advocate for democracy and personal freedom. For his activism and journalism work in Belarus, he was jailed multiple times by the Belarusian government. Viačorka’s activism in Belarus has been chronicled by documentary filmmakers and recognized by many international organizations, including the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and Open Society Foundations. He was the first Václav Havel Fellow at RFE/RL under Havel’s personal recommendation. Featured on: Taking It To The Streets: Confronting The Putin-Lukashenka Axis
Clint Watts is a distinguished research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and nonresident fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy. He is also a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. He recently examined the rise of social media influence by publishing his first book entitled Messing With The Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News. His research and writing focuses on terrorism, counterterrorism, social media influence and Russian disinformation. Clint’s tracking of terrorist foreign fighters allowed him to predict the rise of the Islamic State over al Qaeda in 2014. His writing has appeared in a range of publications to include The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Daily Beast, Politico, Lawfare, War on the Rocks, and the Huffington Post. Featured on: The Looking-Glass War, The Great Hack
Ilya Zaslavskiy is a senior fellow at Free Russia Foundation and the head of Free Speech LLC, a company that runs the project Underminers. He is the first Russian Associate of the Academy of Leadership of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and member of the Advisory Council of the Kleptocracy Initiative, Hudson Institute. His reports have been published by the Atlantic Council, Martens Centre, Foreign Affairs, and the Institute of Modern Russia. Apart from his activist and academic work he is a consultant on energy issues in developing countries for western companies. Featured on: Weird Scenes Inside The Kremlin, Navalny vs. Putin, The Navalny Phenomenon, The Plot Against Navalny, Sanctioning Russia: Deterrence, Defense, and Containment, Autocrats, Kleptocrats, and Sanctions
Casey Michel is a writer, analyst, and investigative journalist focusing on kleptocracy, illicit finance, foreign, and the post-Soviet space. His work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Vox, The New Republic, Politico, and the Washington Post. He is the author of the Free Russia Foundation report “Kill the Messenger: How Russian and Post-Soviet Oligarchs Undermine the First Amendment” and of the upcoming book American Kleptocracy. Featured on: The Plot Against Navalny, Kazakhstan’s Crisis and Russia’s Agenda, Europe’s Last Empire, The Case for Liberating Crimea , Build Ukraine Back Better, The New Crimean War, Russia Tomorrow: Five Scenarios For Russia’s Future, PUTIN’S IMPERIAL GURUS
Vladimir Ashurkov is a Russian opposition politician and a leading figure in the opposition movement in Russia. He is the Executive Director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. Now based in London, Ashurkov continues his public and political activity closely, with Aleksey Navalny and other opposition leaders in Moscow. In 2018, he was elected to the Permanent Committee of the Free Russia Forum, where he leads civil projects funding working party. Featured on: The Power Horizontal
Eto Buziashvili is a Research Associate for the Caucasus with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFRLab). In this role, Eto researches the information space, focusing on Russia and the Caucasus region. Eto has also served in Georgia’s Defense and Interior Ministries as well as in Georgia’s National Security Council and was involved in developing strategic documents. Featured on: The Georgian Front
Shota Gvineria is a lecturer at the Baltic Defense College. Previously, he was part of the Economic Policy Research Center. Shota has also served as Georgia’s Ambassador to the Netherlands and as Deputy Secretary of the National Security Council. He covered NATO integration and security policy related issues as Ambassador at Large in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia. Featured on: The Georgian Front
Michael Kofman is a Senior Research Scientist of the Russian Studies program at the CNA Corporation and a fellow at the Kennan Institute. He is also a military analyst and his research focuses on the Russia and the former Soviet Union, specializing in Russian armed forces, military thought, capabilities, and strategy. Featured on: The Eastern Front, The Guns of April The Gathering Storm, Ukraine in the Crosshairs, War and Attrition, The Winter War, The Long and Grinding War, The Long Hot Summer Campaign, State of the War, Toward a Theory of Success in Ukraine, THE WAR GRINDS ON
Terrell Jermaine Starr is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. Terrell is also a senior reporter at The Root, where he writes about US-Russia relations and about race in America. He’s the host and founder of the podcast Black Diplomats, which explores foreign affairs from a black perspective. Terrell lived in Ukraine as a Fulbright fellow and a freelance journalist, and in Georgia as a Peace Corps volunteer. He is also the author of the forthcoming book Black Man on the Steppes, which is a memoir of his time in the former Soviet Union. Featured on: The Navalny Paradox and Other Tales
Vladimir Milov is a Russian opposition figure. In addition to leading and founding various parties and movements over the years, including Democratic Choice, Solidarnost, and For a Russia Without Lawlessness and Corruption, Vladimir also served as Russia’s Energy Minister. Featured on: Dissidents and Exiles, The Kleptocracy Front, Putin’s War Comes Home, Moscow’s Wounded ‘Godfather’
Jaime Fly is the President and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. A recognized foreign policy thought leader, Fly previously served as a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and as co-director of the GMF’s trans-Atlantic Alliance for Securing Democracy. Fly has previously worked as a senior staffer in the U.S. Congress, the National Security Council, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Featured on: Truth, Lies, and Foreign Agents: The Kremlin’s War on RFE/RL
Kiryl Sukhotski is Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Regional Director for Europe and TV Production. He oversees all RFE/RL’s Russian-language services setting a unified strategy for Russia, as well as the Ukrainian and Armenian services. Kiryl is also responsible for Current Time TV, RFE/RL’s 24/7 channel aiming at the Russian-language audience in the region. Prior to joining RFE/RL he had been the head of the regional Russia/CIS TV operation for Reuters and worked for the BBC in London and Moscow. Featured on: Truth, Lies, and Foreign Agents: The Kremlin’s War on RFE/RL
David Kramer is a senior fellow and lecturer at the Florida International University’s Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs. He has served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor in the administration of President George W. Bush. David also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, where he worked on Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. He’s also been President of Freedom House and a senior director at the McCain Institute. Featured on: Confronting the Axis of Autocrats, Autocrats and Air Piracy, When Biden Met Putin: Assessing the Geneva Summit, Putin’s Imperial Gambit, The Guns of February, The War after Bucha, The Long War , The Path to Victory in Ukraine, The Ukraine War Escalates, The Guns of Winter, Ukraine and Western Security, The Belarusian Front, The China Syndrome, Kremlin Chaos and NATO Unity, 600 Days of War, THE PRESIDENT AND THE GENERALS
Kristine Berzina is a senior fellow at the GMF’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, where she works on building transatlantic cooperation to counter authoritarian interference in democracies. Berzina worked on energy security, transatlantic cooperation, and climate change and security in Berlin, Germany and in Washington, DC. Featured on: Pipeline Geopolitics
Jonathan Katz is a senior fellow and director of democracy initiatives at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Before joining GMF, Jonathan served as deputy assistant administrator in the Europe and Eurasia bureau in the U.S. Agency for International Development. Featured on: When Biden Meets Putin, Ukraine and the Global Battle for Democracy
Professor Marta Dyczok specializes in international politics and history, with a focus on East Central Europe and Eurasia, and specifically Ukraine. Her research interests are on the politics of history, mass media, migration, post-communism and World War II. Featured on: Ukraine and The War on History, TWO YEARS OF WAR
Dr. Igor Gretskiy brings with him a deep knowledge of Russia’s foreign policy towards Ukraine and Poland, and of political transformation in central and eastern Europe. He will also continue to serve as an Associate Professor at the School of International Relations, St. Petersburg State University, Russia. Featured on: A Year of War: Part Two
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander S. Vindman (Retired) was most recently the director for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Russia on the White House’s National Security Council. Prior to retiring from the U.S. Army, he served as a Foreign Area Officer with assignments in Moscow, Russia and for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a Political-Military Affairs Officer. While on the Joint Staff, he co-authored the National Military Strategy Russia Annex and was the principal author for the Global Campaign for Russia. He is currently a doctoral student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Visiting Fellow at Perry World House. Featured on: The Guns of Spring: Ukraine’s Looming Offensive
Mikhail Viktorovich Zygar is a Russian born journalist, writer and filmmaker, and the founding editor-in-chief of Russian news TV-channel Dozhd, which halted operations on 3 March 2022. Featured on: Assassination, Intrigued, and Power Struggles, After the Uprising, War, Punishment and Catharsis, ALL THE DICTATOR’S MEN
Dr. Lisa Aronsson is a Research Fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University. Her research focuses on European security and transatlantic defense cooperation, and her interests include NATO strategy and operations, European Union defense, UK strategy, Mediterranean security, and gender. She is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council where she is affiliated with the Transatlantic Security Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Prior to joining CSR, Lisa worked as an analyst for the Congressional Research Service where she completed a study on the United States and its European allies responses to emerging technologies in defense. Featured on: The Black Sea Front
Anna Mikulska, Ph.D., is a fellow in energy studies at the Center for Energy Studies at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. Her research focuses on the geopolitics of natural gas within the EU, former Soviet Bloc and Russia. Her current interests include the potential use of natural gas as a geoeconomic tool and investigating ways to leverage U.S. LNG exports to bolster European energy security. Mikulska is a senior fellow at University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, where she teaches graduate-level seminars on energy policy and geopolitics of energy. She is also a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and sits on the editorial board of the Adam Mickiewicz University Law Review. Featured on: Who Blew Up Nord Stream?
Giorgi Kandelaki, who served as a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008-20 and is currently a project manager with the Soviet Past Research Laboratory, also known as Sovlab. Featured on: The Battle for Georgia, Then and Now
Serhiy Kudelia is an associate professor of political science at Baylor University, where he teaches courses on ethnopolitical conflicts, terrorism, political regimes, and post-Soviet politics. Earlier he held teaching and research positions at George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Toronto, and National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Ukraine). He received a Ph.D. in international relations from Johns Hopkins University/SAIS and a master’s degree in political science from Stanford University. His articles have appeared most recently in Comparative Politics, Current History, and Post-Soviet Affairs. Dr. Kudelia’s current research deals with the origins of the armed conflict in the Donbas, where he has conducted extensive field research since 2014. Featured on: Ukraine’s Home Front, THE PRESIDENT AND THE GENERALS
Pavel Butorin is Director of Current Time TV, the 24/7 Russian language digital and TV network, led by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in cooperation with the Voice of America. Butorin has been with RFE/RL since 2001, first as a producer for Central News, then as a video producer for the multimedia department, and finally as managing editor for Current Time TV. He has been a leading member of the Current Time team since its inception as a 30-minute television news program in 2014 and was instrumental in its transformation into a successful 24/7 digital and television network. He is a graduate of Ohio University in the United States and has a master’s degree in mass communications. Featured on: Putin’s Latest American Hostage
Mark Temnycky is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He is also an accredited freelance journalist covering Eurasian affairs and European energy security matters. Temnycky’s articles have been published by various news outlets, including the New York Times, Forbes, the Hill, the Diplomat, the National Interest, EUobserver, the Diplomatic Courier, the Euromaidan Press, and several other US and European news outlets.
Featured on: THE WAR IN THE WEST
George Bogden is a an Olin Fellow at the Columbia University School of Law, a visiting researcher at Bard College, and a researcher and writer on international affairs focused on the history of Central and Eastern Europe.
Featured on: NUKES, LIES, AND ‘SECURITY ASSURANCES’
Steven Pifer served as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine from 1998-2000 and is currently embedded at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.
Featured on: TWO YEARS OF WAR
Liana Fix is a Fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a historian and political scientist, with expertise in German and European foreign and security policy.
Featured on: RUSSIA AFTER NAVALNY
Greg Kulchyckyj is a second-generation Ukrainian-American raised in Ukraine and Germany currently leveraging global and professional experiences, relevant education, and a diverse skillset to advocate for Ukrainian security in alignment with U.S. national interests. Featured On: THE POLITICS OF UKRAINE ASSISTANCE
Scott Cullinane is the Director of Government Affairs at Razom for Ukraine, a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to unlocking the potential of Ukraine and building U.S.-Ukrainian ties. Cullinane is currently a Fellow at the National Security Institute, part of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, and in the past has worked as an instructor for the American University of Central Asia. Featured On: THE POLITICS OF UKRAINE ASSISTANCE