Ukraine: Levers of Peace and Drivers of Conflict

ahead of Ukraine’s upcoming elections.

Melinda Haring is the editor of the UkraineAlert blog, which is the Atlantic Council’s most popular publication. Haring is a longtime observer of political developments in the Eurasia region, and her analysis has been featured in The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Newsweek, Novoe Vremya, The American Interest, Kyiv Post, PRI, and broadcast and published by NPR, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Voice of America. She is the author of the report Reforming the Democracy Bureaucracy, coauthor of Ukraine’s Internally Displaced Persons Hold a Key to Peace (Atlantic Council, 2017), and a contributor to Does Democracy Matter? (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). 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 MA 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, and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Gina Lentine specializes in democracy and human rights issues in Europe and Eurasia, a field in which she has worked for the last eight years. As Senior Program Officer with the Europe and Eurasia Programs team at Freedom House, she serves as an active practitioner and advocates to promote respect for fundamental freedoms in Eastern Europe, with special attention to Ukraine and Moldova. Prior to Freedom House, Ms. Lentine worked with the late Nadia Diuk at the National Endowment for Democracy, as well as with Open Society Foundations’ Eurasia Program and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. Gina has spent significant time in Ukraine, Moldova, Poland, and Russia, both for Freedom House and as a graduate student, wherein she conducted field research on interwar nationalist movements and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Ms. Lentine holds a Master of Arts in Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies from Georgetown’s Wash School of Foreign Service and Bachelor of Arts from Wellesley College. She speaks Russian, Polish, and some Ukrainian. 

Vitaliy Shpak is currently the Program Officer handling the Ukraine portfolio at the National Endowment for Democracy. Mr. Shpak holds a law degree from Lviv University and has worked in the nongovernmental, state, and private sectors in Ukraine. He has served as advisor to the Minister of Education and was CEO of Plast, the National Scout Organization. In Washington, DC, Mr.Shpak was an intern and research assistant at the Kennan Institute and Peterson Institute for International Economics. As a Fulbright scholar, he earned a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of Maryland.
Moderator-

Ambassador (ret.) Kenneth Yalowitz served as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer for 36 years and was twice an ambassador: to Belarus from 1994-1997; and  Georgia from 1998-2001.  He was chosen for the Ambassador Robert Frasure award for peacemaking and conflict prevention in 2000 for his work preventing spillover of the Chechen war into Georgia. Ambassador Yalowitz directed the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College from 2003-11 and served as director of Georgetown University's MA in Conflict Resolution program from 2016-2018.