The War in Ukraine: One Year On

PANELISTS

Robin Dunnigan is the Deputy Assistant Secretary responsible for Central and Eastern Europe in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. She served previously as Chargé d’Affaires and Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy in Austria from July 2018 to July 2021. A career member of the Senior Foreign Service with the rank of Minister Counselor, Ms. Dunnigan joined the State Department in 1992. She served as Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Department of State’s Bureau of Energy Resources from August 2014 to August 2017. In this role, she directed U.S. energy diplomacy to ensure that energy resources were used to promote sustainable global economic growth and stability and strengthen U.S. national security.

Maria Snegovaya is a Senior Fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, and a Fellow at the Illiberalism Studies Program at George Washington University. She received her doctorate from Columbia University. The key focus of her research is Russia’s domestic and foreign policy. She also studies democratic backsliding and re-autocratization in post-communist Europe and the tactics used by Russian actors and proxies who circulate disinformation to exploit these dynamics in the region. Her research results and analysis have appeared in policy and peer-reviewed journals, including West European Politics, Party Politics, Journal of Democracy, Post-Soviet Affairs, and the Washington Post‘s political science blog the Monkey Cage. Her dissertation-based book manuscript is under contract with Oxford University Press. Her research has been referenced in publications such as the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Economist, and Foreign Policy. Throughout her career she has collaborated with multiple U.S. research centers and think tanks.

Brigadier General Peter B. Zwack (Ret.), a Visiting Fellow at Perry World House, served as the US senior defense official and attaché to the Russian Federation from 2012 to 2014, a period which included Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine. He also served in West Germany, Kosovo, South Korea, and Afghanistan. Retiring in 2015 after thirty-four years of military service, he then served for four years as the Russia-Eurasia fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies within the National Defense University. Zwack is currently a global fellow at the Kennan Institute, part of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. A published author, he has worked with Russian and international colleagues in multiple fields since 1989, including defense, security, academia, policy, veterans, and private citizens. He regularly consults, writes, and lectures within the interagency, defense, think tank, academic, and business sectors, and provides commentary on contemporary Russian and Eurasian security issues. 

MODERATOR

John Gans is the vice president of strategic communications and policy at The Rockefeller Foundation. From 2017 until 2021, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and worked at Perry World House, last as director of communications and research. Prior to joining Perry World House, he was the chief speechwriter to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter at the Pentagon. In addition to leading the writing team at the Defense Department, Gans served as senior speechwriter for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew. In 2019, Gans published White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War, which the Wall Street Journal said was a “bottom-up history.” He has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Atlantic, and elsewhere, and appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. He earned his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.