This week LSE IDEAS Russia-Ukraine Dialogues will partner with the LSE IDEAS Central and South-East Europe Programme to discuss the reactions from and impact on frontline states. Speakers will provide, inter alia, the Polish, Hungarian, Belarusian and Romanian perspectives.
Meet the speakers and chair
Ionela Maria Ciolan is a Brussels-based foreign policy and security expert and Board Member of the Transatlantic Alumni Network. Until recently, Ionela worked as a Research Fellow at the European Policy Centre (EPC) think tank in Brussels. Ionela is a 2021 James S. Denton Transatlantic Fellow at Center for European Policy Analysis (Washington D.C.). She previously gained experience as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, and through her work at the European Parliament (Brussels) and the Centre for EU-Russia Studies, University of Tartu (Estonia), and National University of Political Studies and Public Administration (Romania).
Katia Glod is a nonresident fellow with CEPA’s Russia program. Glod is an independent analyst and political risk consultant based in London. She advises on the politics and economics of former Soviet countries. Glod worked as the Belarus consultant for the European Endowment for Democracy in Minsk. She also worked as an election observer and analyst for the OSCE in countries such as Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Albania, and North Macedonia. Earlier Glod was a Robert Bosch Academy Fellow on the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House in London. She managed research projects on labor migration and public attitudes for the Eurasian Development Bank in Russia and Kazakhstan.
Péter Krekó is the Executive Director of Political Capital, an independent policy research, analysis and consulting institute in Budapest. He is also a senior fellow at the Washington-based CEPA think tank and a PopBack Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Earlier, he was a guest researcher at the Europe’s Futures - Ideas for Action program of the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), and a non-resident Associate Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University SAIS Bologna Institute of Policy Research. Péter is an associate professor with habilitation at the Department of Social Psychology at ELTE PPK. His main areas of expertise are disinformation, Russian political influence in the West, and European populism and radicalism.
Bogdan Zawadewicz is a research fellow, covering the Balkan region. Prior to joining the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW), he worked as a research associate at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg, where he was a member of the research group “Frozen and Unfrozen Conflicts”. Zawadewicz served as a consultant on the project “Negotiations Matter” established by the Goethe Institute in Tel Aviv. His main area of research includes the political cleavages in Central and Eastern Europe, separatists’ strategies among peripheral elites, the impact of external actors in the Balkan region and socio-political developments in Post-Soviet Space.
Leon Hartwell is the Sotirov Fellow at LSE IDEAS and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington D.C. His research interests include conflict resolution, genocide, transitional justice, diplomacy, democracy, and the Western Balkans. Previously, Hartwell was CEPA’s Acting Director of the Transatlantic Leadership Program and a Title VIII Fellow. From 2012 to 2013, he was also the Senior Policy Advisor for Political and Development Cooperation at the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Zimbabwe, where his work included government and civil society engagement, political reporting, peace building projects, and supporting human rights defenders. In 2019, Hartwell completed a joint doctoral degree summa cum laude at Leipzig University (Germany) and Stellenbosch University (South Africa). His thesis analyzed the use of mediation in the resolution of armed conflicts.
More information about the event
Event hashtag: #LSERussiaUkraine
LSE IDEAS (@lseideas) is LSE's foreign policy think tank. Through sustained engagement with policymakers and opinion-formers, IDEAS provides a forum that informs policy debate and connects academic research with the practice of diplomacy and strategy.
This panel is part of LSE IDEAS' Russia-Ukraine Dialogues. Given the recent escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war (24 February 2022), the conflict continues to be fluid and requires cross-disciplinary analysis. Weekly panels, scheduled for every Tuesday, will bring together in-house and external experts to report on and discuss the war’s impacts on various global issues.