TIME & LOCATION
Tuesday, April 12th, 2022, 6:30PM EDT
Room 505, 1957 E Street, Washington, DC 20052 and via Zoom
Note: We ask that in-person attendees remain masked for the duration of the event in accordance with the policies of The George Washington University.
ABOUT THE EVENT
Since 2014, Ukraine has been embroiled in conflict with both the Russian Federation and separatist forces in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. On February 24th of this year, Russian president Vladimir Putin made the decision to escalate the conflict, resulting in a full scale invasion of Ukraine and the deaths of countless people. The Ukrainian people have remained defiant and have bravely repulsed numerous Russian offensives. We recently witnessed the collapse of the Russian Offensive in Kyiv Oblast due to poor logistics and strategy on behalf of the Russians and tenacious resilience from Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. Despite this victory, the Russian retreat has uncovered numerous atrocities committed by the Russian military and paramilitary forces including the horrific massacre of men and boys in the town of Bucha.
We are lucky to host a wonderful guest panel of Ukrainian professionals from a wide variety of fields: First Secretary Kateryna Smagliy of the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, Dr. Roman Kalytchak of Lviv State University's Department of International Relations, and veteran journalist Natalia Antonova. We intend to discuss a multitude of topics pertaining to Russia's invasion of Ukraine including how the war has been covered in the media, the wider international implications of the conflict, and how the embassy here in Washington has responded. We also hope to gain insight into how the GW community and non-Ukrainians in general can help assist those who have had their lives and families torn apart by this terrible conflict.
Kateryna Smagliy is the First Secretary at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington and is a McCain Institute’s Next Generation Leader (2019 Cohort). She is a former Director of the Kennan Institute Kyiv Office. She has served as a Kyiv-based consultant of the European Endowment for Democracy in Brussels and led the Anti-Crisis Humanitarian Program of the International Renaissance Foundation. She also worked for the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv as the principal liaison officer with Ukraine’s parliament. Smagliy seeks to focus on formulating and driving policy reforms that respond to the concerns of internally displaced citizens and educational institutions in Donbas.
Dr. Roman Kalytchak is a Professor at the Lviv State University’s Department of International Relations. Previously, he was a full-time Associate Professor of the Department of International Relations and Diplomacy at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. Prof. Kalytchak is a member of the Scientific and Curriculum Council of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine and supervises activities related to higher education in the field of Social Sciences. Previously, he served as a Deputy Chairman of the Curriculum Subcommittee on International Relations, Social Communications and Area Studies of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine in 2016-2018.
Natalia Antonova is a Ukrainian-American writer and an open-source intelligence (OSINT) investigator. She writes a newsletter on online safety, geolocation, Ukraine and Russia — and is a regular contributor to Foreign Policy. She has an interest in Russia, disinformation, online safety, open source intelligence, and various adjacent topics. She was also the last editor of The Moscow News, Russia's oldest English language newspaper, before it was finally shut down by the government in 2014, and is a former editor at Bellingcat. She has written for The Guardian, Mashable, Foreign Policy, and Newsweek, among other publications.
