In light of Russia’s devastating invasion of Ukraine, attention and anxieties over mounting nuclear threats continue to reverse four decades of declining public attention and concern of the risks of nuclear weapons. People around the world are waking up to the frightening reality that the threat of nuclear war never really went away. As we approach the one-year mark since the start of the war, let’s “meet” to discuss one of the most-pressing nuclear issues of the day.
Thursday, February 23, 2023
10am PT / 12pm CT / 1pm ET
Speaker Line-up:
- Melinda Haring, Director of Stakeholder Relations and Social Impact at Superhumans Center & Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council
- Illia Ponomarenko, Defense Reporter at the Kyiv Independent
- Jon Wolfsthal, Senior Advisor for Policy & Advocacy at Global Zero and former special assistant to President Barack Obama
Hope you’ll join us. For questions please reach out to events@ploughshares.org.
About the Speakers:
Melinda Haring is director of stakeholder relations and social impact at the Superhumans Center in Lviv, Ukraine, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. Previously, she was the deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and editor of the Atlantic Council’s popular publication, the UkraineAlert blog. She is author of Reforming the democracy bureaucracy and coauthor of Biden and Ukraine: a strategy for the next administration, Biden and Belarus: a strategy for the next administration, and Ukraine’s internally displaced persons hold a key to peace. Haring has worked for Eurasia Foundation, Freedom House, and the National Democratic Institute, managing democracy assistance programs in Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia. She has an MA in Government with a certificate in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from Georgetown University. 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, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Illia Ponomarenko is the defense and security reporter at the Kyiv Independent. He has reported about the war in eastern Ukraine since the conflict’s earliest days. He covers national security issues, as well as military technologies, production, and defense reforms in Ukraine. Besides, he gets deployed to the war zone of Donbas with Ukrainian combat formations. He has also had deployments to Palestine and the Democratic Republic of the Congo as an embedded reporter with UN peacekeeping forces. Illia won the Alfred Friendly Press Partners fellowship and was selected to work as USA Today's guest reporter at the U.S. Department of Defense.
Jon Wolfsthal is a Senior Advisor for Policy & Advocacy at Global Zero. From 2014 to 2017, he served as special assistant to former U.S. President Barack Obama and as senior director for arms control and nonproliferation at the National Security Council. Previously he served as the deputy director of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies. Wolfsthal served as the special adviser to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden for nuclear security and nonproliferation and as director for nonproliferation on the National Security Council. He supported the Obama administration’s negotiation and ratification of the New START arms reduction agreement with the Russian Federation and helped support the development of nuclear policy, including the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review.