The price of aggression: Russia's war in Ukraine

William J. Antholis has served as director and CEO of UVA's Miller Center of Public Affairs since January 2015. In that time, the Miller Center has strengthened its position as the leading nonpartisan research institution on the American presidency and worked with scholars across the University of Virginia to deliver vital research to policymakers and the public. Before coming to the Miller Center, Antholis served as managing director at the Brookings Institution from 2004 to 2014, working directly with Brookings's president and vice presidents. Antholis is the author of Inside Out India and China: Local Politics Go Global (2013) and co-author (with Strobe Talbott) of Fast Forward: Ethics and Politics in the Age of Global Warming (2010). He has published articles, book chapters, and opinion pieces on U.S. politics, U.S. foreign policy, international organizations, the G8, climate change, and trade.

Heather Conley is president of the German Marshall Fund, a nonpartisan American public policy think tank and grant-making institution dedicated to promoting cooperation and understanding between North America and Europe. Conley previously served as senior vice president for Europe, Eurasia, and the Arctic and as director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where she developed the acclaimed Kremlin Playbook series, a dedicated research effort that examined the doctrine and methodology of Russian malign economic behavior and its methodology across Europe. She also is a recognized expert on the Arctic region, focusing on the Russian Arctic, climate transformation, and U.S. policy toward the region.

Eric Edelman, a Miller Center practitioner senior fellow, retired as a career minister from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2009 after having served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House. As the undersecretary of defense for policy (2005–2009), he oversaw strategy development as the Defense Department’s senior policy official with global responsibility for bilateral defense relations, war plans, special operations forces, homeland defense, missile defense, nuclear weapons and arms control policies, counter-proliferation, counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, arms sales, and defense trade controls. Edelman served as U.S. ambassador to the Republics of Finland and Turkey in the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and was principal deputy assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for national security affairs.

Patricia M. Kim is a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at Brookings and holds a joint appointment to the John L. Thornton China Center and the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. She is an expert on Chinese foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and U.S. alliance management and regional security dynamics in East Asia. Previously, Kim served as a China specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, International Security Program Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program at Princeton University. She frequently briefs U.S. government officials in her areas of expertise.

Andrei Kirilenko is a professor of finance at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, focusing on intersections of finance, technology, and regulation. From 2015 to 2019, he served as the founding director of the Centre for Global Finance and Technology at the Imperial College Business School. From 2013 to 2015, he was a professor of the practice of finance at MIT Sloan and co-director of the MIT Center for Finance and Policy. Prior to his academic positions, he was chief economist of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), designing and enforcing an effective regulatory regime of financial markets. Kirilenko also spent 12 years at the International Monetary Fund working on financial crises around the world.

John W. McArthur is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. He co-founded and co-chairs the 17 Rooms initiative, a new approach to catalyzing action for the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. Outside of Brookings, he is also a senior adviser to the United Nations Foundation, a member of Policy Horizons Canada’s Deputy Minister Steering Committee, and a member of the Novata ESG Advisory Council. He was previously the chief executive officer of Millennium Promise Alliance, the international nongovernmental organization. Prior to that he served as the manager and then deputy director of the U.N. Millennium Project, Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s independent advisory body mandated to recommend an action plan for achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

Scott Miller, a research fellow at the Miller Center, is a lecturer and research associate at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. From 2019 to 2021, he held a postdoctoral fellowship in economic and business history at the Yale School of Management’s International Center for Finance. As an economic historian, Miller examines the development of modern economic systems, particularly during periods of instability and volatility. He is the author or co-author of numerous scholarly papers on economic history, financial crises, and the interplay between societal and economic change. He also has written or co-written 10 case studies on financial crises and economic development.

John M. Owen IV is a Miller Center faculty senior fellow and a professor in UVA's Department of Politics. He is the author of Liberal Peace, Liberal War: American Politics and International Security and The Clash of Ideas in World Politics: Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change 1510-2010. A recipient of fellowships from Harvard, Stanford, and Princeton Universities, Owen is a member of the editorial board of International Security and a faculty fellow at the UVA Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.

Philip B. K. Potter, a Miller Center faculty senior fellow, is an associate professor of politics and founding director of the National Security Policy Center in the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. He is also a university expert with the National Ground Intelligence Center, U.S. Army INSCOM. Potter has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Politics and the Journal of Global Security Studies and is an associate principal investigator for Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS). Potter has been a fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point, Harvard University, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Elina Ribakova directs the Institute of International Finance’s economic research on emerging markets, with special interests in Russian economics and financial stability. She was previously a visiting fellow at Bruegel, where her research focused on financial markets, EMs, and central banks. Prior to Bruegel, she held senior level roles in economic research at a diverse set of financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank in London, Amundi (Pioneer) Asset Management, Avantium Investment Management, and Citigroup. She has also taught graduate and undergraduate courses at the Stockholm School of Economics and given guest lectures at the London School of Economics, New Economic School in Moscow, and Chicago Booth in London. Ms. Ribakova began her career as an economist at IMF headquarters in Washington D.C.

Thomas Risse is an international relations scholar and professor at the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin. His work focuses on the importance of transnational actors, the power of international norms, and the influence of domestic structures on international interactions. He is the former director of the Freie Universität Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign, and Security Policy and founding director of the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies. He has previously held teaching and research appointments at the European University Institute's Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies in Florence, Italy; the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt; the University of Konstanz, Germany; Cornell, Yale, Stanford, and Harvard Universities, and the University of Wyoming.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is the CEO of New America and the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. From 2009–2011, she served as director of policy planning for the United States Department of State, the first woman to hold that position. Upon leaving the State Department she received the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award for her work leading the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, as well as meritorious service awards from USAID and the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe. Prior to her government service, Dr. Slaughter was the Dean of Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School) from 2002–2009 and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School from 1994-2002.

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is the senior associate dean of leadership programs and the Lester Crown Professor in the Practice of Management for the Yale School of Management. He is also founder and president of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, a nonprofit educational and research institute focused on CEO leadership and corporate governance. He was formerly a professor at Emory's Goizueta Business School and at Harvard Business School. BusinessWeek has listed Sonnenfeld as one of the world’s 10 most influential business school professors and Directorship magazine has listed him among the 100 most influential figures in corporate governance. He is the first academician to have rung the opening bells of both the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.

Ambassador William B. Taylor is vice president, Russia and Europe at the U.S. Institute of Peace. In 2019, he served as chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv. During the Arab Spring, he oversaw U.S. assistance and support to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria. He served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009. He was the U.S. government's representative to the Mideast Quartet, which facilitated the Israeli disengagement from Gaza and parts of the West Bank. He served as the first director of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office from 2004 to 2005, and as coordinator of international and U.S. assistance to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003. Ambassador Taylor is a graduate of West Point and Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and Germany.

Andrew S. Weiss is the James Family Chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research on Russia and Eurasia. He was previously director of the RAND Corporation’s Center for Russia and Eurasia and executive director of the RAND Business Leaders Forum. He also served as director for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian Affairs on the National Security Council staff, as a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, and as a policy assistant in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy during the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. Weiss has private sector experience as a vice president and investment strategist at American International Group, Inc. subsidiary companies.