Doctor adrian karatnycky atlantic council

Since his election last year, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his government have pledged to transform and energize Ukraine&#;s economy, promising to bring in $50 billion in foreign direct investment and aiming for 40 percent GDP growth in five years. Those pledges have not been realized. So one year on, where did Zelenskyy’s government push the reform needle forward? And what should the government&#;s top priorities be in the coming year?

Tymofiy Mylovanov, Ukraine&#;s former minister of economic development, trade and agriculture, joins Adrian Karatnycky, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council&#;s Eurasia Center and managing partner at Myrmidon Group LLC, and Dr. Anders Åslund, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council&#;s Eurasia Center. Melinda Haring, deputy director at the Atlantic Council&#;s Eurasia Center, moderates the discussion.

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Recent months have seen a confounding set of appointments and personnel decisions by President Zelenskyy and his administration. If the president’s initial appointments when he first took office held the promise of fresh reform approaches, Zelenskyy’s latest picks make a mockery of his claims to represent a new era in Ukrainian politics.

Notably, the president has appointed Leonid Kravchuk, Ukraine’s year-old first president, to lead complex peace negotiations with Russia. In announcing the appointment, Zelenskyy declared that Kravchuk commands the respect of all Ukrainians, forgetting that under Kravchuk Ukraine suffered economic collapse, endured hyper-inflation of 10, percent, and ceded autonomy to Crimea, a status that prevented its full integration into the Ukrainian state. Just as importantly, Kravchuk was further discredited by his political alliance in with Viktor Medvedchuk, Putin’s man in Ukraine.

In a recent interview on Russian television, Kravchuk embarrassed himself by playing along with his propagandist hosts’ premise that Russia is not party to the war it is waging in eastern Ukraine. An octogenarian who needs extensive rest breaks, Kravchuk has decided to add vigor to his team by naming as his top advisor Vitold Fokin, an year-old former Ukrainian prime minister best known for his resistance to market reforms in the first months of Ukraine’s independence. Kravchuk explained that Fokin, who has not been in government service for nearly three decades, “is the best informed about what is going on in the Donbas” among his acquaintances.

Not to be outdone, President Zelenskyy’s Prosecutor General Irina Venediktova has recently appointed another old-school veteran, former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Svyatoslav Piskun, as a key advisor. Piskun is a notorious veteran of the Ukrainian political establishment whose family reportedly owns a USD 2 million villa on the French Riviera. Furthermore, in TV and print interviews, Piskun has somewhat bizarrel

Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and Director of Stanford's Master's in International Policy Program. 

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics.  His book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions.   His most recent book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, was published in Sept.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science.  He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation,  and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.  He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from  

Twitter: @FukuyamaFrancis

Vladislav Davidzon, a writer, translator, and critic joins Viktor Kovalenko to discuss the cultural and political transformations in Ukraine during the ongoing Russian war.

We discussed the first days of the Russian invasion, his magazine the Odessa Review and his book From Odessa With Love, how he burned his Russian passport in front of the Russian Embassy in France, why some Russians aren't granted an asylum in the US, political legacy and Jewish roots of President Zelensky, the new documentary Superpower by Sean Penn, and what is wrong with the Oscar.

Mr. Davidzon is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. Since , he also serves as the European culture correspondent for the Tablet Magazine. In , Davidzon founded the Odessa Review and served as its chief editor until July His work has been featured in numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal, World Policy Journal, the New York Observer, and the American Interest.

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