Brussels Forum Session: The Economic Counteroffensive: Rebuilding Ukraine

Valentyna Shulimborska is COO at Ro3kvit, a coalition of more than 100 professionals from Ukraine and other countries who create knowledge and methodologies for the rebuilding of Ukraine’s urban and rural landscapes and infrastructure.  

Shulimborska is a program and project manager with extensive experience in leading large-scale transformational projects in manufacturing and supply chains. Her background includes managing geographically dispersed stakeholders of various cultures and seniority.

Brussels Forum Session: The Economic Counteroffensive: Rebuilding Ukraine

Karl Jensen joined AECOM in 2020 to lead the national governments business line. He supports governments worldwide with solutions to complex water, environmental, transportation, building, and energy infrastructure challenges. He also oversees AECOM’s disaster resilience solutions practice, which is dedicated to responding to natural and human-caused disasters, restoring affected communities, and developing mitigation and resilience solutions to protect against future events.  

Throughout his career, Jensen has held leadership positions in engineering and construction, defense, and aerospace. Prior to AECOM, he led strategy and sales for the national governments sector of CH2M / Jacobs, with more than $2 billion in annual revenue and a sales team of nearly 100. His other roles within the defense industry have included deputy of corporate strategy at Raytheon and senior vice president of business development at CACI.  

Prior to his roles in industry, Jensen was a US Navy officer. He was part of the Navy Space Cadre and a designated acquisition professional, and led procurements for the intelligence community. He was a naval aviator with more than 40 combat flights in Iraq and Somalia.

Jensen holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the US Naval Academy, a master’s degree in astronautical engineering, and an aerospace engineers’ degree from the Naval Postgraduate School. He completed the advanced program managers course at the Defense Services Management College. He has held board positions with CH2M Hill Inc. and Master Singers of Virginia.

Brussels Forum Session: Spotlight: A Response

Ivan Krastev is a political scientist, chairman of the board of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, and a permanent fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna (IWM Vienna). He is also the founder and member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the boards of the International Crisis Group and GLOBSEC. He regularly publishes articles in the Financial Times, The New York Times, and other international and Bulgarian media. 

Krastev’s latest books are: “Is it Tomorrow Yet? Paradoxes of the Pandemic”; “The Light that Failed”, co-authored with Stephen Holmes and winner of the Lionel Gelber Award for Best English Language Book on International Politics for 2020; “After Europe”; “Democracy Disrupted. The Global Politics on Protest”, and “In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders”. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages.  

Krastev is the 2020 winner of the Jean Améry Award for European Essay Writing. 

Andris Sprūds is minister of defense of the Republic of Latvia, a position he has held since September 2023. He was previously a member of the Saeima (parliament) and chairperson of the Saeima European Affairs Committee. 
 
Sprūds is also a member of the advisory board and former director of the Latvian Institute of International Affairs, and concurrently holds the position of professor at Riga Stradins University. 
 
Sprūds has been a visiting student and scholar at Oxford, Uppsala, Columbia, and Johns Hopkins universities, as well as at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Japan's Institute of Energy Economics. His research interests include energy security and policy in the Baltic Sea region, the domestic and foreign policy of post-Soviet countries, and transatlantic relations. 
 
Sprūds holds a master's degree in Central European history from the Central European University in Budapest, a master's degree in international relations from the University of Latvia, and a PhD in political science from Jagiellonian University in Kraków. 

Brussels Forum Session: Trust in Information in the Age of AI

Peter Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he co-directs the Arena Initiative.

Previously, he was a senior fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he was the director of the Arena Initiative, a research project dedicated to overcoming the challenges of digital-era disinformation and polarization. His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and was nominated for the Samuel Johnson, Guardian First Book, Pushkin House, and Gordon Burns prizes. The work has been translated into over a dozen languages and was dramatized on BBC Radio 4. His new book, This is Not Propaganda, was released in August 2019,. It was a Times Book of the Year and has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burns Prize.

Pomarantsev  has testified on the challenges of information war and media development before the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the UK Parliament Defense Select Committee. He was a specialist advisor on the UK Parliamentary Committee on Fake News, and was a member of USC Annenberg’s Transatlantic Working Group on Internet Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression. He is a columnist at The American Interest, and writes for publications including the New York Times, Granta, and The Atlantic. From 2002 to 2014, Pomarantsev  was a television producer on documentaries and factual entertainment programs for major networks including the Discovery Channel and the BBC. He continues to present and write radio documentaries for BBC Radio 4, most recently on disinformation about climate change.

Pomarantsev is frequently asked to host policy seminars at NATO, the EU, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, the German Federal Foreign Office, and the US Department of State, as well as at numerous public events. He has helped write in-depth policy recommendations on counterpropaganda and media diversity for both national governments and NGOs, including the UK FCDO’s strategic communication policies for Russia and the western Balkans. He has led seminars and given talks on the subject of propaganda and media at universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna.