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12 November 2024

QI Panel: Can Americans Agree on How to Settle the Ukraine War?

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos 

I'd like to welcome everyone here to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. My name is Kelley Vlahos. I am a senior advisor at QI, but I'm also the editor of our online foreign policy magazine, Responsible Statecraft, which I hope you are all reading and writing for me. So I'm very excited to be hosting this event with my colleague George Beebe this afternoon. I see a lot of familiar faces in the room and a lot of new faces too. I've been talking with a lot of you previously about the Ukraine war, and I know it's been a major part of your professional lives for the last 32 months since the Russian invasion in February 2022. Many of you are researchers, scholars, diplomats, congressional staffers, or like me, journalists who have been reading, writing and editing, reporting and analysis on the war for years. It's very consuming and unfortunately seemingly unending. But there seems to be a new spirit in the air today, a sense of urgency and maybe just an acknowledgement finally, that time is running out, that if Ukraine is not winning on the battlefield, then it is time to truly focus on the alternatives to fighting and to start negotiating a pathway to peace. 

Many of us, including my esteemed panelists today, have been aware of and if not promoting actively that pathway for a long time. Is Washington catching up though, or is a diplomatic end to the war even possible without a hands-on American engagement with all interested parties? And what about the bitter partisanship in Washington? Will there ever be a time when the political stars are aligned so that the US can take the steps necessary to steer this conflict toward a resolution deploying words and not weapons? So we have a lot of ground to cover today, so I'd like to formally introduce our panelists and then we can get on with the discussion. Tom Graham, Graham in the center here, has worn many hats and has had extensive experience in US-Russian relations. Early in his career, he was a foreign service officer with assignments in the US Embassy in Moscow. He also worked on Russian and Soviet affairs on the policy planning staff at the State Department. Later he served in the George W. Bush administration as a special assistant to the president and then in two roles on the national security staff, including senior director for Russia and director for Russian affairs. Early on in the administration he served as the associate director of policy planning on the staff at the Department of State. He's the author of Russia's Decline in Uncertain Recovery and co-author of US-Russian Relations at the Turn of the Century, and is a co-founder of Yale University's Russian, East European and Eurasian studies program. Charles Kupchan, to my right has served at the State Department on the policy planning staff

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