Opinion, Berkeley Blogs

Open letter to Jeffrey Sachs on the Russia-Ukraine war

By Yuriy Gorodnichenko

ICC judges issue arrest warrants against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin

Dear Dr. Sachs,

We are a group of economists, including many Ukrainians, who were appalled by your statements on the Russian war against Ukraine and were compelled to write this open letter to address some of the historical misrepresentations and logical fallacies in your line of argument. Following your repeated appearances on the talk shows of one of the chief Russian propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov (apart from calling to wipe Ukrainian cities off the face of the earth, he called for nuclear strikes against NATO countries), we have reviewed the op-eds on your personal website and noticed several recurring patterns. In what follows, we wish to point out these misrepresentations to you, alongside our brief response.

ICC judges issue arrest warrants against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin

 

Pattern #1: Denying the agency of Ukraine

In your article “The New World Economy” from January 10, 2023, you write: “It was, after all, the US attempt to expand NATO to Georgia and Ukraine that triggered the wars in Georgia (in 2010) and in Ukraine (2014 until today).” Similarly, in your article “What Ukraine Needs to Learn from Afghanistan” from February 13, 2023, you write: “The proxy war in Ukraine began nine years ago when the US government backed the overthrow of Ukraine’s president Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych’s sin from the US viewpoint was his attempt to maintain Ukraine’s neutrality despite the US desire to expand NATO to include Ukraine (and Georgia).”

Let us set the record straight on the historical events from 2013-2014, at which you hint in the aforementioned misinformative statements: The Euromaidan had nothing to do with NATO, nor the US. Initial protest was sparked by Viktor Yanukovych’s decision not to sign the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement, despite said agreement passing the Ukrainian Parliament with an overwhelming majority and enjoying broad support among the Ukrainian population. Yanukovych’s regime’s choice to respond by brutally beating peaceful protesters (mostly students) on the night of November 30, 2013, only further alienated the population and intensified the protests. After the adoption of a set of laws forbidding the freedom of press and assembly (commonly termed the  “dictatorship laws”) by Yanukovych in January 2014, the Euromaidan turned into a broader movement against government abuse of power and corruption, police brutality, and human rights violation – which we now refer to as the Revolution of Dignity. Ukraine’s accession to NATO was never a goal of this movement. Hence, your attempts to trace the beginning of the war to “NATO” are historically inaccurate. Furthermore, treating Ukraine as a pawn on the US geo-political chessboard is a slap in the face to millions of Ukrainians who risked their lives during the Revolution of Dignity.

 

Pattern #2: NATO provoked Russia 

You repeatedly emphasize that the expansion of NATO provoked Russia (e.g., “NATO should not enlarge, because that threatens the security of Russia,” from your interview to Isaac Chotiner at the New Yorker from February 27, 2023).

We want to alert you to a few facts. In 1939, it was the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany that invaded Poland. In 1940, it was the Soviet Union that invaded the Baltic countries. In 1940, it was the Soviet Union that annexed parts of Romania. In 1956, it was the Soviet Union that invaded Hungary. In 1968, it was the Soviet Union that invaded Czechoslovakia. Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Hungary or Czechoslovakia did not invade Russia or the Soviet Union. No threat emanated from these countries. But these countries were attacked by the USSR/Russia. This is why these countries wanted to join NATO. Since joining NATO, none of these countries have been attacked by Russia again.

Just like these countries, Ukraine (whose military budget was a mere $2.9 bn in 2013, prior to Russia’s military aggression against it) wants to have security and peace. It does not want to be attacked again by Russia (whose military budget in 2013 stood at $68 bn). Given that Ukraine’s agreement to give up its nuclear weapons in 1994 in exchange for security “assurances” from the US, UK and Russia (!) did nothing to prevent Russian aggression, currently the only credible guarantee is NATO membership.

We also want to draw your attention to the fact that Finland and Sweden applied for NATO membership in response to Russian aggression, and yet Russia did not complain about these two countries joining NATO. You do not seem to be particularly concerned about these two countries joining NATO either. This differential treatment of Ukraine vs. Finland/Sweden legitimizes “spheres of influence,” a notion that seems appropriate for the age of empires and not for the modern era.

 

Pattern #3: Denying Ukraine’s sovereign integrity

In your interview to Democracy Now! on December 6, 2022, you said: “So, my view is that […] Crimea has been historically, and will be in the future, effectively, at least de facto Russian.”

We wish to remind you that Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 has violated the Budapest memorandum (in which it promised to respect and protect Ukrainian borders, including Crimea), the Treaty on Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation (which Russia signed with Ukraine in 1997 with the same promises), and, according to the order of the UN International Court of Justice, it violated international law. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia was supposed to protect peace, but instead Russia violated the foundational principle of the UN (Article 2 of the UN Charter: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”). Indeed, the entire world security architecture after WWII is based on the assumption that country borders (regardless of historical background) cannot be changed by force in order to preserve peace, as Kenya UN ambassador highlighted in his famous speech. If a nuclear power is allowed to annex territories of another country as it wishes, then no country in the world can feel safe.

By insisting that Russia can keep Crimea, you are making an implicit assumption that if Russia is allowed to do that, it will leave the rest of Ukraine in peace. However, this is demonstrably not true, as Russia’s “de facto” ownership of Crimea over 2014–2022 did nothing to preclude its current aggression. The aim of Putin is to “ultimately solve the Ukrainian question,” i.e. to completely destroy Ukraine and annex its entire territory. Thus, by annexing Crimea he did not “restore the historical justice” — he just prepared a springboard for further military attacks on Ukraine. Therefore, restoring Ukraine’s control over its entire territory is crucial not only for the security of Ukraine but also for the security of all other nations (by reinforcing the lesson that aggressors should not get away with land grabs!).

Also, you state that “Russia certainly will never accept NATO in Ukraine.” For your information, the UN Charter emphasizes the self-determination of peoples as a key principle. It’s not for Russia to decide what alliances or unions Ukraine will or will not join. Ukraine has its own democratically-elected government (not a dictatorship, like in Russia), and this government, after consultation with Ukrainian people, will decide whether Ukraine will or will not join NATO. Likewise, NATO countries have every right to decide for themselves whom they would like to welcome in their alliance.

 

Pattern #4: Pushing forward Kremlin’s peace plans

In the aforementioned article “What Ukraine Needs to Learn from Afghanistan,” you write: “The basis for peace is clear. Ukraine would be a neutral non-NATO country. Crimea would remain home to Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet, as it has been since 1783. A practical solution would be found for the Donbas, such as a territorial division, autonomy, or an armistice line.”

While your suggestion is perfectly aligned with that of Russian propagandists, it leaves unanswered the key question from the Ukrainian perspective: Based on what evidence do you trust a serial warmonger, who has stated on multiple occasions that Ukraine does not exist, to be satisfied with Crimea and Donbas and not try to occupy the entire country? Until you find a convincing answer to this question, we would kindly ask you to refer to the 10-point peace plan proposed by President Zelensky and fully backed up by the Ukrainian people. Regurgitating Kremlin’s “peace plans” would only prolong the suffering of Ukrainian people.

Writing that if Ukraine offered Putin Crimea and Donbas in December 2021 or March 2022 then “the fighting would stop, Russian troops would leave Ukraine, and Ukraine’s sovereignty would be guaranteed by the UN Security Council and other nations” is just wishful thinking. Peace negotiations in early 2022 broke down not because of non-existent US intervention but because Russia demanded unconditional capitulation of Ukraine (and it still does!). Remember that Russia’s goals in Ukraine were “demilitarization and denazification”. What “denazification” means was explained by one of Putin’s political advisors, Timofey Sergeitsev, in his piece “What Russia should do with Ukraine?” There, he argued for the brutal destruction of the Ukrainian nation involving killing millions of people and “re-educating” others. Russians already started implementing these plans in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

We suggest that you read the entire text by Sergeitsev’s, but a few passages clearly show what he means: “a country that is being denazified cannot possess sovereignty,” “Denazification will inevitably include de-ukrainization — the rejection of the large-scale artificial inflation of the ethnic component in the self-identification of the population of the historical Malorossiya and Novorossiya territories, which was started by the Soviet authorities”, “denazification of Ukraine means its inevitable de-europeanization”, [denazification implies…] “the seizure of educational materials and the prohibition of educational programs at all levels that contain Nazi ideological guidelines” (in his article, Sergeitsev repeatedly calls Ukrainians “Nazis”).

You seem to be unaware that, consistent with this rhetoric, Russia commits horrendous war crimes as documented by the UN and many others. We fail to discern any indication of a genuine interest in peace from the ongoing  Russian atrocities.

We urge you to reevaluate your stance on thinking that Russia is interested in good-faith peace talks.

 

Pattern #5. Presenting Ukraine as a divided country

In “What Ukraine Needs to Learn from Afghanistan,” you also state that “The US overlooked two harsh political realities in Ukraine. The first is that Ukraine is deeply divided ethnically and politically between Russia-hating nationalists in western Ukraine and ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and Crimea.”

This statement echoes a Russian political technology first applied during 2004 presidential elections and still used by Russians to justify the “denazification” of Ukraine today. We encourage you to take a look at the actual empirical facts and history.

In 1991, all regions of Ukraine voted for independence. Including Crimea.

According to the 2001 Census (the latest data on self-identified ethnicity available for Ukraine), Ukrainian population is the majority in all the regions of Ukraine, except for Crimea. And when we speak about Crimea, we should ask why it has the ethnic composition which it has. It has a Russian majority because of a series of genocides and deportations starting from its first occupation by Russia in 1783 and as recently as 1944 when Crimean Tatars were deported to remote parts of the Soviet Union. Crimea’s indigenous population was deported, killed, and replaced by Russians. A similar tactic was used by Russia during its several genocides of Ukrainians — for example, during the Great Famine of 1932–33, Russians arrived to live in the houses of Ukrainians who died of famine. Russia is using the same tactics of population replacement today, in the current war: it deports the Ukrainian population, forcefully adopts Ukrainian children or “re-educates” (brainwashes) them after forcefully parting them with their families.

Besides cleansing Ukrainian and other indigenous populations, Russia used “softer” tactics, such as Russification, i.e. discouraging the learning and usage of the Ukrainian language in all spheres. Russification has been ongoing for centuries. Its instruments have been quite diverse — from “mixing” people by sending Ukrainians to work to Russia and sending Russians to study or work in Ukraine, to making it close to impossible for Ukrainian speakers to enter universities, to representing Ukrainian language and culture as backward and inferior to the “great Russian culture,” to stealing Ukrainian cultural heritage (e.g. only now world museums started to correctly identify Ukrainian artists presented by Russia as Russian, and hundreds of thousands of artifacts have looted from Ukrainian museums from 2014 and especially during the last year). Thus, the acute language discussions are a natural response to Russia’s historical attempts to suppress any restoration of rights of the Ukrainian language. Despite this history of oppression, Ukrainians have been gradually switching to Ukrainian, and the Russian full-scale invasion intensified this process.

Recent polls show that irrespective of language or location, Ukrainians overwhelmingly (80%) reject territorial concessions to Russia. Polls also show that 85 percent of Ukrainians identify themselves above all as citizens of Ukraine, as opposed to residents of their region, representatives of an ethnic minority, or some other identifier. This is hardly possible in a divided country.

 

In summary, we welcome your interest in Ukraine. However, if your objective is to be helpful and to generate constructive proposals on how to end the war, we believe that this objective is not achieved. Your interventions present a distorted picture of the origins and intentions of the Russian invasion, mix facts and subjective interpretations, and propagate the Kremlin’s narratives. Ukraine is not a geopolitical pawn or a divided nation, Ukraine has the right to determine its own future, Ukraine has not attacked any country since gaining its independence in 1991. There is no justification for the Russian war of aggression. A clear moral compass, respect of international law, and a firm understanding of Ukraine’s history should be the defining principles for any discussions towards a just peace.

 

Kind regards,

Bohdan Kukharskyy, City University of New York

Anastassia Fedyk, University of California, Berkeley

Yuriy Gorodnichenko, University of California, Berkeley

Ilona Sologoub, VoxUkraine NGO

Tatyana Deryugina, University of Illinois

Tania Babina, Columbia University

James Hodson, AI for Good Foundation

Tetyana Balyuk, Emory University

Robert Eberhart, Stanford University

Oskar Kowalewski, IESEG School of Management, France

Jerzy Konieczny, Wilfrid Laurier University and International Centre for Economic Analysis

Mishel Ghassibe, CREi, UPF and BSE

Garry Sotnik, Stanford University

Yangbo Du, INNOVO Group of Companies

Stan Veuger, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

Pavel Kuchar, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London

Moshe Hazan, Tel Aviv University

Fabio Ghironi, University of Washington

Harry Pei, Department of Economics, Northwestern University

Matilde Bombardini, UC Berkeley

Oleg Gredil, Tulane University

Andriy Shkilko, Wilfrid Laurier University

Oleksandra Betliy, Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting

Santiago Sanchez-Pages, King's College London

Vadim Elenev, Johns Hopkins University

Dariia Mykhailyshyna, University of Bologna

Valeria Fedyk, London Business School

Grigory Franguridi, University of Southern California

Andrii Bilovusiak, London School of Economics

Ioannis Kospentaris, Virginia Commonwealth University

Benjamin Moll, London School of Economics

Lubo Litov, Price College of Business, OU

Pavel Bacherikov, UC Berkeley Haas

Robert Scott Richards, Managing Director, CrossBoundary

Samuel C. Ramer, History Department, Tulane University

Olena Ogrokhina, Lafayette College

Michael Landesmann, The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies

Matthew Holian, San Jose State University

Petra Sinagl, University of Iowa

Jeanine Miklos-Thal, University of Rochester

Wojciech Kopczuk, Columbia University

Jonathan Meer, Texas A&M University

Tetiana Bogdan, Academy of Financial Management by the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine

Mats Marcusson, Retired EC official

Alminas Zaldokas, HKUST

Christian R. Proaño, University of Bamberg, Germany

Michael Weber, University of Chicago

Daniel Spiro, Uppsala University

Hlib Vyshlinsky, Centre for Economic Strategy

Martin Labaj, University of Economics in Bratislava

Jacques Crémer, Toulouse School of Economics

Marc Fleurbaey, Paris School of Economics

Dmitriy Sergeyev, Bocconi University

Oleksandra Moskalenko, London School of Economics and Political Sciences

Olga Pindyuk, Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies

Swapnil Singh, Bank of Lithuania

Yevhenii Usenko, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Oleksandr Vostriakov, Kyiv National Economic University named after Vadym Hetman

Julian Reif, University of Illinois

Ernst Maug, University of Mannheim

Olga Shurchkov, Wellesley College

Vladimir Dubrovskiy, CASE Ukraine

Niko Jaakkola, University of Bologna

Anders Olofsgård, SITE/Stockholm School of Economics

Leonid Krasnozhon, Loyola University New Orleans

Jesper Roine, Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics, SSE

Krassen Stanchev, Sofia University and Institute for Market Economics

Brendan O'Flaherty, Columbia University

Samuel Rosen, Temple University

Francois Joinneau, "Entrepreneurs for Ukraine"/Tuvalu 51

Torbjörn Becker, Director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics

Maria Perrotta Berlin, SITE, Stockholm School of Economics

Oleksiy Kryvtsov

Inna Semenets-Orlova, Interregional Academy of Personnel Management

Denis de Crombrugghe, Nazarbayev University

Olena Mykolenko, VN Kharkiv National University

Solomiya Shpak, Kyiv School of Economics

Oleksandr Talavera, University of Birmingham

Kevin Berry, University of Alaska Anchorage

Denys Bondar, Tulane University

Kálmán Mizsei

Artur Doshchyn, University of Oxford

Robert Östling, Stockholm School of Economics

Oleksandr Petryk

Vera Kichanova, King's College London

Mariia Panga, George Mason University

Oleg Itskhoki, UCLA

Lina Zadorozhnia, Kyiv School of Economics

Dominic Lusinchi, UC Berkeley Extension, instructor (retired)

John S. Earle, George Mason University

Scott Gehlbach, University of Chicago

Konstantin Sonin, University of Chicago

Olena Havrylchyk, University Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne

Floyd Zhang, Instacart (previously Stanford)

David Zaikin, Founder of Ukraine Momentum, CEO of Key Elements Group.

Piroska Nagy-Mohacsi, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Szymon Sacher, Columbia University

Iikka Korhonen, Bank of Finland

Sebastian Buhai, SOFI at Stockholm University

Sergei Guriev, Sciences Po, Paris

Gerard Roland, UC Berkeley

Daniel Ershov, University College London School of Management

Denis Ivanov, Corvinus University of Budapest

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, Peterson Institute For International Economics

Alexander Rodnyansky, University of Cambridge

Aleksandr Kljucnikov, European Centre for Business Research, Pan-European University, Czechia

Rohan Dutta, McGill University

Nataliia Frantova

Rok Spruk, University of Ljubljana

Bohdan Slavko, JPMorgan Chase & Co

Oleksandr Shepotylo, Aston University

Andrew Kosenko, Marist College

Bart Lipman, Boston University

Yang Xie, University of California, Riverside

James S. Henry, Global Justice Fellow and Lecturer, Yale University

Jan Fidrmuc, Université de Lille

Michal Zator, University of Notre Dame

Nina Baranchuk, University of Texas at Dallas

Jonathan Schulz, George Mason University

Jakub Steiner, Cerge-Ei and Zurich U

Sergey V. Popov, Cardiff University

Heski Bar-Isaac, University of Toronto

Evan Sadler, Columbia University

Christoph Kronenberg, University Duisburg-Essen

Bart Edes, Professor of Practice, McGill University

Lucan Way, University of Toronto

Jerg Gutmann, University of Hamburg

Andy Semotiuk, President - Centre for Eastern European Democracy

Hanna Vakhitova, Kyiv School of Economics / Syddansk Universitet

Pedro Romero-Aleman, Universidad San Francisco de Quito

Michał Białek, University of Wrocław

James S. Henry, Global Justice Fellow and Lecturer, Yale University

Nik Gabrovšek

Rudi Bachmann, University of Notre Dame

Alexander Karaivanov, Simon Fraser University

Aniol Llorente-Saguer, Queen Mary University of London

Hanna Onyshchenko, PhD candidate, University of Michigan

Olivier Coibion, University of Texas at Austin

Tomasz Mickiewicz, Aston University, Birmingham, UK

Andriy Tsapin, National bank of Ukraine

Daniel Heyen, RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau

Andrey Fradkin, Boston University

Charles Wyplosz, The Graduate Institute, Geneva

Antonio Mele, London School of Economics

Tymofiy Mylovanov, Kyiv School of Economics

Andrii Parkhomenko, University of Southern California

George Loginov, Augustana University

Chris Doucouliagos, Deakin University

Vlad Mykhnenko, Sustainable Urban Development Programme, University of Oxford, UK

Kjeld Schmidt, Copenhagen Business School

Eric Chaney, Institut Montaigne

Ilya Shpitser, Johns Hopkins University

Taras Wolczuk, London School of Economics

Harry de Gorter, Cornell University

Clemens Buchen, WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management, Vallendar, Germany

Piotr Arak, Polish Economic Institute

Greg Wright, UC Merced

Mitja Steinbacher, Faculty of law and business studies, Catholic Institute

Karl T. Muth, Booth School of Business, The University of Chicago

Pedro Bento, Texas A&M University

Danilo Guaitoli, New York University

Rick Della

Alex Eble, Columbia University

Michael Tedesco, Ohio University

Victoria Malko, History Department, California State University, Fresno

Carlos Gomez-Lopez, HSBC

James S. Henry, Managing Director, Sag Harbor Group

Chris Doucouliagos, Deakin University

Reuben Kline, Stony Brook University

Daron Acemoglu, MIT

Martin Kahanec, Central European University, CELSI and EUBA

Vadim Marmer, University of British Columbia

James S. Henry, Managing Director, Sag Harbor Group

Germà Bel, Universitat de Barcelona

Marcel Smolka, University of Flensburg

Anton Sukach

Christopher A. Hartwell, Zurich University of Applied Science

Adrien Couturier, LSE

Vladimir Novak, National Bank of Slovakia

Yuki Takahashi, European University Institute

Philippe Gabriel, Avignon Université et Laboratoire interdisciplinaire de recherche en didactique éducation et formation

Pauric Brophy, GDSI Limited, Galway, Ireland

Mark V. Pauly, University of Pennsylvania

Garance Genicot, Georgetown university

Vitaly Radsky, UNC Chapel Hill

Rune Jansen Hagen, University of Bergen

Olena Ivus, Queen's University

Lars Handrich, DIW Econ, Berlin/Germany

Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Paris School of Economics

Laszlo Halpern, Institute of Economics, Budapest

Nicolas Gavoille, Stockholm School of Economics in Riga

Lyubov Zhyznomirska, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Saint Mary's University (Canada)

Alex Krumer, Molde University College

Adrian Ivakhiv, University of Vermont

Michael Spagat, Royal Holloway University of London

Cathy Schneider, American University School of International Service

Matthew Pauly, Michigan State University

Florin Bilbiie, University of Cambridge

Irwin Collier, Freie Universität Berlin (ret.)

Andrzej Skrzypacz, Stanford

Timur Kuran, Duke University

Athena Small, University of Virginia

Lena Edlund, Columbia University

Serhii Abramenko, EIEF

Mauricio Drelichman, University of British Columbia

Raymond Riezman, Aarhus University

Igor Masten, University of Ljubljana, School of Economics and Business

Joseph Steinberg, University of Toronto

Hans-Joachim Voth, University of Zurich

Edgar Morgenroth, Dublin City University

Vitaliy Ryabinin, Imperial College London

Anna Nagurney, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Serhiy Stepanchuk, University of Southampton

Piotr Zoch, University of Warsaw and FAME | GRAPE

Colin Rowat, University of Birmingham

Jim Leitzel, University of Chicago

Yevgenii Tymovskyi, Student

William Szuch, UkeTube - Ukrainian Video

Ole Agersnap, Princeton University

Clara E. Dismuke-Greer, Health Economics Resource Center, VA Palo Alto Health Care System

Rick Harbaugh, Indiana University

Margarete Biallas

David Jaeger, University of St Andrews

Germán Gieczewski, Princeton University

Jana Kunicova

Lee Ohanian, UCLA

Andy Zapechelnyuk, University of Edinburgh

Mark E. Schaffer, Heriot-Watt University

Jacopo Mazza, Utrecht University School of Economics

Silvester van Koten, University of Jan Evangelista in Ústí nad Labem (UJEP)

Tetiana Albrecht, Student of MA in Security and Diplomacy, Tel Aviv University

Artem Korzhenevych, TU Dresden, Germany

Paul Klein, Stockholm University

Philip Ushchev, Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Julia Korosteleva, Professor in Business Economics

Giovanni Caggiano, University of Padua

Sergey Alexeev, The University of Sydney

Pawel Bukowski, University College London

Fabian Lange, McGill University

Paul De Grauwe, London School of Economics

Lorenz Kueng, University of Lugano

Andrei Belyi, University of Eastern Finland

Louis Furmanski, University of Central Okalhoma

Maxim Mironov, IE Business school

Benjamin Hilgenstock, KSE Institute

Elina Ribakova

Elodie Douarin, UCL SSEES

Gabriel Lee, University of Regensburg, Germany

Iryna Stewen, University of Mainz and University of Zurich

David Lambert

Ewa Karwowski, King's College London

Roman Sheremeta, American University Kyiv

Paul Terdal, Portland-Lviv Sister City Association

Dmytro Hryshko, University of Alberta

Anders Aslund, Stockholm Free World Forum

Tomislav Ladika, Associate Professor of Finance

Iryna Franko

Volodymyr Bilotkach, Purdue University

Daniel Philpott, University of Notre Dame

Ian Gaunt, International Arbitrator

Olha Krupa, Seattle University

Olga Slivko, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University

Xavier Jaravel, London School of Economics

Franco Bruni, Bocconi University and ISPI

Paul Knight

Roberton Williams, University of Maryland

Gerhard Riener, University of Southampton

Victoria Hui, University of Notre Dame

Olha Markova

Vita Faychuk, Gustavus Adolphus College

Tetyana Shlikhar, University of Notre Dame

Richard Green, University of Southern California

Mykola Riabchuk, Research Fellow, NIAS

Michael Koziupa, Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, Inc., - New Jersey Co-ordinating Council

Douglas Almond, SIPA and Economics

Michal Myck, Centre for Economic Analysis, CenEA

Kevin Costa, Massachusetts Democratic State Committee

Myroslav Marynovych, Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv, Ukraine

Györgyike Margit Trautmanné Zsigri,

Laada Bilaniuk, University of Washington

Bohdan Kordan, University of Saskatchewan

Victor Rodwin, New York University

Mikhail Galashin, UCLA

David Marples, University of Alberta

Michael Alexeev, Indiana University - Bloomington, IN

Zenon Radewych

John Weiss, Cornell University

Ezekiel Emanuel, Iniversity of Pennsylvania

Ben Fitzhugh, University of Wasington

Peter Zalmayev, Eurasia Democracy Initiative, director

Attila Ratfai, Central European University

Myron Spolsky, Plast Conference

Miklós Vörös

Lukasz Rachel, UCL

Lada Roslycky, Black Trident Consulting Group

Peter Terem, Matej Bel University in Banska Bystrica

Lars Svensson, Stockholm School of Economics

Pavel Baev, Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO)

Walter Gregory Kuplowsky, partner - Mitchell Bardyn & Zalucky

Mai’a K Davis Cross, Northeastern University

Mitja Steinbacher, Faculty of Law and Business Studies, Ljubljana

Olivier Simard-Casanova, Economist and data scientist, Aléryon Science

Igor Shevchenko

Ambassador (retired) Allan Mustard, Retired Soviet/Russia specialist, agricultural economist

Laurence Kotlikoff

Christian Moser, Columbia University

Glenn Gibson, University of Ulster

Nataliya Zadorozhna

Talia Zajac, University of Manchester

Danylo Sudyn, Ukrainian Catholic University

Tanya Richardson, Wilfrid Laurier University

Andreas Önnerfors, Linnaeus University, Sweden

Michael J. Orlando, University of Colorado Denver

Dóra Győrffy, Corvinus University of Budapest

Vidvuds Zigismunds Beldavs, Riga Photonics Centre

Claudio Morana, University of Milano-Bicocca

Wlodzimierz Dymarski, PhD, Poznan University of Economics (retired)

Andrey Shulik

Jukka Mäkinen, Estonian Business School

Iryna Dudnyk, British Columbia Institute of Technology

Dasha Safonova

Teng Biao, University of Chicago

Soumya Datta, South Asian University

David Schindler, Tilburg University

Stephenson Strobel, Cornell University

Heiko Pääbo, University of Tartu

Francis Fukuyama, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford

Timothy Frye, Columbia University

Gerald Friedman, Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Craig Kennedy

Michael Grinfeld, University of Strathclyde

Austin Starkweather, University of South Carolina

Andriy Danylenko, Pace University

Sergey Ivanov

Andrei Kozyrev

Clément Mangin, Université du Québec à Montréal

Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University

Larry Epstein, McGill University

Susanne Wengle, University of Notre Dame

Michele Boldrin, Washington University

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