event

Transatlantic Public Opinion on the War in Ukraine

Tue. March 26th, 2024
Washington, DC

As the war in Ukraine has passed its second anniversary, two major elections are on the horizon. In June, the European parliamentary elections will be held across the European Union, while Americans will take to the ballot box in November to elect the next president. Both elections have the potential to affect Western support to Ukraine and thus the course of the war. 

What is the state of public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic in the run-up to these important elections? Are Americans really souring on the war? Are Europeans prepared to take up the slack if the United States leaves the field? What will it take for both European and American leaders to continue support for Ukraine? 

Join the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) for this timely discussion during a critical year for global democracy. Sylvie Kauffmann, editorial director of Le Monde, will moderate a panel discussion with Sophia Besch, a fellow in the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment, and the coauthors of a new paper on Western public opinion on the war in Ukraine, Mark Leonard, director of ECFR, and Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies. Dan Baer, senior vice president for policy research and director of the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment, and Jeremy Shapiro, research director at ECFR, will deliver introductory remarks.  

Political ReformDemocracyEconomySecurityMilitaryForeign PolicyCivil SocietyNorth AmericaUnited StatesCaucasusRussiaEastern EuropeUkraineWestern Europe
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
event speakers

Sylvie Kauffman

Sylvie Kauffman is editorial director, lead writer, and columnist at the French newspaper Le Monde, for whom she writes a weekly column on global affairs. Her opinion pieces on European and international politics have also appeared in the New York Times. Previously, she was the first female editor-in-chief of Le Monde, a position she held during the Wikileaks collaboration with El País, the Guardian, and the New York Times. She has reported from Asia, Eastern Europe, and the United States, where she wrote a prize-winning series of articles about life in the U.S. following the 9/11 attacks.

Sophia Besch

Senior Fellow, Europe Program

Sophia Besch is a senior fellow in the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focuses on European foreign and defense policy.

Ivan Krastev

Ivan Krastev chairs the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and is a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna. He is a founding board member of ECFR, a member of Open Society Foundations’ global advisory board, a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, and the author of the widely acclaimed book After Europe. In 2020, he was awarded the Jean Améry Prize for European essay writing. Previously, he served as executive director of the International Commission on the Balkans and as editor-in-chief of the Bulgarian edition of Foreign Policy.

Mark Leonard

Mark Leonard is cofounder and director of ECFR. He hosts the weekly podcast Mark Leonards’s World in 30 Minutes and writes a column on global affairs for Project Syndicate. Previously, he worked as director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform and as director of the Foreign Policy Centre. He has spent time in Washington, DC as a transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and in Beijing as a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences. In September 2021, he published his latest book The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict.

Dan Baer

Senior Vice President for Policy Research, Director, Europe Program

Dan Baer is senior vice president for policy research and director of the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Under President Obama, he was U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)  and he also served deputy assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.

Jeremy Shapiro

Brookings Institution

Jeremy Shapiro is the research director and U.S. program director of ECFR. His areas of focus include U.S. foreign policy and transatlantic relations. Shapiro was previously a fellow with the Project on International Order and Strategy and the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, where he edited the Foreign Policy program’s blog Order from Chaos. Prior to Brookings, he was a member of the U.S. State Department’s policy planning staff, where he advised the secretary of state on U.S. policy in North Africa and the Levant. He was also the senior adviser to then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs Philip Gordon, providing strategic guidance on a wide variety of U.S.-European foreign policy issues.