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Anne Applebaum is a columnist for The Washington Post and a prize-winning historian with a particular expertise in the history of communist and post communist Europe. She is also a professor of practice at the London School of Economics, where she runs ARENA, a research project on disinformation and 21st-century propaganda, and a Senior Fellow of International Affairs and Agora Fellow in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She is the author of several books, including “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine,” “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe,” and “Gulag: A History,” which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. Applebaum is a former member of The Washington Post’s editorial board, a former deputy editor of the Spectator magazine, and a former Warsaw correspondent of The Economist.
Radosław (Radek) Sikorski is a member of the European Parliament as well as a distinguished statesman with the Office of the President at CSIS. He is also currently a senior fellow at the Center of European Studies at Harvard University. He was formerly Poland’s minister of defense (2005–2007), foreign minister (2007–2014), and speaker of parliament (2014–2015). Born and raised in Bydgoszcz, Poland, Mr. Sikorski led a student strike committee there in 1981 as part of the Solidarity movement. He graduated from Oxford University with a B.A. and an M.A. in politics, philosophy, and economics. He then served as a war reporter in Afghanistan and Angola. In 1988, he was awarded the World Press Photo for spot news. Mr. Sikorski returned to his home country in 1989. From 2001 to 2005, he was a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. As minister of foreign affairs, Mr. Sikorski was the Polish signatory of the Treaty of Lisbon, in 2007. Together with Carl Bildt, he launched the EU Eastern Partnership. He proposed and helped to set up the European Endowment for Democracy. He negotiated and signed the Poland-Russia regional visa-free regime, Poland-U.S. missile defense agreement, and—together with foreign ministers of Germany and France—the accord between the pro-EU opposition and Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2013. In 2012, Foreign Policy named him one of its 100 global thinkers for “telling the truth even when it’s not diplomatic.”