Brussels Forum Session: Part II: The World’s Largest Construction Project—Laying the Foundation at the London Donor Conference

Odile Renaud-Basso was elected the seventh president of EBRD on 2 November 2020 by the EBRD’s Board of Governors.She is the first-ever female head of a multilateral development bank. 

Prior to joining the EBRD, as director general at the French treasury, Renaud-Basso oversaw the development of France’s economic policies, taking the lead on European and international financial affairs, trade policies, financial regulation, and debt management. In this capacity she also served as vice president of the European Economic and Financial Committee, deputy to the G7/G20 groups, and French governor or alternate governor of the World Bank, the EBRD, and the African Development Bank. She was also chair of the Paris Club. 

Renaud-Basso is a graduate of the Paris Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po) and an alumna of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Brussels Forum Session: US Elections in 2024: Politics, Support for Ukraine, and Challenges to Democracy

Ines Pohl has been Deutsche Welle (DW)'s Washington bureau chief since July 2020. She was previously DW's editor in chief from 2017 to 2020. During her three-year tenure, she focused on expanding DW's social media presence and exclusive journalistic offerings in all 32 broadcast languages. As a journalist, she is particularly interested in issues of democratic legitimacy and social transitions. She is passionate about human rights and the role of democratic structures in developing countries. She makes a strong case for using social networks to connect journalists and users.  

Pohl spent 2005 at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow, exploring immigration, religion, and leadership. She is a member of the board of trustees of Reporters Without Borders and the advisory board of Youth Against AIDS. From 2009 to 2015, Pohl was editor in chief of the daily newspaper taz. During this time, she launched a weekend edition and revised www.taz.de, now one of the most widely used German news sites.

Brussels Forum Session: Building for the Future: A Green Marshall Plan for Ukraine   

Olena Pavlenko is president and co-founder of the Ukrainian think-tank DiXi Group and the Ukrainian Energy website. She leads a team of 17 people and has managed projects supported by USAID, the EU, OECD, the World Bank, and others. Pavlenko worked as a speechwriter for President Victor Yushchenko from 2005 to2008.  

Pavlenko has worked in the energy sector for more than 20 years, covering such issues as energy security, energy transparency, integration of the EU and Ukrainian energy markets, and open data in the energy sector. She also served as a non-staff advisor to the minister of energy and the minister of foreign affairs. 

Pavlenko is a deputy head of Ukraine’s EITI Multi-Stakeholder Group and was a global council chair of the PWYP global coalition from 2020 to 2022 and chair of the EU-UA Civil Society Platform in 2021-2022. She is an author of the brochure "Playing a Long Game: How Civil Society Can Lead Changes" about Ukraine's experience in EITI implementation for civil society organizations in other countries. 

After the full-scale invasion of Russia started, Pavlenko and her team joined the working group under the Ministry of Energy to help energy companies find replacements for damaged equipment. She and her team have also helped local communities to find generators and other equipment to remain resilient during power outages. She continues her advocacy work in support of the energy sector of Ukraine.  

Brussels Forum Session: Turkey: What Now? What Next?  

Soli Özel is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a senior lecturer at Istanbul Kadir Has University.  

Özel was a “Europe’s Futures” fellow at Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in 2021–22. During the pandemic, he taught course at the American University in Central Asia and the Menton campus of Sciences-Po. He also hosted webinar series for Institut Montaigne on the American elections and on the changing geopolitics of the Middle East. He was a Bernstein Fellow at the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School and a visiting lecturer in Yale’s political science department.  

Özel has been a columnist at Nokta magazine and GazetePazar, Yeni Binyıl, Habertürk, and Sabah newspapers. Currently he writes for Deutsche Welle-Turkish and Politikyol, and provides a weekly commentary on world affairs for Gazete Duvar TV. He has held fellowships at Oxford University the EU Institute of Strategic Studies, the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, Institut Montaigne in Paris, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.  

Özel holds an MA in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS-1983).

Brussels Forum Session: US Elections in 2024: Politics, Support for Ukraine, and Challenges to Democracy

Frank Luntz is a three-time New York Times best-selling author, a sought-after political, business, and media consultant, a revered professor at almost a dozen universities across the globe, and a regular commentator on just about every media outlet people watch today. The New York Post called him “the world’s most influential person in politics”. 

Luntz served for more than a decade as the “Focus Group Czar” for Fox News, and for five years as a corporate and business communications news analyst for CBS News before moving to ABC News. In a career spanning almost four decades, Luntz has written, supervised, and conducted more than 2,500 surveys, focus groups, ad tests, and dial sessions for more than 50 Fortune 500 companies and CEOs in more than two dozen countries on six continents.  

Luntz’s current work is devoted to policy and education. He is dedicating his time and energy to developing the “words that work” to bridge the deep political divide in the United States. 

Brussels Forum Sessions: 

• Night Owl: The Future of Russia—Potential Scenarios and Their Implications for International Security
• Turkey: What Now? What Next?

Sergey Lagodinsky is a German lawyer, author, and member of the European Parliament (Greens/EFA). He is chair of the European Parliament’s Delegation to the EU-Türkiye Joint Parliamentary Committee and the Greens/EFA spokesperson for EU-Türkiye and EU-Russia relations. He is also first vice-chair of the Committee on Legal Affairs and works for the Committee on Foreign Affairs as well as the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs. 

   

Dr. Lagodinsky studied law in Göttingen and public administration at Harvard University. From 2003 to 2008, he served as program director and later as consultant to the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee. He then worked as a lawyer at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP. From 2012 until joining the European Parliament in 2019, he was director of the department Europe/North America of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Lagodinsky is a regular guest and commentator in numerous media outlets. 

Brussels Forum Session: Night Owl: The Future of Russia- Potential Scenarios and Their Implications for  International Security

Julia Ioffe is a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck News. Previously, Ioffe was a US politics, national security, and foreign policy reporter for The Atlantic. Prior to 2017, she was a contributing writer at Politico magazine, where she covered the 2016 election, a contributor at Huffington Post’s Highline, and a columnist at Foreign Policy. She was a senior editor at The New Republic from 2012 to 2014, and a Moscow-based correspondent for Foreign Policy and the New Yorker. Ioffe has twice been a finalist for the Livingston Award : for a 2013 profile of Senator Rand Paul and a 2011 piece on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. In 2009, she received a Fulbright scholarship to live and work in Russia. 

Brussels Forum Session: Opening Dinner: A Shared Cause, A Meal Shared—Voices from the Region

John Hewko is the general secretary and chief executive officer of Rotary International and The Rotary Foundation. 

Hewko previously served as vice president for operations and compact development for the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a US government agency established in 2004 to deliver foreign assistance to the world’s poorest countries. At MCC, he completed the negotiation of assistance agreements totaling $6.3 billion to 18 countries for infrastructure, agriculture, water and sanitation, health, and education projects. 

Prior to joining MCC, Hewko was an international partner with the law firm Baker McKenzie, specializing in international corporate transactions in emerging markets. He helped establish the firm’s Moscow office and was the managing partner of its offices in Kyiv and Prague. 

While working in Ukraine in the early 1990s, Hewko assisted the working group that prepared the initial draft of the new Ukrainian post-Soviet constitution and was a charter member of the first Rotary club in Kyiv. 

Hewko has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University, and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has published papers and articles in leading US and international publications and has spoken extensively on political and business issues dealing with the former Soviet Union, Central Europe, Africa, and Latin America. He is also a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. 

Hewko holds a law degree from Harvard University, a master’s in modern history from Oxford University (where he studied as a Marshall Scholar), and a bachelor’s in government and Soviet studies from Hamilton College in New York.