Speakers:

Dmytro Kuleba is a Ukrainian politician and diplomat who served as Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine from March 2020 to September 2024 and led the country’s diplomacy in the period immediately after the Russian invasion. He now holds academic posts at the Harvard Kennedy School and Sciences Po and is the author of both War and New Horizons (which featured essays by Ban Ki-moon, Condoleezza Rice and Boris Johnson) and Words of Defiance.

Bjorn Berge is the Deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe where he is responsible for the Council’s work advancing democracy, human rights and the rule of law and is the co-author of Words of Defiance. Before joining the Council of Europe, he served as international adviser to the Prime Minister of Norway and served as a speechwriter to three Norwegian Foreign Ministers.

Philippe Sands KC is an international lawyer and the author of numerous prize-winning books including East West Street, the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2016, and Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules. He is Professor of Public Understanding of Law at University College London and is on the board of the Hay Festival of Arts and Literature. His most recent book, 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia, was published in 2025.

Dr Olesya Khromeychuk is a historian and writer who is currently the Director of the Ukrainian Institute London. She is an expert in the history of East-Central Europe and has taught at the University of Cambridge, University College London, the University of East Anglia and King’s College London. She is the author of The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister and ‘Undetermined’ Ukrainians: Post-War Narratives of the Waffen SS Galicia Division.