The overarching question imparting urgency to this exploration is: Can U.S.-Russian contention in cyberspace cause the two nuclear superpowers to stumble into war? In considering this question we were constantly reminded of recent comments by a prominent U.S. arms control expert: At least as dangerous as the risk of an actual cyberattack, he observed, is cyber operations’ “blurring of the line between peace and war.” Or, as Nye wrote, “in the cyber realm, the difference between a weapon and a non-weapon may come down to a single line of code, or simply the intent of a computer program’s user.”
Natalie Jaresko
Natalie A. Jaresko is Managing Director in EY-Parthenon’s Turnaround and Restructuring Strategy practice focused on the Government and Public Sector. At EY, she will lead EY-Parthenon’s sovereign restructuring efforts and large-scale public-sector turnarounds. She has over 30 years of transformational leadership experience in the private, public, and non-governmental sectors.
Natalie served as Minister of Finance of Ukraine (2014-16) at one of the most difficult times in Ukraine’s history, rocked by a deep recession, Russia's initial occupation and war. She led the successful negotiation and implementation of the largest IMF program in history, including a complex sovereign debt restructuring, reduction of budget deficits, introduction of budgetary transparency, improved corporate governance at state owned banks, and reduction of monopolistic practices.
Natalie served five years (2017-2022) as the Executive Director of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico. She led the sustainable exit from the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, while restoring the Island’s fiscal health. Notwithstanding environmental and political instability, she focused limited budgetary resources on improving critical public services, while strengthening budgetary practices, financial reporting, and transparency.
Earlier she spent two decades in private equity, as co-founder/CEO of Horizon Capital, a fund manager with over $600 million under management, and as President/CEO of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund.
She serves as Chairperson of Aspen Institute Kyiv and Commissioner of the CSIS Ukraine Economic Construction Commission, as well as supporting several other philanthropic organizations.
She is a graduate of Harvard Kennedy School of Government (MPP) and DePaul University (BSC).
Matteo Patrone
Matteo Patrone is the Managing Director, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus (EEC) at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) based in Kyiv. He is responsible for the Bank’s operations and policy engagement initiatives in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine with a staff of 180. The EBRD invests in these countries about € 2 billion a year in more than 120 new transactions, representing approximately 20 per cent of the Bank’s annual business activity. The Bank holds a portfolio of over € 8 billion in EEC. Matteo leads the Bank’s response to the Russian aggression to Ukraine whereby the EBRD pledged to invest € 3 billion with over € 1.7 billion deployed and € 200 billion mobilised from partner financial institutions in 2022 only.
Matteo has over 25 years’ experience in industry and finance. He joined the EBRD in 2008, in the Corporate Equity team where he was supervising equity transactions with a focus on Western Balkans, Poland, Turkey and the Russian Federation. In 2012 he was appointed Country Director for Serbia and in 2015 Regional Director for Romania and Bulgaria. In these countries the Bank invested more than € 3bn and conducted a number of substantial policy engagement initiatives under his leadership, including an Investment Climate and Governance Initiative in Serbia, and fostering the development of local capital markets and reforming the water sector in Romania and Bulgaria.
He is the Chair of the Supervisory Board of the Ukrainian Business Ombudsman Institution and a Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine. He also serves in the Board of the Ukrainian Corporate Governance Academy.
Prior to working at the EBRD, Matteo was Managing Director at Finint & Partners, the private equity arm of Finanziaria Internazionale, an Italian merchant bank, where he spent 10 years investing in a broad range of sectors.
Before that he was Senior Manager at Accenture Strategic Services in Milan, Italy and held various positions in the Finmeccanica and ENI groups in the UK and Italy. Matteo was born in Genoa, Italy, and lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
He holds an MBA from INSEAD and an MS degree cum laude in Mechanical Engineering from Genoa University. He is married and has a son.
Vladyslav Rashkovan
Vladyslav Rashkovan is an Alternative Executive Director at the IMF, representing Ukraine and 14 other states on the Executive Board. Prior to joining the IMF, he served as Deputy Governor and a Member of the Board of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). Before joining the NBU in 2014, Mr. Rashkovan spent eight years working with the UniCredit Group, holding the position of CFO and Deputy CEO of UniCredit Bank Ukraine. In 2000, he served as a strategic consultant in the M&A field. He has been widely engaged in non-profit activities, having co-chaired the Banking and Financial Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine in 2010-2013, and having set on the Board of the Kyiv School of Economics in 2012-2014. He graduated from the Banking Department of the Odessa State Economic University in 2000 and later was a researcher at the University of Genova (Italy) and the Institute of the World Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Daniel F. Runde
Daniel F. Runde is a senior vice president, director of the Project on Prosperity and Development (PPD), and holds the William A. Schreyer Chair in Global Analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a leading global think tank. Mr. Runde also served as the acting director for the CSIS Americas Program from 2020-2022. His work is oriented around U.S. leadership in building a more democratic and prosperous world. Among his many other contributions, Mr. Runde was as an architect of the BUILD Act, contributed to the reauthorization of the U.S. EXIM Bank in 2018, and was an architect of Prosper Africa, a U.S. government initiative to deepen the United States' commercial and development engagement in Africa. He has been a leading voice on the role and future of the World Bank Group and U.S. leadership in the multilateral system.
Prior to CSIS, Mr. Runde held leadership roles at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank Group. Earlier in his career, Mr. Runde worked in commercial banking at Citibank in Argentina and in investment banking at Alex. Brown & Sons. Mr. Runde was granted the Officer’s Cross in the Order of Isabel la Católica, a Spanish civil order. Currently, he serves on the board of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), Spirit of America, and the Ashesi University Foundation. Mr. Runde is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bretton Woods Committee. He is also a columnist for The Hill and hosts a CSIS podcast series, Building the Future: Freedom, Prosperity, & Foreign Policy with Dan Runde.
Mr. Runde is also the author of the book The American Imperative: Reclaiming Global Leadership through Soft Power (Bombardier Books, 2022). He previously chaired two U.S. government advisory committees: the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid at USAID and the Sub-Saharan Africa Advisory Committee at the U.S. EXIM Bank. Fluent in Spanish, he graduated cum laude from Dartmouth College and holds a master’s in public policy from Harvard University.