Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Opens New Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin

BERLIN, GERMANY – The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace announced today the launch of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, its fifth global center.

“As we open the doors of Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, we begin a new chapter in Carnegie’s future while also enhancing our decades-long focus on one of the world’s most consequential regions,“ said Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Alexander Gabuev, the center’s founding director, and our team of scholars will continue providing unmatched strategic insight and analysis, ensuring our new center becomes a vibrant node in our global network and helping decisionmakers grapple with urgent and long-term policy challenges involving Russia, Ukraine, and the wider region.”

To mark the opening of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, the Endowment convened a by-invitation-only session in Berlin on Tuesday, April 25. The event was attended by a cross-section of leading German and international policymakers, scholars, diplomats, and media. “It is exciting that the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center is making Berlin its base. The ideas and analysis produced by Carnegie’s scholars are extremely valuable,” said Ambassador Andreas Michaelis, the State Secretary of the German Federal Foreign Office.

“After Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine, Carnegie scholars have contributed invaluable analysis and insight into the war and the inner workings of Russian policymaking and society,” said Penny Pritzker, the chairman of the Carnegie Endowment Board of Trustees and former U.S. Secretary of Commerce. “I’m honored to help mark this special occasion and to serve an institution committed to bringing forth a more peaceful world.”

The Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center is the successor to the acclaimed Carnegie Moscow Center, which was ordered by the Russian Government to close in early 2022 as part of a ruthless crack-down on Russian civil society and independent media organizations. Over the course of its nearly three decades of operation, the Carnegie Moscow Center played a unique role in shaping international understanding of the entire region. Carnegie Politika, the Berlin Center’s online digital media platform, is one of Russia’s most influential sources of analysis, offering independent, evidence-based analysis that is not available anywhere else.

The Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, which is part of the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, joins a community of centers in Beirut, New Delhi, and East Asia, as well as a center in Brussels that focuses on European foreign policy in Brussels, Berlin, Paris, London and other European capitals. All centers provide world-class, on-the-ground insights to global policy debates on the world’s most pressing challenges.

The center’s inaugural director, Alexander Gabuev, is one of the world’s foremost experts on Russian foreign policy and Sino-Russian relations. Gabuev, who has been a senior fellow at Carnegie since March 2015, is fluent in English, German, Mandarin, and Russian. Under his leadership, the center will be home to an exceptional team of prominent experts, including Alexander Baunov, Andrei Kolesnikov, Alexandra Prokopenko , Tatiana Stanovaya, Maxim Samorukov, Artyom Shraibman, Vita Spivak, Temur Umarov, and Sergey Vakulenko. “The new Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin has an important mission: helping the world tackle the massive challenges unleashed by the Kremlin’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine and understanding the future drivers of developments across the entire region. I am honored to help lead such an important institution at this critical juncture,” said Gabuev.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a nonpartisan global think tank. In a complex, changing, and increasingly contested world, the Carnegie Endowment generates strategic ideas and independent analysis, supports diplomacy, and trains the next generation of international scholar-practitioners to help countries and institutions take on the most difficult global problems and advance peace.