Brigadier General Peter B. Zwack (Ret)

Brigadier General Peter B. Zwack {Ret.} is a U.S. Army veteran, having served over 34 years as a Military Intelligence and Foreign Area Officer in diverse command and staff postings such as Afghanistan, the Balkans, South Korea West Germany, and Russia. He served in Moscow as the Senior U.S. Defense Attaché to Russia during the pivotal years of 2012 – 2014 that included the Russian invasion of Ukraine and is one of our nation’s leading experts on Russia.

For over three decades BG Zwack frequently traveled both professionally and personally across Russia’s vast Eurasian landscape from the Atlantic to Pacific, and arid southern regions to the Arctic Circle. He interacts with Russians and international colleagues on multiple levels including defense, security, academia, policy, veterans, and private citizens. His written and spoken insights are based on his over 30-years of analytical and in-country USSR-Russia experiences that began with an extraordinary summer spent in 1989 as a young U.S. Army Captain studying Russian and culture in a provincial Soviet city on the Volga River.

After his military retirement in 2015 he wrote, lectured, advised and taught at The National Defense University, lecturing on a wide range of topics to high school, college, graduate students and governmental and interagency members at a wide range of institutions. These include Boston, Brown, George Washington and Harvard Universities, Universities of Virginia and Denver, National War College, U.S Naval War College, Army War College, NATO, KFOR, West Point, European and Pacific Commands, U.S. Army Europe, numerous Thinktanks (Atlantic Council, Council on Foreign Relations and CSIS) and other domestic and international venues. His articles have appeared in Politico, The Hill, The National Interest, Defense One, New York Daily News, The Washington Times and The Cipher Brief. He has often been cited in the New York Times and Washington Post. Major news networks including ABC Nightline, CNN, CBC, PBS, MSNBC and AlHurra have sought his expertise.

BG Zwack currently is a Global Fellow at The Kennan Institute within the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars which is the premier American center for advanced research on Russia and Eurasian. From this perch he lectures, publishes, and speaks while also participating in non-governmental “Track II” exchanges between retired American and Russian governmental, academic and cultural professionals. He is also a Fellow at the Pell Center for International Relations. He is an international relations graduate from the University of Denver, and received a Masters degree in National Security at both the Defense Intelligence College and Naval War College. BG Zwack speaks Russian, German, Italian, and some French.