Samuel Charap is a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, based in RAND’s Washington, DC office. His research interests include the political economy and foreign policies of Russia and the former Soviet states; European and Eurasian regional security; and US-Russia deterrence, strategic stability and arms control.
From November 2012 until April 2017, Dr. Charap was the Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Prior to joining the IISS, he was a CFR International Affairs Fellow at the U.S. Department of State, where he served as Senior Advisor to the Undersecretary for Arms Control and International Security and on the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff, covering Russia and Eurasia. From 2009-2011, Dr. Charap was Director for Russia and Eurasia at the Center for American Progress, a Washington DC-based think tank.
Dr. Charap’s book on the Ukraine crisis, Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (co-authored with Timothy J. Colton), was published in January 2017. His articles have appeared in the Washington Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Survival, Current History, Financial Times, New York Times, and several other journals and newspapers. He holds a doctorate in political science and a masters in Russian and East European studies from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He received his B.A. from Amherst College. He was a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Moscow Center and the International Center for Policy Studies (Kyiv), and a Fulbright Scholar at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. Dr. Charap is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.