Adrian Karatnycky, Managing Partner
Adrian Karatnycky is the founder and Managing Partner of the Myrmidon Group LLC. For over a decade he was the President and CEO of Freedom House, a major pro-democracy and economic reform non-governmental organization. In the 1980s, he played a leading role in offering assistance to and building support for Poland's Solidarity movement. In 1989, he began working in Ukraine with reformist forces and over the years he has developed an extensive relationship with Ukraine policymakers, opinion leaders, business leaders, and entrepreneurs. Mr. Karatnycky served as co-director of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on the US and the United Nations (2003-4), as co-director of the first World Forum on Democracy (2000), and was a member of the United Nations Blue Ribbon Commission on Ukraine (2005). Educated at Columbia University, Mr. Karatnycky, has co-authored and edited over twenty books focused on the post-Communist space and global trends in reform. A respected expert on Ukraine and Eastern Europe, he writes regularly for Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal.
In recent years, Mr. Karatnycky has advised a number of investment banks, funds, and companies on politics and economic policy in Ukraine. In addition to his role at Myrmidon, Mr. Karatnycky co-founded and volunteers his time with the non-profit Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter and conducts research at the Atlantic Council of US, where he is a Senior Scholar.
Berel Rodal, Senior Advisor
Berel Rodal has provided executive leadership and strategic, planning, and management advice to governments, and since 1990, to companies. His professional experience as a senior official in the Government of Canada included policy, planning, and executive responsibilities in the foreign affairs, international trade, defense, security and intelligence, economic and social domains, and in managing across jurisdictions; his career involved him in many of the central challenges facing government during his twenty-two years of public service. He served in the Department of External Affairs and in the Cabinet/Privy Council Office in the Government of Canada; as Secretary of the Steering Committee on national unity in the Cabinet Office during the period of the (first) Quebec referendum; as Director-General of the Policy Secretariat in the Department of National Defence; and as a member of Canada’s negotiating team in the Canada-US Free-Trade negotiations.
He has lectured in Canada, the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Japan on governance and the state, federalism and intergovernmental relations, nationalism and political identity, international relations, ‘information-age’ issues, international trade, and strategic policy/international security affairs. He was born in Montreal and was educated at McGill University and Balliol College, Oxford.
George Sarcevich, Senior Advisor
Mr. Sarcevich brings more than twenty years of international investment banking, high technology entrepreneurial, and government advisory experience to the team. At Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, and HSBC, he helped issuers across multifarious industries raise more than $33 billion in the international capital markets. He is a founding partner and former CFO of IX2 Networks, a leading provider of carrier-neutral co-location services in Los Angeles, California. In Southeast Europe since 2002, he completed World Bank, EBRD, UNDP, and US Treasury supported public and private sector financial assignments in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Serbia. He was involved in restructuring Serbia’s London Club debt and initiated and led the process for the initial credit ratings for the republics of Serbia and Montenegro. He was a founding partner of Bastion Group, a boutique investment bank focused on southeastern Europe sold to KBC Securities in 2007. He is a graduate of Princeton University.
Myroslava Luzina, Associate
Myroslava Luzina is the Myrmidon Group’s liaison in Ukraine. She holds an MA in philology and an undergraduate degree in law from the Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University, and an MBA from the Kyiv Mohyla Business School.
Her job experience includes positions of a university teacher and of a parliamentary staff member for a leading Ukrainian legislator and former foreign minister. She has also done a prestigious one-year internship at the German Bundestag and has served as the liaison in the organization of major North American business conferences focused on Ukraine. She is fluent in English, German, Ukrainian, and Russian.