Nicolai N. Petro is Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island. He received his PhD in Foreign Affairs from the University of Virginia in 1984. During the collapse of the Soviet Union, he served as special assistant for policy in the US State Department. He is the author or editor of eight books and has written about Russia and Ukraine for many publications, including The American Interest, Asia Times, Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, The National Interest, and The New York Times. In 2013-2014, he was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Ukraine working on his latest book, Blessed Is the Kingdom: The Orthodox Church and the Struggle for the Soul of Modern Russia, which is under contract to Stanford University Press.