Experts of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine took part in a webinar on critical infrastructure protection

As part of the cooperation between the NSDC Staff and the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation (CRDF Global Ukraine) (with the support of the U.S. Department of State), an interactive webinar “Needs and challenges in developing critical infrastructure protection in Ukraine”.

The webinar hosted about 170 representatives of Ukrainian and foreign government agencies, the private sector, non-governmental institutions, donor organizations, and international partners.

The Ukrainian side presented the vision of the chosen model of developing a system of critical infrastructure protection (CIP) in Ukraine, taking into account the adoption by the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine of the Law of Ukraine “On Critical Infrastructure”. The current state and prospects of the full-fledged launch of this system in Ukraine were discussed.

In addition, the vision of the concept of developing a system for training CIP specialists, developing new curricula for universities, online courses, developing/adapting risk assessment programs, the need to define and develop registers of critical infrastructure, etc. were presented.

Ukrainian experts also paid attention to the issue of support by international partners for Ukraine’s efforts to develop the CIP system in order to strengthen the state’s national capacity in this area.

Among the experts representing the Ukrainian side were Head of the Service for Critical Infrastructure Security of the NSDC Staff Iryna Tymoshenko, Head of the Department of Critical Infrastructure, Energy Security and Ecological Safety at the National Institute for Strategic Studies Oleksandr Sukhodolya, and Deputy Director of the Cyber Defense Policy at the Administration of the State Service for Special and Information Protection of Ukraine Oleksandr Bakalynsky.

Leading international cybersecurity experts were involved in the interactive webinar including Nauset National Security Group LLC Executive Director Ronald Bears, F24 AG Senior Strategic Project Manager, Dr. Alessandro Lazari. The event was moderated by Tom Callahan, Vice President of Strategy, Innovation, and Evaluation at CRDF Global.

International experts acquainted Ukrainian participants with the leading European and American trends in the field of critical infrastructure protection, internationally recognized best practices, and standards that can be adopted in Ukraine. In addition, they stressed the importance of establishing a public-private partnership mechanism for CPI, and spoke about a number of educational and training courses of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (FEMA, CISA, and FLETC), George Mason University, training on CPI from governmental, academic and non-governmental organizations in the EU, and raised the issue of adapting such experience for use in Ukraine.