Nolan Peterson is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He is an independent defense consultant, award-winning journalist, war correspondent, and author who has lived in Ukraine since 2014.

As an international correspondent, Peterson has covered conflicts around the world. Apart from his work in Ukraine, he has been embedded with US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and with the Kurdish Peshmerga during the battle for Mosul in Iraq. He deployed on the USS George H.W. Bush off the coast of Syria to report on the coalition air war against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Peterson also retraced the path of Tibetan refugees on a solo hike across the Himalayas from Nepal to China and spent several months documenting the stories of Tibetan freedom fighters on assignment in India and Nepal.

Peterson is a former US Air Force special operations pilot and a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He graduated from the US Air Force Academy in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and a minor in French. As a US Air Force Gerhart fellow, he earned a master’s degree in French from Middlebury College after two years of study at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. After leaving the US Air Force in 2011, Peterson completed a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where he was a McCormick Foundation fellow.

Peterson’s work has been published by numerous news outlets. He has written for outlets including the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, BBC, Newsweek, the Heritage Foundation, and Coffee or Die Magazine. He is the author of Why Soldiers Miss War: The Journey Home and several fiction collections.