About

Ivan Nagornyak is a Kyiv-based public policy expert specialising in Ukraine's European integration. He is a Policy Fellow at the European Policy Institute in Kyiv (EPIK) and an Expert Partner and EU accession expert at CIVITTA and EasyBusiness. In 2025 and 2026 he served as a pro bono adviser to Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration. His work focuses on EU enlargement policy and methodology, Ukraine's accession negotiations, staged and sectoral integration into the Single Market, and the institutional capacity that membership requires of government, parliament and civil society.

Between 2020 and 2024 he served in the Ukrainian government, first as Adviser to the Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration and then as Deputy Director General of the Government Office for Coordination of European and Euro-Atlantic Integration at the Secretariat of the Cabinet of Ministers. In that capacity he coordinated the comprehensive review of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, led the preparation of Ukraine's application for EU membership and the response to the European Commission's questionnaire in 2022, and oversaw the implementation of the seven reform steps required to open accession negotiations, managing a team of more than forty.

With EasyBusiness and the Centre for Economic Recovery he co-organised Ukraine's first civil-society EuroSummit in 2024 and supported launching of the EuroHub initiative, a platform for cooperation between NGOs and government in preparing for the negotiations. He also contributed to the Enlargement Hub project of the CEU Democracy Institute on the governance of EU enlargement. Earlier he worked as a specialist on the EU-funded Association4U project in support of the Government Office.

He holds a PhD (Candidate of Political Sciences) from the Institute of International Relations of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, where his dissertation examined the EU's Eastern Partnership, a master's degree in International Relations from Vasyl Stefanyk Precarpathian National University and a bachelor's degree in Law from Lviv State University of Internal Affairs. He studied at the University of Warsaw on a scholarship of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and completed executive training at LSE IDEAS.

His analysis has appeared in Foreign Policy, The Kyiv Independent, European Pravda, ZN.ua, NV, VoxUkraine, New Eastern Europe, Visegrad Insight and The Loop (ECPR), and he comments regularly for Ukrainian and international media.