Alex Dimitrief is a Partner at Zeughauser Group. He was the President & CEO of General Electric’s Global Growth Organization in 2018 and previously served as GE’s General Counsel. Dimitrief also teaches “The Corporation as a Citizen” at Harvard Law School and Corporations at New York Law School. Below, he shares an adaptation of his journal from his time volunteering in Ukraine. 

I first visited Ukraine in October 2018, when I was President & CEO of GE’s Global Growth Organization, to speak at the Kyiv International Economic Forum. Afterwards, the GE-Ukraine team showed me around their capital city. Our first stop was to the then-new memorial for the Ukrainians who were gunned down during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. As a leader of the movement put it, the people of Ukraine “chose democracy over dictatorship. We chose freedom of speech and freedom of elections.” In response, Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula.