Dmitri Vitalyevich Trenin (Russian: Дмитрий Витальевич Тренин) is a member of Russia’s Foreign and Defence Policy Council [ru].^[1] He was the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, a Russian think tank.^[2] A former colonel of Russian military intelligence,^[3] Trenin served for 21 years in the Soviet Army and Russian Ground Forces, before joining Carnegie in 1994.^[2]

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Dmitri Trenin
Дмитрий Тренин
Born	11 September 1955  Moscow (Soviet Union)
Alma mater	Military Institute of the USSR Ministry of Defence Institute for US and Canadian Studies

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Trenin served in the Soviet and Russian armed forces from 1972 to 1993. His service included postings both inside and outside of the Soviet Union, to include a stint as the first non-NATO senior research fellow at the NATO Defense College in Rome.^[4]

Trenin joined the Carnegie Moscow Center (which itself was set up with funding from the Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction) in 1994 soon after its formation in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

On December 22, 2008, Trenin became the first Russian director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.^[5] Trenin also chaired Carnegie Moscow's research council and the Foreign and Security Policy Program.

According to American journalist James Kirchick, following the re-election of Vladimir Putin in 2012 the Carnegie Moscow Center, which Trenin led, started to gradually adopt pro-Putin positions: this caused the resignation of chair of the think tank's Society and Regions Program, Nikolai Petrov ^[ru]; the editor-in-chief of the center's magazine, Maria Lipman; and Russian political scientist Lilia Shevtsova. All of them were critics of Putin.^[6]

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ended its affiliation with Dmitri Trenin in early 2022 after he endorsed Putin's war on Ukraine.^[2]

Trenin is a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London, United Kingdom), the Russian International Affairs Council (Moscow),^[7] and the Russian International Studies Association (Moscow). He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Moscow School of Political Studies.^[8] He is a Senior Network Member at the European Leadership Network (ELN).^[9] Trenin was expelled from the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences in October 2022 "due to his active support of the unjustified and illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine in both speech and writing".^[10]

Trenin criticised people who left Russia after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.^[11] He has commented on future scenarios for Russia.^[12]

Analysing Trenin’s narrative around the 2021–2022 Russo-Ukrainian crisis and Russia–United States relations, Russian political writer Andrey Piontkovsky referred to Trenin as an “elite Kremlin propagandist targeting the Western expert audience” suggesting that the Carnegie Foundation was complicit in Kremlin propaganda for 30 years -- the duration of Trenin's directorship of the Carnegie Moscow Center. ^[13][14]