Dmitri Trenin
former director of the Carnegie Moscow Center

Dmitri Vitalyevich Trenin (Russian: Дмитрий Витальевич Тренин) is a member of Russia's Foreign and Defence Policy Council. He was the director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, a Russian think tank. A former colonel of Russian military intelligence, Trenin served for 21 years in the Soviet Army and Russian Ground Forces, before joining Carnegie in 1994.
Military career
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.
Carnegie Moscow Center (1994–2022)
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 22 December 2008, Trenin became the first Russian director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. Trenin also chaired Carnegie Moscow's research council and the Foreign and Security Policy Program.
Since its foundation, Carnegie Moscow Center has often been ranked as the leading think tank in Russia in reports by the University of Pennsylvania's Think Tanks and Civil Society Program, the "Global Go To Think Tank Report". The Carnegie Moscow Center, nevertheless, has been closed in February 2022 due to the Russian government's decision, and at the same time the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ended its affiliation with Dmitri Trenin after he endorsed the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Dmitri Trenin” as former director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4462405. VIAF identifies the subject as 69108410. The Library of Congress control number is no97021358. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1972, 1993 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dmitri Trenin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.