Ambassador William B. Taylor is vice president, Europe and Russia, at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Among his many posts, Ambassador Taylor served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009, in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

In 2019, after President Trump ordered Ambassador Marie Yovanovich back to Washington, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked Mr. Taylor to serve as chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv. He subsequently pushed back against Trump’s efforts to make Ukrainian aid conditional on investigating his political rivals, and Ambassador Taylor was a key witness in President Trump’s first impeachment trial.

Ambassador Taylor joined the federal government in 1980 as Director of Emergency Preparedness for the Department of Energy, directed a Defense Department think-tank at Fort McNair, and then spent five years as Special Deputy Defense Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador to NATO. From 1992 until 2002, Ambassador Taylor served with the rank of ambassador, coordinating assistance to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

During the Arab Spring, Ambassador Taylor oversaw U.S. assistance and support to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria. He served in Jerusalem as the U.S. government’s representative to the Mideast Quartet. He also served in Kabul in 2002, and in 2004 Taylor was transferred to Baghdad as Director of the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office. In 2015 he was appointed executive vice-president of the U.S. Institute of Peace.
He earlier served on the staff of Senator Bill Bradley.

Ambassador Taylor is a graduate of West Point and Harvard’s Kennedy School and served with distinction as an infantry platoon leader and combat company commander in the U.S. Army in Vietnam and Germany.