Profile

Secretary General Energy Charter Secretariat

Ambassador Urban Rusnák became Secretary General of the Energy Charter Secretariat in January 2012. Amb. Rusnák is Slovak by nationality. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas in 1990 with an M.Sc. and received his Ph.D. from the Ankara University Institute of Social Sciences in 1998. Amb. Rusnák also holds an Honoris Causa doctorate from the Kiev Slavonic University since 2009.

Prior to his appointment with the Energy Charter Secretariat, Amb. Rusnák worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Slovak Republic and was the Leader of the Project for Slovakia's External Energy Security. Before that, he was Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador of the Slovak Republic to Ukraine (2005-2009), Head of the MFA Political Analysis Division (2003-2005), Deputy Head of Mission at the Embassy of the Slovak Republic in Turkey (1994-1998) and MFA Desk Officer for South Caucasus, Central Asia, CIS and South East Europe. He also held the position of Executive Director of the International Visegrad Fund in Bratislava (2000-2003) and Director of the Slovak Institute for International Studies (1999-2000).

Additionally, Amb. Rusnák was a Lecturer at the Kiev Slavonic University (2005-2009) and at the International Relations Faculty of the Economic University in Bratislava (2000-2003). He was also Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Slovak Institute for International Studies (2000-2003), Editor in Chief for the MFA International Issues Journal (1998-1999) and is the author of several articles on international relations, energy security, development assistance and Caspian oil and gas issues.

Besides his mother tongue, Amb. Rusnák speaks English, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, French and Hungarian.