Ian Proud is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute and director of Diplomatic Excellence Ltd.

He was a member of His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service for 24 years until 2023, serving in Thailand, Afghanistan, and Russia, through a posting to the British Embassy in Moscow from 2014 to 2019.

He organized the 2013 G8 Summit in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, which marked Vladimir Putin’s most recent visit to the United Kingdom, and focused on Russia–Ukraine policy for the final 10 years of his career. He authorized around half of all U.K. sanctions against Russia after war broke out in Ukraine in February 2022. 

He is a U.K. expert in crisis management, having been involved in the British government response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, the first Bali bombing in 2002, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, the Arab Spring, and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Among his many roles, he was in charge of crisis response at the British Embassy in Moscow at the time of the Salisbury nerve agent attack of March 2018. 

Upon his retirement, he published a memoir, A Misfit in Moscow: How British Diplomacy Failed in Russia, 2014–2019 (2023). 

He established Diplomatic Excellence in 2025 as a nonprofit to help university students from a working-class background build skills to compete for diplomatic service entry, and to promote foreign language use in diplomacy. He speaks Russian, Thai, and a number of other languages.