Dale Perry Dartmouth Alumni Runs Emergency Aid to Ukraine

The American entrepreneur with a business in Ukraine who pivoted to lead a grassroots humanitarian effort.

Dale Perry has done as much as any American to try to empower Ukraine, but he never expected to run an emergency aid operation in the face of a Russian invasion. 

At age 60, Perry is no stranger to post-Soviet states and their geopolitical tensions. Raised in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, he studied Russian and engineering at Dartmouth College and traveled to the Soviet Union to spend a summer abroad in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1982. He came home with a strong desire to defend his country from what he saw as "a threatening system, from a patriotic point of view," he says, joining the U.S. Navy and serving on fast-attack submarines through the late 1980s. His Russian and engineering background later helped him land a job as a group manager for the power company AES Corp AES, -1.52%. There, he managed operations and business development in central Asia and Russia, including the biggest power plant in Kazakhstan. 

When Dale Perry started his long journey to the Ukraine border, he had no idea he'd be launching a humanitarian mission. As Russian forces were massing in February, Perry, the American co-owner of a Kyiv-based energy trading company, was about as far as one can travel from Ukraine, vacationing on a remote French Polynesian island. With tensions mounting, he cut the vacation short, headed back through the Seattle area, where he lives on Bainbridge Island, then to Europe, focused largely on ensuring the safety of his Ukraine-based employees. He brought a suit and tie, hoping to attend a gathering scheduled for that Friday, Feb. 25, to celebrate the arrival in Poland of a U.S. liquefied natural gas shipment bound for Ukraine.

For the full article in Market Watch.