Olesya Vartanyan is a conflict analyst with over 15 years of experience in the South Caucasus, specializing in managing research, advocacy, communications, and donor relations. She most recently served as Senior Analyst at the International Crisis Group, where she led research on security issues in Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, with a specific focus on conflict zones. Olesya has a proven track record in policy development and contributing to confidential peace processes.
Leyla Latypova is a journalist and political analyst focusing on politics and civil society in Russia’s ethnic republics. She is one of the few English-speaking Indigenous professionals whose scholarly and journalistic work is dedicated solely to advancing and protecting the rights of Russia’s non-Slavic Indigenous communities and ethnic minorities.
Latypova has more than a decade of experience in empirical research on politics and protest mobilization in Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Caucasus and the Balkans, as well as strong connections with pro-democracy communities in those regions.
Olga Tokariuk is a Senior Analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, based in London. Her research is focused on state-sponsored information operations and disinformation, particularly in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Olga is also an Academy Associate at Chatham House’s Ukraine Forum and an Associate at Imperial War Museums. She is a former fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where she researched the role of humour as an antidote to disinformation.
Olga Tokariuk’s background is in journalism. Her work and commentary has been featured in TIME, The Washington Post, NPR, BBC, Monocle, EFE, ANSA, and other international and Ukrainian media.
Rauf Mammadov is a senior manager at Fuld & Company, specializing in energy issues. He also serves as a non-resident scholar on energy policy at the Middle East Institute and the Jamestown Foundation. His research focuses on energy security, global energy industry trends, and energy relations between the Middle East, Central Asia, and the South Caucasus, with a particular emphasis on the post-Soviet countries of Eurasia.In addition, Mammadov co-directs Bright Garden Voices, a grassroots initiative fostering constructive dialogue and activities between Armenians and Azerbaijanis.
Maria Vyushkova (Batani Indigenous Foundation, Yarmouth, ME, USA) is a PhD computational scientist, Buryat activist and expert in how Russia’s ethnic minorities are involved in Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Dr. Vyushkova got her PhD degree in Chemistry from the Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion in Novosibrisk, Russia in 2009, and as of 2022, worked as a computational scientist with the University of Notre Dame. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Maria Vyushkova co-founded the Free Buryatia Foundation, the first ethnic anti-war organization of Russia’s Indigenous people, and used her expertise as a computational scientist to analyze the ethnic composition and ethnic inequalities in the Russian-side death toll of the Ukraine war.