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.
In 2023, she published a pioneering research paper on Russia’s ethnic minority casualties of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. On September 18, 2024, Maria Vyushkova testified in the US Helsinki Commission Congressional hearing on Russia’s imperial identity.