Jaroslava Barbieri

Jaroslava Barbieri is an Italo-Ukrainian doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham (UK). Her PhD project analyses how Russia’s activities in the occupied areas of Ukraine since 2014 have laid the groundwork for Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. Parts of the findings have been recently published in an article, 'Raising citizen-soldiers in Donbas: Russia's role in promoting patriotic education programmes in the Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples’ Republics'. She is also a project manager at Zinc Network, an international development and strategic communications business, where she focuses on the post-Soviet region. Previously, she worked as a researcher at the Arena programme based at the SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University, a multi-disciplinary programme dedicated to creating best practices for overcoming disinformation and polarisation. Her research interests include Ukrainian politics, Russian foreign policy, post-Soviet conflict studies, disinformation, the politics of memory in the post-Soviet region and European political thought. Her media commentary has appeared in Sky News, NBC News, ABC News, France 24, The Independent, Euronews, Channel4News, Newsweek, BBC Radio and LBC Radio.