About the Authors
Timothy Ash is a senior sovereign strategist at Bluebay Asset Management in London. He has worked as a professional economist for 30 years, with 20 years in banking working for institutions such as RBS, Bear Stearns, Nomura and ICBC-Standard Bank, among others. His specialism is emerging Europe economics as related to fixed-income investments, taking a comparative perspective. He has covered Ukraine for his entire professional career. He first visited Kyiv in 1988, and worked for the EU on a development project in Bila Tserkva in 1994–95. Since then he has visited Ukraine regularly, and writes and blogs extensively on the economic challenges facing the country. His articles are regularly published in the media, including by the Financial Times, the Atlantic Council, UBJ and the Kyiv Post, among others. He has advised various governments on Ukraine/Russia policy, and specifically on the impact of sanctions. Tim has a first-class BA (Hons) economics degree from Manchester University, and a master’s in agricultural economics from the same university.
Janet Gunn worked for many years as a research analyst in the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), focusing on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and its successor states. She served in various embassies, including Moscow and Kyiv. In Kyiv she reported on political developments in Ukraine following the Orange Revolution (2005–06). In 2007 to 2008 she worked in the EU Border Assistance Mission to Ukraine and Moldova, based in Odesa. She has participated in many Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) election observer missions in the region, including in Ukraine in 2004 and 2014. In 2014, she was the senior expert in the OSCE National Dialogue Project in Ukraine. She is a trustee of the BEARR Trust, a British charity which supports vulnerable groups in the countries of the former Soviet Union.
John Lough is the managing director of JBKL Advisory Ltd, a government relations and strategic consulting company. He is an associate fellow of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, and co-authored (with Iryna Solonenko) the Ukraine Forum’s inaugural publication, Can Ukraine Achieve a Reform Breakthrough? (2016). He began visiting Ukraine in the early 1990s as a lecturer at the Soviet Studies (later Conflict Studies) Research Centre at Sandhurst and later as a NATO official responsible for public information programmes in Eastern Europe (1997–2001). He continued to work on projects in Ukraine as a communications consultant with The PBN Company (2001–03), as an international affairs adviser with TNK-BP (2003–08), and later as a government relations consultant with BGR Gabara (2008–16). Since establishing his own consultancy company in 2016, he has regularly visited Ukraine on client business.
Orysia Lutsevych is manager of the Ukraine Forum in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House. Orysia’s research focuses on social change and the role of civil society in democratic transition in the post-Soviet region. Her last research project focused on Russian proxy groups and state-linked NGOs in the contested neighbourhood of the EU’s Eastern Partnership region. She is the author of the Chatham House publications Agents of the Russian World: Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighbourhood (2016); and How to Finish a Revolution: Civil Society and Democracy in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine (2013).
She also provides consultancy services on programme development and evaluation, citizen engagement and high-impact strategies. She has provided consultation services to the Council of Europe, the European Endowment for Democracy, the UK FCO, USAID, the PACT Foundation and the Open Society Foundations. Her media work includes contributions to the BBC, CNN, the Financial Times, the New York Times and openDemocracy. Before joining Chatham House, she led the start-up of Europe House Georgia and was executive director of the Open Ukraine Foundation. She has a master’s degree in international relations from Lviv State University and a master’s in public administration from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
James Nixey has been head of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House since January 2013. He is also an associate fellow with the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and serves on the board of the journal UA: Ukraine Analytica. His principal field of study concerns the relationships between Russia and the other post-Soviet states, and between Russia and the West. His selected published work for Chatham House includes: The Long Goodbye: Waning Russian Influence in the South Caucasus and Central Asia (2012); ‘Russia’s Geopolitical Compass: Losing Direction’ in Putin Again: Implications for Russia and the West (2012); ‘The South Caucasus: Drama on Three Stages’ in A Question of Leadership: America’s Role in a Changed World (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); and ‘Russian Foreign Policy Towards the West and Western Responses’ in The Russian Challenge (2015). He has also written articles for the Guardian, the Telegraph, Newsweek, the BBC, CNN.com and the Independent. He holds degrees in modern languages and international relations, and has previous experience in journalism (as a reporter in Moscow in the late 1990s) and in the banking sector.
James Sherr is an associate fellow and former head of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House (2008–11). He was a member of the Social Studies Faculty of Oxford University from 1993 to 2012; a fellow of the Conflict Studies Research Centre of the UK Ministry of Defence from 1995 to 2008; and director of studies of the Royal United Services Institute (1983–85). He has published extensively on Soviet and Russian military, security and foreign policy, as well as on energy security, the Black Sea region and Ukraine’s effort to deal with Russia, the West and its own domestic problems. Recent publications include: ‘A War of Narratives and Arms’ in The Russian Challenge (Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2015); and Hard Diplomacy and Soft Coercion: Russia’s Influence Abroad (Brookings Institution Press, 2013).
Kataryna Wolczuk is an associate fellow with the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House, and a professor of East European politics at the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies (CREES) at the University of Birmingham, UK. She holds an MA in law from the University of Gdansk, Poland, and an MSc and PhD from the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on East European politics, the EU’s relations with the post-Soviet states and Eurasian integration. Her publications include: Ukraine between the EU and Russia: the Integration Challenge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and The Eurasian Economic Union: Deals, Rules and the Exercise of Power (Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2017, with Rilka Dragneva).