Please join the Russia and Eurasia Program at The Fletcher School for a talk by Nina Jankowicz about Russian influence campaigns not only in Central and Eastern Europe but also in the United States. Refreshments will be provided. Attendance is by registration only on Eventbrite.

Nina Jankowicz is a Global Fellow at the Kennan Institute currently working on a book about the evolution of modern Russian influence campaigns in Eastern Europe. In 2016-2017, she advised the Ukrainian government on strategic communications under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship. Her writing has been published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, BuzzFeed News,The Wilson Quarterly, and others. She is a frequent commentator on disinformation and Russian and Eastern European affairs, and she has been interviewed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and PBS’s Judy Woodruff.

Prior to her Fulbright grant in Ukraine, Ms. Jankowicz managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. She received her MA in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, where she was a Title VIII and FLAS scholarship recipient, and her BA from Bryn Mawr College, where she graduated magna cum laude. She has lived and worked in Russia, and speaks fluent Russian and proficient Polish and Ukrainian. She was a 2017 Foreign Policy Interrupted Fellow.

While the 2016 presidential elections woke up the West to the threat of “fake news” emanating from Russia, Central and Eastern European states have been aware of and fighting the threat for years. The project argues that in order to gain ground in, let alone win the information war, affected governments must prioritize addressing the trust gap between citizens, media and government that allows disinformation to find success. The work will present lessons learned from experiences fighting disinformation in Eastern Europe as the United States seeks to repair the damage wrought by Russia in its own information landscape.