Thomas Barrett is a senior lecturer at the Kyiv School of Economics and a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Davis Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. His research focuses on how the transformation of the economy in Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia and Moldova in the last 20 years can explain the changes in their geopolitical alignments vis à vis Russia and the EU. Thomas has conducted research projects for the Institute for European Politics, the Bertelsmann Foundation and the Centre for Eastern European and International Studies (ZOiS). He also worked as a humanitarian project coordinator for Caritas in Ukraine and Moldova in 2022-2023. He is proficient in Ukrainian, German and Russian, and speaks intermediate Mandarin Chinese.