Sabina Babaieva

Sabina Babaieva is a visiting fellow with GMF’s Strategic Democracy Initiatives (SDI) team. She is a senior at Yale University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in ethics, politics, and economics with a concentration in security studies. Her coursework centers on democratic resilience, security, and governance under stress. 

Babaieva brings an academic profile closely aligned with SDI’s work on Ukraine and foreign information manipulation. With initial guidance from the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions, she developed an independent open-source project geocoding Russian propaganda narratives on military positioning in Donbas and auditing them against satellite imagery and Ukrainian and international sources. As a political-military analysis research intern at the Hudson Institute, she analyzed Russian and Chinese state media and Kremlin-adjacent sources to assess China–Russia–DPRK alignment and its implications for US allies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. She completed an intensive Chinese-language study program with distinction at National Taiwan University in Taipei and coursework in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University. She has coordinated expert panels on Ukrainian reform, cognitive warfare, and wartime resilience with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Prior to joining GMF, Babaieva was a researcher at the Yale MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and a research assistant at Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), where she worked on the Soviet Economic Archives Project. She held leadership positions in the European Youth Parliament of Ukraine and WiTech Ukraine, a women-in-technology organization she co-founded in Kyiv.