Ukraine

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. 

Tetiana Kutsevych is a visiting fellow with the Strategic Democracy Initiative at GMF. She coordinates projects and activities within the Ukraine resilience and recovery portfolio, including the Unbreakable Europe initiative, which works to bring Ukraine’s practical wartime experience in civil protection and crisis preparedness to attention of European institutions and national authorities. She engages with participating institutions and partners across Europe, prepares working materials and project outputs, and manages communications among project teams in Kyiv, Brussels, and Washington.

Kutsevych also coordinates activities related to the Unbreakable Kherson project, including the publication of the Ukrainian-language edition and events presenting Ukraine’s experience of resilience and recovery under wartime conditions. Her broader portfolio includes consultation with Ukrainian national and local authorities on civil preparedness, infrastructure protection, and local self-government.

Before joining GMF, Kutsevych served as a project manager at international technology companies Viseven and Wezom, where she oversaw multiple projects and coordinated cross-functional teams. Prior to that, she worked as a marketing and partnerships manager at Termojet and manager for international communications and partnerships at Ecosoft. At the Montessori School in Kyiv, she organized international conferences connecting Ukraine’s Montessori community with partners abroad and represented Ukrainian educational practices internationally.

Kutsevych holds a master’s degree in psychology from Kyiv National Linguistics University and a professional certification in project management from IAMPM.