Field of research: Security
Alina Zubkovych
Alina Zubkovych is the Head of the Nordic Ukraine Forum and Academic Director of the PhD Program in Social Studies at the Kyiv School of Economics. She earned her PhD in Social Studies from the School of Advanced Social Studies in Slovenia (2015). Her academic interests include transformation processes and identity politics in Ukraine, security perspectives, and regional cooperation between the Nordic-Baltic countries (NB8) and Ukraine. Alongside her academic work, she actively engages in public debate and advocacy on Ukraine’s democratic reforms and international partnerships.
(Last updated in September 2025)
Yar Batoh
Yar Batoh is an Associate Research Fellow at The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and consultant on international cooperation at NPC Ukrenergo since 2019. He has a B.A. in International Relations (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv) and a certificate in political science (Granada University). From 2017-2019, he was an analyst at VoxUkraine. Yar focuses on international security, conflict resolution, Ukrainian and Russian foreign policy.
Latest publication: Yar Batoh. “What should Ukraine expect from the new European Parliament?” UA:Ukraine Analytica. Issue 3 (17), 2019.
(Last updated February 2020)
Stephan De Spiegeleire
Stephan De Spiegeleire is a Principal Scientist at HCSS. He holds a Master’s degrees from the Graduate Institute in Geneva and Columbia University in New York, as well as a C.Phil. degree in Political Science from UCLA. He worked for the RAND Corporation for nearly ten years, interrupted by stints at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik and the WEU’s Institute for Security Studies.
Stephan started out as a Soviet specialist, but has since branched out into several fields of international security and defense policy. His current work at HCSS focuses on strategic defense management, security resilience, network-centrism, capabilities-based planning, and the transformation of defense planning. He is particularly active in HCSS’s security foresight efforts to inform national and European security policy planning in the broader sense. He also teaches at Webster University in Leiden. Stephan keeps a personal blog, where he records his reflections on his fields of expertise. Please visit: gettingdefenseright.blogspot.com.
(Last updated February 2020)