Lesia Bidochko

Guest Author

Lesia Bidochko (LinkedIn) is a Policy Fellow at the European Policy Institute in Kyiv (EPIK). Established by the Swedish Institute of International Affairs through its Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, EPIK focuses on security, European integration, and policy issues related to Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Her current work focuses on Ukraine’s military transformation, dronization, emerging military technologies, and Russian nuclear coercion.

She served as Deputy Head of the Research Center at Detector Media, Ukraine’s leading media watchdog, where she developed research methodologies, conducted social media monitoring and network analysis, and investigated Russian propaganda ecosystems, pro-Russian influence networks, and malign actors on temporarily occupied territories. Her work contributed to analytical frameworks later used in Ukrainian sanctions processes. She analyzed Russian propaganda and foreign fighter recruitment in Germany as a country expert for the Counter Extremism Project.

She is also Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Non-Resident Fellow at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). Her academic work focuses on the Ukrainian far right and the impact of war on radical movements and postwar risks.

Articles by this author:

A woman with dark hair tied in a ponytail, wearing a plain dark t-shirt sits at a desk covered with gadgets in front of a window, in a small room with drones pinned to the plywood walls on three sides.

How Ukraine Became a Drone Superpower

Jun. 1, 2026 Lesia Bidochko