Our Team
Ksenia Maximova
Co-founder, Military Analytics and AI
The founder and director of the Russian Democratic Society and director of GRID Research. She currently serves as a Liberal Democrat councillor for Walpole ward in London. She is a human rights advocate and established the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group: Russia Watch. Her expertise lies in Russian tech, oil and gas as well as Russia’s AI usage. Ksenia is currently wanted by Russian authorities and has been declared a terrorist/extremist there.
Anonymous Expert
Co-founder, Human Rights
An anonymous expert in human rights, co-founder and head of a human rights organization working to protect vulnerable groups within Russia such as LBTQA+ communities, supporting people facing political persecution, and providing emergency assistance.
Margarita Kuchusheva
International Law
A human rights advocate based in Cyprus. Margarita's practice focuses on asylum, extradition, and legal aid for émigrés, and she serves as legal counsel for the Anti-War Committee and coordinator of the Democratic Community of Russians in Cyprus. Her work focuses particularly on transnational repression, politically motivated extradition and the protection of Russian civil society in exile. In 2026, she joined the United Nations Community of Protection for Human Rights Defenders, contributing to its work on transnational repression and the misuse of international law-enforcement mechanisms.
Alexey Sidorenko
Digital Security
A Russian civic-tech specialist and the founder of Teplitsa Social Technologies in 2012, an educational NGO connecting civil society activists with IT specialists across Russia. He previously co-created a crowdsourced wildfire-help map that won a Runet Prize, and has collaborated with the Carnegie Endowment and Global Voices Online. Teplitsa was designated a "foreign agent" in 2023.
Dmitry Zakhvatov
Russian Law
A Russian lawyer who defended opposition activists, Pussy Riot members, and journalist Marina Ovsyannikova before leaving Russia in 2022. Now based in Lithuania, he works on evacuating people persecuted by the Putin regime, earning the Anti-War Committee's "Voice of Resistance" award. In 2026, a Russian court convicted him in absentia, sentencing him to 21 years for fundraising tied to Ukrainian forces.
Liza Kozharinova
Co-founder, Political Tech and AI
A Russian democracy advocate and campaign specialist focused on the intersection of AI and political communication. She has worked to strengthen dialogue between US and UK legislatures and Russian civil society, and to improve the targeting of sanctions. Previously, she helped build digital systems at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. As a Henry Fellow at Yale, she researched the use of AI and data in elections and currently works with American political campaigns to develop new persuasion technologies. At Yale, she also co-founded Freedom Collective, a community for anti-war Russians.