Jens Siegert is currently the team leader of the EU project „Public Diplomacy. EU and Russia“. He is a writer on public affairs and Special Advisor to the Board of the International Memorial Society. Until the summer of 2015 he was director of the Moscow office of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, a foundation closely linked to the German Green Party. He set up the office in 1999. He is an expert on Russian domestic and foreign politics and is the author of numerous publications on Russia and relations between Russia and the EU and between Russia and the West in general. He has a special interest in Russian civil society issues. He writes a Russlandblog and a regular column in the “Russland-Analysen”. In 2018 he published a book 111 Reasons to love Russia (in German). He was born in 1960 in Germany and studied political science, sociology and economy in Marburg. From 1988 to 2001 he worked as a free lance journalist for German, Austrian and Swiss media, based in Cologne and Moscow. Since 1993 he has lived and worked in Moscow.