Mattia Nelles normally lives in Ukraine, where he until the full-fledged Russian invasion worked on community development in eastern Ukraine for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Germany’s main development agency. Academically and professionally Mattia focuses on Eastern Europe, Russia's foreign policy towards its "near Abroad" but especially on Ukraine, and the internal and external dynamics shaping its politics and policies. Until late 2020, he was Program Director for Ukraine at the Center for Liberal Modernity (LibMod), a Berlin based think-tank. There he managed a consulting project with Ukrainian parliamentarians. Mattia holds a master’s degree in political science with a focus on eastern Europe and Ukraine from the Free University of Berlin. He studied, taught and worked in Germany, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the United States and Australia. He regularly tweets about the war against Ukraine at @mattia_n