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The Next Steps
The Karski-Swyer Belarus Initiative will soon be established as a D.C. nonprofit corporation and will seek recognition as a tax-exempt charitable organization under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
The Initiative’s leadership has have begun a listening campaign involving Google Meet sessions with grant applicants and individuals interested in contributing to the organization, as well as discussions at:
#FACON26, the Fulbright Association’s 49th Annual Conference, October 23–25, 2026, at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. The conference will provide an opportunity to meet members of the Fulbright community who may be interested in Belarusian studies.
The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) 58th Annual Convention, November 12–15, 2026, at the Palmer House Hilton in Chicago. There, the North American Association for Belarusian Studies, originally established under the leadership of David Marples and others, will discuss its future plans.
The Karski-Swyer Belarus Initiative’s Officers & Directors
Founding Officers & Ex-Officio Directors
Ethan S. Burger (President and Chair of the Board) is an international attorney and scholar whose engagement with Belarus spans more than three decades. Under OSCE auspices, he observed Belarus’s 2001 presidential election and its 2004 referendum and parliamentary elections. He advocated for the legislation enacted as the Belarus Democracy Act of 2004 and has provided expert testimony in more than twenty-five U.S. asylum cases involving Belarusian applicants, including pro bono work for HIAS. As a Fulbright Specialist, he taught at Vilnius University in 2016 and lectured at European Humanities University (EHU), the Belarusian university in exile; he expects to be teaching at EHU during the Spring 2027 Semester. His work centers on legal and political developments in the Soviet successor states, corporate governance, human rights, and transnational financial crime and corruption. He has taught at Georgetown University Law Center, American University Washington College of Law, and the University of Wollongong, and has lectured throughout Russia and Ukraine. He holds an A.B. from Harvard College and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center.
Zhanna Charniauskaya (Corporate Secretary and Director) is a Belarusian-American community leader, educator, and advocate for democracy and human rights in Belarus. She has helped lead Belarusians in Chicago, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit promoting Belarusian culture and community engagement, since 2010. In 2023 she was elected President of the Association of Belarusians in America. She immigrated to the United States in 1997, lived for two years in Wisconsin, and then settled in the Chicago suburbs. She teaches chemistry at East Aurora High School in Aurora, Illinois.
Alesya Semukha-Greenberg (Treasurer and Director) Alesya Semukha-Greenberg is a communications executive, editor, literary translator, and Belarusian-American civic leader. After studying Belarusian linguistics and literature at Belarusian State University, she worked at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from 1988 until immigrating to the United States in 1995.
Non-Executive Directors
Igor Abramov (Director, effective January 1, 2027) is an international trade and business lawyer and the managing partner of Abramov & Associates LLP. He has more than three decades of experience in international trade and investment, business transactions, government relations, and corporate governance. He has advised clients in oil and gas, mining, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, manufacturing, consumer products, and banking and financial services, with substantial work in Russia, Kazakhstan, and other former Soviet states.
Dmitri I. Dubograev (Director) founded Femida (femida.us), a law firm based in Alexandria, Virginia, and serves as its managing partner and CEO. He leads the firm’s cross-border practice, advising technology founders, investors, and intellectual property owners on mergers and acquisitions, IP strategy, and major business transactions, and helps technology companies enter and navigate the U.S. market. Before Lukashenko came to power, he served in an advisory capacity on rule-of-law projects with the International Law Institute in Washington, D.C. He was the first Belarusian university graduate to earn a J.D. in the United States and practice law here.
Victoria Leukavets (Director) is a political scientist specializing in democracy promotion and electoral authoritarianism, with a focus on Belarus, the other Eastern Partnership countries, and Russia. She is a researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies at Södertörn University in the Stockholm region. She previously led a project on Belarus at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. Her research also addresses the political economy of international sanctions against Russia and Belarus. She is the author of The Integration Policies of Belarus and Ukraine vis-à-vis the EU and Russia (ibidem/Columbia University Press). Her work has appeared in Europe-Asia Studies, New Perspectives, Caucasus Survey, and the Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Belarus.
Arthur Piszczatowski (Director) is an institutional sociologist focused on macro-level institutional design and strategies for achieving institutional purpose and growth. He studies how large-scale social change shapes institutional strategy, how to counter institutional atrophy, and how NGOs and civil society can strengthen democratic participation. His interests include Eastern Europe, Eurasia, corporate governance, and transatlantic institutional design. He taught sociology as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and serves on the Board of the National Capital Area Chapter of the Fulbright Association. He studied business at SGH Warsaw School of Economics in Poland.
Roster of Independent Grant Reviewers
Katia Glod is an independent analyst and political risk consultant based in London who advises on the politics and economics of the former Soviet countries. She is a research fellow and deputy head of foreign policy at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre (NEST), a member of the OSCE Independent Expert Network, and a nonresident fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. She was a policy fellow at the European Leadership Network, leading projects on Russia–West relations. She has also served as the European Endowment for Democracy’s Belarus representative in Minsk and as a consultant to Amnesty International. She has worked as an election observer and analyst for OSCE missions in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Albania, and North Macedonia.
Don Jensen is a specialist on the politics and foreign and security policies of Russia, Ukraine, and the other post-Soviet states. He has served as director for Russia and Europe at the U.S. Institute of Peace and as an adjunct professor at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences of Johns Hopkins University. As a U.S. Foreign Service officer posted to Moscow and Sofia, he supported the START, INF, and SDI negotiations. In 1988, he was a member of the first ten-member U.S. team to inspect Soviet missile bases under the INF Treaty. From 1996 to 2008, he was Associate Director of Broadcasting and head of the research division at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, where he helped lead its expansion into new broadcast regions after the Cold War. In 2016, he was a visiting scholar at the NATO Defense College in Rome.
Anton Saifullayev is a historian and Assistant Professor at the University of Warsaw, affiliated with its Institute of Intercultural Studies of Central and Eastern Europe and its Center for East European Studies. His work applies postcolonial and decolonial approaches to Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space, with particular attention to historiography and the Belarusian history of ideas. He is the author of Postkolonialne historiografie: Casus jednego średniowiecza (Postcolonial Historiographies: The Case of a Certain Middle Ages, 2020) and numerous articles and policy papers. His current research examines how Western knowledge about Belarus and Eastern Europe has been produced from the Cold War to the present. He graduated from the Department of History at Belarusian State University and received his M.A. in cultural studies and his Ph.D. in the humanities from the University of Warsaw.
Peter H. Solomon is Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Law and Criminology at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto. He has written extensively on criminal justice and courts in the USSR and post-Soviet states, as well as law and legal institutions in authoritarian regimes, and he has participated in judicial reform projects in Russia and Ukraine (for the Canadian International Development Agency, OECD, and World Bank). He is the coauthor, with Kathryn Hendley, of The Judicial System of Russia (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Curt Woolhiser is a Slavic linguist specializing in Belarusian, sociolinguistics, dialectology, and language contact. He is a Lecturer in Russian and Slavic Linguistics at Boston College and an Associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and previously taught at Brandeis University. His doctoral research examined contact between Polish and Belarusian dialects in the Polish-Belarusian-Lithuanian borderlands. He has written widely on language and national identity in Belarus and in Poland’s Podlasie region.
Funding Priorities: Grants, an Endowed Chair, and Support for European Humanities University
Once the Karski-Swyer Belarus Initiative obtains recognition under Section 501(c)(3), it will accept tax-deductible donations, enabling it to offer more—and larger—grants. We will also explore ways to support European Humanities University through both in-kind assistance and financial contributions.
We will operate the Initiative on a shoestring budget with people donating their time, guided by the proverb:
«Не имей сто рублей, а имей сто друзей.»
Better to have one hundred friends than one hundred rubles.
But we must be practical, since one hundred rubles does not buy much today.
In the future, we plan to seek financial support from individuals with a record of supporting educational and rule-of-law projects in the Soviet Union’s successor states. We also hope to partner with an educational institution to establish an endowed chair in Belarusian studies, which we understand would require approximately $2.5 million.
