Anna Borshchevskaya is a fellow at the European Foundation for Democracy and is the Ira Welner Fellow at the Washington Institute. She is a PhD candidate at George Mason University, where her research focuses on Russia’s policy toward the Middle East. A former analyst for a U.S. military contractor in Afghanistan, she has served as communications director at the American Islamic Congress. She has also worked as assistant director of the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council, research analyst for the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and program coordinator of the American Foreign Policy Program at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).Borshchevskaya is a Russia native but immigrated into the United States as a refugee in late 1993. Her work on Russia and the Middle East has been published widely including in The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, National Review, Fox News, CNN, and The Middle East Quarterly. Until recently she conducted translation and analysis for the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office and its flagship publication, Operational Environment Watch, and wrote a foreign affairs column for Forbes. She is the author of the February 2016 Washington Institute monograph, “Russia in the Middle East.”