Alexandra Prokopenko was a visiting fellow in DGAP’s Center for Order and Governance in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia from February 2023 to March 2024. She is an expert on Russian economic and monetary policy and the decision-making processes of the Kremlin and Russian government. 

Specifically, Prokopenko’s analysis of economic policy focuses on Russia’s digital economy and the interplay of various state actors; on the monetary side, she examines the Russian budget and finance. She publishes a weekly newsletter on the Russian economy at The Bell, one of Russia’s leading independent online media outlets. She is also a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

From 2017 to 2022, Prokopenko worked as an adviser at the Central Bank of Russia and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. From 2008 to 2017, she worked as a reporter, first at the TASS news agency and then at Vedomosti, Russia’s then leading business newspaper. She covered the politics of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, as well as the election campaigns of 2008 and 2012. 

In 2018, Prokopenko completed a master’s degree in sociology at the University of Manchester and the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka). Her thesis focused on narrative types in the field of bureaucracy. In 2009, Prokopenko was a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. She also earned a degree from Moscow State University in 2006.

[Last updated: August 2024]