Maria Kolomychenko was a visiting fellow in DGAP’s Center for Order and Governance in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia from October 2022 to March 2024. She is an expert on Russia’s IT, telecommunications, and cybersecurity industries as well as the country’s technology and internet policy. 

Kolomychenko works as a deputy editor-in-chief at the RTVi news website in Moscow. From 2021 to 2022, she served as a head of special projects at the Russian tech giant Yandex. From 2012 to 2021, she was a technology correspondent, editor, and investigative reporter at Russian business dailies Kommersant and RBC, as well as at Meduza and the Moscow bureau of Reuters. Kolomychenko was the first journalist to discover Russian plans to build a “sovereign Runet”; she investigated an arrangement of Russian digital surveillance systems and published exclusive stories on cybercriminals from Russia. 

From 2006 to 2012, Kolomychenko worked as an engineer at Beeline, one of the largest Russian telecommunication companies. She holds a specialist degree in journalism from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. 

[Last updated: August 2024]