Jens Siegert is a publicist and writer. Until January 2021 he was the team leader of the EU project „Public Diplomacy. EU and Russia“. Until summer 2015 he was the director of the Moscow office of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, a foundation closely linked to the German Green Party. He set up the office in 1999. He is an expert on Russian domestic and foreign politics. He publishes regularly about Russia, especially Russian-Western relationship, the structure of Russia’s political system and Russian civil society issues. He published two books about Russia: “111 Reasons to love Russia” (2018) and “In Principle Russia. An Encounter in Terms” (2021), both in German. He was born in 1960 in Western Germany, studied political science, sociology and economy in Marburg. From 1988 to 2001 he worked as a free-lanced journalist for German, Austrian and Swiss media, based in Cologne and Moscow. He lives and works in Moscow since 1993.