Dr. Kristina Jonutyte is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University (Lithuania). She is a social anthropologist, and her research interests include political anthropology, ethnicity and religion. She has been conducting research on Buryat religion and society since 2015. More recently, she has started a new research project that explores Buryat racialisation and belonging in contemporary Russia, in the context of the war in Ukraine. She defended her PhD at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Germany), and has since held research and teaching positions at Vilnius University and Vytautas Magnus University, as well as visiting fellowships at the University of Cambridge (UK) and the University of Zurich (Switzerland).