Samantha is an Associate Fellow, Russia and Eurasia Programme, Chatham House. Samantha’s career has spanned the public and private sectors, with a mix of political consulting, policy and strategic communications and finance. 

After working for 10 years as an international civil servant for the European Commission and NATO HQ in Brussels, Samantha moved to Private Banking with a special focus on Eastern Central Europe and Central Asia. She was first based in Geneva with Coutts Bank, before joining the Private Banking team at Merrill Lynch Paris. She left banking in 2012 to concentrate full-time on political risk consulting and writing non-fiction and fiction. In 2014 she was part of a British Government funded project to help the Ukrainian Government organise their strategic communications following the annexation of Crimea. 

She has also worked in India as a writer and researcher for the British think tank Institute for Statecraft, and for a number of journals and magazines. Samantha is active in EU affairs, especially combatting disinformation. Samantha is bilingual in English and French, speaks fluent Russian, Italian and Spanish and has working knowledge of Czech and German.