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Network participant

Serhiy Leshchenko

Advisor to President Zelensky's Chief of Staff, Journalist and former Member of Parliament

Serhiy Leshchenko is a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament (2014-2019), previously working as an investigative journalist and deputy chief editor for Ukrainska Pravda from 2000 until 2014. An anti-corruption specialist, Sergii helped launch the “Stop Censorship!” movement in 2010 and the “Chesno” campaign that called for transparency in parliament.

In 2019, Leshchenko became an advisor to the transition team of President Zelenksy and was appointed to the supervisory board of the Ukrainian railways.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Leshchenko became a permanent advisor to Zelensky’s Chief of Staff, Andriy Yermak, and has continued his reporting from the front lines via his social media channels, countering disinformation, amassing over 130,000 subscribers.

Serhiy has received multiple awards, including a Press Prize from the German ZEIT Foundation and the NDI’s Democracy Award, and was named one of the “100 heroes of information” by “Reporters Without Borders”.

Sergii was a Reagan-Fascell Fellow in the National Endowment for Democracy (Washington, DC), a John Smith Fellow (UK), and a former lecturer at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. He is the author of two books about high-level corruption in Ukraine.